An accidental Bhailo
Rahul GoswamiRahul Goswami, one of Goa's most hardworking and
innovative outstation correspondent, covered this state
for the Business Standard, in the mid-nineties. He is
today based in Singapore. On a lighter note, RG says he
was offered, several times during his stint in Goa,
bribes by various colleagues envious of his posting as
inducement to trade places with them. Instead, he went
to Bombay to quarrel with newspaper vendors, went to
the Gulf to start up a dot-bomb, went to Singapore to
learn Mandarin, and is now wondering if those bribes
are still on offer.
Arriving to live and work in 'aparanta' -- a place
beyond the end, as the Sanskrit texts would have us
believe, where time stands still -- was always going to
be a challenge for the conscientious newspaper
correspondent. Even when one does not do so blind, as I
comforted myself in 1993.
It was Goa Dourada, Golden Goa, Perola do Oriente,
Pearl of the East, Roma do Oriente, and other such
colourfulness that I was being assigned to. The imagery
was breath-taking -- corsairs, corruption and
conversions. There were heart-warming tales of gruff
compassion -- whether from the dashing Marathas or
their debonair Portuguese rivals. There were edgy
accounts of the rivalries of contentious nationalisms,
delicious stories of grand thievery, fabulous stories
of immoral profligacy, of debauched viceroys who
equalled in pomp and splendour the Asian potentates
they dealt with.
This was, I thought to myself, the stuff of a hundred
feature stories, the mother-lode of post-colonial
memorabilia, the gateway to phantasmagorical
explorations. Indeed they were, but in no way that I
had imagined at the outset, overcome then by the
cultural fecundity of 'aparanta'. Imaging Goa, as a
curious ingenue, as a journalist, as an informed
participant, has never been an easy task and indeed is
one that has grown more onerous over the years.
Indeed the provenance of such a view is a curious one,
and yet one that is well-known. The widespread tendency
in Western writing of India -- and, by extension, of
Goa -- has been to condense the description of the
scenic beauty and natural resourcefulness, the
cosmopolitan life and the imagined mercantile
prosperity of the early colonial period, into
pastel-coloured, palatable images. So it is too with
Goa Dourada, or Golden Goa.
The Goa that has been perpetuated in the newsrooms of
the media conglomerates of urban India -- an English
construction, I would like to emphasise -- has even now
more in common with the hazy feel-good miasma that
occulted the communal perceptions of the dharma bum
generation that made its way from the West, in a slow
and tortuous ganja-laden, booze-sodden crawl, through
the tolerant places of the 'Third World'. The
difference was, and is, that the dharma bums smoked and
drank and blissfully fornicated under the moonlight
that bathed the silvery beaches of 'aparanta' and
dreamt of equality and human emancipation (to be fair
to many of them).
The news editors and feature editors and
editors-in-chief and numberless marketing imbeciles who
chose to imagine Goa, within the narrow and noisome
worlds that defined their own existences in the
megapolis of their choosing, had on the other hand no
such overarching humaneness, despite generous
applications of all that is narcotic and alcoholic.
'Aparanta', I found, may welcome all comers, but it
also encourages those processes that sift out the unbelievers.
How, I asked myself, is one to distinguish? What is the
Goan-ness that one is seeking to understand and, if
possible, to give substance to in a 1,200-word report
(under the illiterate regimes that run newsrooms these
days, that is a torrent of words)? Can one encapsulate
all that seeks to be distilled by this multitude of
experiences, of personal encounters, by listening to
the narratives of the histories of Goa? And when one
does become an ideological sympathiser of the dharma
that is 'aparanta', how can one convey it to the
hard-eyed stewards who rule over the column centimetres
in Bombay or Delhi?
It was a question that had no simple answer. My own
method was to attempt to blend in with the rhythms of
the village in which I lived, Betim, which lies across
the river Mandovi, opposite Panaji. The river is like a
slow-moving artery that expresses Goa -- the rusting,
elderly ferries of the River Navigation Department chug
across the gap with a ponderous regularity, and in
doing so determine the schedules of legions of Goans
who live within a short bus ride of the water --
'aparanta' tends not to respect time-pieces worn on
one's wrist.
In this I was marginally successful. Mahadeo was one of
my neighbours -- a generously-bellied Betim elder who
with surprising agility climbed into his canoe and laid
his meagre nets along the river shallows. Mahadeo was
also adept at catching river crabs, and when one
morning I found a pair -- neatly trussed and no more
than two hours old -- squirming outside my front door I
realised with a thrill that I was accepted by the Betim-kars.
Mahadeo -- despite his belly a very handsome man with a
tanned visage crowned by a mop of white curls, with a
commanding presence and possessing an enviable facility
with a little skiff barely a foot across -- was only
one of a series of revelations. There were the nearby
family Bhosale, whom I had been warned "were trouble",
the "rowdy boys" of the village who tended to be
destructive, the crooked 'possorkars' from whom I would
be forced to purchase my groceries. The roll-call of
potential villains was long indeed.
All unfounded. The rhythms of 'aparanta', as they found
this 'bhailo' in Betim, ensured harmony. My dilemma
was, how might I convey this to urban-bred news editors
who have little tolerance for a mofussil
correspondent's rural romanticism, as they saw it?
Sometimes, fortune intervenes. In my case, while
reporting for Business Standard, it came in the form of
C P Kuruvilla, to my mind the most super-aware news
editor of the last two decades.
Kuru, as we called him, was (he has voluntarily
withdrawn from the circus that is print media, hence
'was') a maverick before the term found fashion, and
was so within the relatively severe environs of the
Ananda Bazar Patrika. Kuru provided the intellectual
get-up-and-go that impelled a legion of correspondents
to hit the road in search of stories that were to
become memorable ones, and even more remarkable, was
able to do so in the context of a mainstream business newspaper.
Will you find a Kuru nowadays? No, is the likely
answer. Editors, sad to say, tend to be almost
uniformly useless. It is left to the greater community
of journalists to provide the context, the space, the
encouragement, and the means. The encouragement,
context and professional support has perforce now to
come from within. This working alternative has not only
become desirable, it has become imperative for for the
non-sarkari journalists.
The problem is a systemic one today; there should have
been manuals passed on, but system administrators have
deleted them. Where binaries perish, we must turn to
mnemonics. There was a time when some of us in The
Sunday Observer successfully ran a tactical media
counter-insurgency within the framework.
An immediate provocation at the time was a faux
editorial regime presided over by an imposter named
Pritish Nandy. Every Friday (dak edition) and every
Saturday (city edition) we would have to redefine and
re-take our territory and remind the insurgents that
they had no place in it. It was hard work -- outright
threats and go-slows, files full of protest notes and
minutes of meetings, and the halting evolution of a
code that cut across the barriers that traditionally
define a functioning news organism. I think it worked
well at the time -- the guerrillas who did this are
still here.
Our questions were basic -- why can sanitation not be
"sold"? Why can education not be? Labour not be? Health
not be? The elderly not be? That this not only assumes
but reflects the dreadful significance of "sold"
indicates why we still need guerrillas in the newsroom.
These guerrillas, if they still exist and can still be
drafted, will come up against some formidable mantras.
"All things are more or less of equal import: all are
only daily" is one. If you ask one of the system
administrators she will reply: "All data are equal, but
some are more equal than others."
That is why, we are reminded by those who give the
system administrators their wages, the media have
produced their own heroines and myths, which can
compete with the traditional ones and moreover happily
embroider over them. I was once advised that
"journalism asks us to invest in the stock-market of
momentary sensation". After such sexualist reduction,
what forgiveness?
The difficulty lies in the accepted impermanence of our
art, our skill, and the relentless transformation of
today's news feature into tomorrow's newsprint into the
day after tomorrow's wrapping paper for pakodas. The
media that we construct (from the point of view of the
consumer, and the brokers who interpose themselves
between writer and audience) offers titillating
speculations on danger, scandal, death, nightmare, opportunity.
Like a television talk-show host tripping loquaciously
on industrial-strength amphetamines, it rattles noisily
on, uncaring of the quiet interjections about
sanitation, infant mortality, unreported police
atrocities, tribal communities flooded out of their
homes. And that is so both in an India that has
reclaimed 'aparanta' without caring to know the
topography of Goa, as it is in the desolate urban
scapes that seek to define the middle classes who --
reliable sources say -- are the new India that seeks to spend.
The rules of the game have changed and we do need a new
set of guerrillas. Newsroom disobedience is not what it
used to be (is it at all what it was?). Who is willing
to explore the new paradigm? It is so easy to stay in
the bunker of assurances. No conclusions, no certainty;
only performance analyses, management matrices, and
practical wagers. We really do need a bunch of newsroom
narkasurs here.
Can one seek for and hope for such a dimension in Goa?
Will 'aparanta' provide it? Not readily. Early in my
apprenticeship as a correspondent in Goa I ran into the
local brand of sarkari thought. It was one of those
endless afternoons in the old press room, the one in
the corner of the Idalcao. A minion from one of the
chambers above clattered in through the swing doors and
muttered something. He was half asleep and so were the
occupants of the press room, those who were not
wrestling with the typewriters.
We all streamed out, following the minion. Through the
wooden security gate we filed, the one that is supposed
to detect the presence of suspicious metal objects on
one's person, and up the stairs we climbed. Across a
landing whose timbers had been scuffed shiny by the
passage of tired footwear, then down a verandah over
which hung tattered pieces of plastic in an ugly and
half-hearted attempt to keep out the rain. And finally
into some functionary's room.
It turned out to be occupied by some minister, who
lolled indulgently behind a desk. He was Luizinho Faleiro,
before he became a big wheel, but who was even at the
time odious. We chose seats. Greasy khitmutgars passed
amongst us, proferring cups of tea and soggy biscuits.
Luizinho grinned a sepulchral grin, as if privately
awaiting the demise of one or another of those who had
just seated themselves. Then, as if disappointed by the
absence of such drama, he coughed and began.
"I have called you here," he announced brusquely, "to
comment on..." and there followed some dull government
programme or the other. Luizinho, with another
graveyard grin, then collected his belly, cleared his
throat and barked: "Take down!". And then proceeded to
provide what I can only call dictation. To the credit
of about a third of his audience, they did not whip out
a notebook to scribble. The rest, shamefully, played
the part of stenographers. It was my first encounter
with the Establishment's view of the Press, and of the
willingness of that part of the state's press to permit
such a relationship.
Luizinho was merely following tradition, just as surely
as the passage of the full barges bearing iron ore,
which announced themselves with a dull throb as the red
mineral made its way to the mouth of the Zuari and the
hungry ore carriers berthed there. For they were -- and
are -- one and the same. Government functionary and
river vessel -- both vehicles of the powers that seek
to control 'aparanta'. Does it work? Should it?
It does in fact work. Teotonio de Souza, before he
departed from the Xavier Centre of Historical Research,
had chatted with me on a few occasions. He had been,
then, as critical of the Church as he was of the
gradual change he saw in Goa's politics and
middle-class political consciousness. He had told me,
up there in the haze of one Porvorim afternoon, how he
had been amused to read that "Goans are largely a
T-shirt wearing population".
That comment came from one Arun Sinha, who was then,
and as far as I know continues to be, editor of The
Navhind Times. Teotonio seemed at first mildly
intrigued by this person's interpretation of the
Goanness of Goans. But then the historian also revealed
a resigned bitterness about what else he perceived in
the journalist's prose. "One wonders," he wrote later,
"if to be wholly Indian one has to chew 'paan' and spit
it all around, or replace T-shirts or G-shorts with
kurta-pajama or safari suit."
It is part of a misguided mission which propagates
itself apparently tirelessly and without mercy -- that
there are caricatures which continue to be attributed
to Goans. Very often, they are invented by bureaucrats
and self-styled "professionals" who want to teach Goans
to be less easy-going or less un-Indian. I suspect that
one Manohar Parrikar, the current Big Wheel in the
circus that is Goa's government of the day, is just as
keen to socially re-engineer the Goan masses. Nor is he
the first, nor most zealous of those who have wished to
do so.
The trouble for the correspondent in Goa -- zealous or
cantankerous or otherwise -- is that one never seems to
escape the impression that, in a certain way,
de-colonisation has not yet been digested. It is not
that the departure of the Portuguese is regretted
(there are exceptions, of course) but the question of
why, Portuguese colonisation remains so strenuously
berated. How is one to internalise this truth, seek to
convey to our readers the paradoxes that abound in our
reading of this beautiful, bewitching 'aparanta'? How
can one negotiate for oneself the editorial space to do so?
I do not mean this to be a disheartening preface for
the hapless correspondent who finds herself deposited
in Goa, without the benefit of an immediate
acquaintance with Peter's (St Inez), Joao's (opposite
the now notorious Hotel Neptune), or Martin's (whose
staff has long since relapsed into slumber). Given the
dismal state of the print media in India today, the
days of the full-time state correspondent seem to be
distant memories (my friend and comrade Prakash Kamat
has on the other hand proven to be remarkably resilient!).
The simple truth is that the "Goan culture" that is so
venally peddled aboard the tourist boats that
shamelessly and noisily ply the Mandovi off Panaji (how
I wish they would cease) is far from easily definable.
Cultures never do remain isolated or static, and
certainly not the seaborne cultures of which Goa,
Govapuri, Gopakapatnam, became a part.
And it is indeed true that the mechanism which
supported the 'Estado de India' nourished a very unique
place, one which internalised the life-affirming
concept behind a word redolent of the very essence of
Goan-ness, a word that resounds with wisdom -- sussegado.