the boundaries
of journalism in Goa should be looking at, apart from
just the Secretariat. Recently, his work made it to the
news in a major way, when the Indian Express carried a
large spread in its national-edition on how Misquita
had traced the strange story of the sinking of a World
War II British passenger liner, BritanniaIII, which had
dozens of Goans (including one of Misquita's
grand-uncle's) on board.

If my entry into journalism was accidental, working
with rural correspondents in Goa was equally
unexpected. One morning of May 1998, then editor of the
Gomantak Times, Ashwin Tombat, asked me to handle local
correspondents who were contributing to the newspaper.
He assured me that correspondents were an integral part
of the newspaper and, that, a strong network would play
a vital role in strengthening the newspaper.

While Tombat's ability to put forth persuasive
arguments eventually convinced me to accept this task,
I was determined not to remain 'stuck' with
correspondents for long. There were many reasons for
this. Firstly, working with correspondents invariably
meant that one would end up merely re-writing their
stories and would not have much time to work on my own
stories. And with barely two years of journalism under
my belt, there was no way I would allow my ambition be
condemned to the mere restoration of correspondents'
news items.

Secondly, co-ordinating with correspondents involved
vast amounts of patience, as each correspondent had to
be handled differently. Moreover, since most were
part-time correspondents and could devote only a few
hours to the profession, I could only expect them to
function for a brief part of the day. Then again, these
correspondents were based in different parts of the
state and my interaction with them was largely
dependent on telephones and other means of remote communication.

The correspondents were certainly happy to have me
around, as till then their complaints seemed endless.
"Our stories don't appear promptly in the newspaper
and, sometimes, they don't appear at all. People in our
locality then get upset and complain that we are not
sending in their stories," was a commonly echoed
grievance. "No one attends to our telephone calls and,
when they do, they keep transferring our calls from one
person to another and they finally disconnect the
phone," was another general complaint.

Their complaints certainly had some degree of
legitimacy.

It is a comm