growth later
on); and for taking on some of Goa's most sacred of cows.

But Rajan's ability to cast himself in the
'anti-Establishment' mould is equalled by his skills in
brokering deals (the recent track of contentious and
fast-confused charges over the Rs 300,000 government
sponsorship of the SARS campaign at Remo Fernandes'
50th birthday is a case in point, as are the
willingness to propose projects to a government that
are otherwise blasted from the editorial pulpit). This
rather personalised essay, obviously biased and clouded
by a string of personal experiences, seeks to narrate
one person's run-ins into Goa's most long-serving
editor. Perhaps from it could emerge a few snapshots
outlining how things really work in the Goa media.

ONE'S FIRST impressions of Rajan was meeting up with a
long-sleeve and tie-clad middle-aged 'uncle' during an
interview a month or two before the launch of the
English-language Herald in 1983. The location was in
the old balcony (now demolished) that stood almost over
today's Cafe Shanbhag, near the Panjim Municipal
Garden. Besides Rajan, also sitting in on the interview
was Valmiki Faleiro, who was egged on by the recent
public debate to tell his side of the story in another
chapter. (Devika Sequeira, then still in her 'twenties
but quite in command of the situation, willing to spend
extremely long hours and clear about what she expected
to bring out a thoroughly-worked on feature page or
front-page report as we later saw, had interviewed me
in an earlier round. Being quite thick-skinned, one
went in once again for another interview when
advertised subsequently, only to be told that it was
just as well one had returned, as the earlier
applications had got misplaced!)

In the second round of interviews, my first encounter
with Rajan, it took this then raw third-year college
kid quite some to gauge some clues about the identity
of this man shooting across the questions. Only a
syllable or two gave hint of his South Indian origins,
and with his formal clothes, he could have easily
passed off as a scion of a landed Goan family. Rajan
did seem a bit embarassed to make the offer of Rs 300
as the payment for a trainee sub-editor. But money
didn't matter, and the joy of becoming a journalist
while still in college more than sufficed. In any case,
this princely sum was thrice what one then irregularly
earned as an articled clerk to a chartered accountant.
This offer was made on the