id than
done. And as anyone who has tried translating stories
from Goa's Marathi press will testify, most stories
contain enormous amount of comment and a large number
of them are un-sourced.

Our plight could therefore be well imagined. Things I
guess have become somewhat better in the last few
years; but then it was a nightmare. Trying to fill up
six broad-sheet pages with material translated from
Tarun Bharat was way too optimistic a goal, to put it
mildly. So at best you managed a couple of pages. The
rest of the paper was trusty old teleprinter copy,
courtesy UNI (United News of India) and PTI (Press
Trust of India).

And as for our own reporting resources, there was
Lionel Messias who slaved all alone in the Panaji
office. This couldn't last. So in early December 1986,
when the Gomantak Group advertised for staff, I jumped
at the opportunity and applied. Besides being a good
opportunity to return home from Belgaum -- anyway one
used to travel home every week -- the adventure of
being there as a newspaper was being born was too good
to miss.

Not that I was totally unfamiliar with the birth pangs
of newspapers -- having joined the Herald as a trainee
when it was a few months old and Newslink when it was
in a similar position. But, birth pangs or whatever,
there's nothing like competition to add a little
excitement. It shakes up established players, and all
the poaching for staff only pushes up salaries and
gives hitherto ignored journalists their day in the sun.

I too was offered more money -- more than double my
last salary drawn in the Herald -- which I had quit a
few months earlier in less than happy circumstances.
Meanwhile, just as Gomantak Times was about to be
launched, Rajan Narayan in his inimitable style
launched a broadside against the to-be-launched
newspaper. For days, he wrote about how the Maharashtrawadis
were planning take over Goa's English-language media.
Never mind that most of the to-be-launched paper's
staff were old Herald hands.

However, GT -- as the paper was later referred to --
seemed on to making great progress as we neared launch
date. For the first time in the history of Goa's
English-language media, we had newspaper designers
working on what the paper would look like. A two-man
team from what was then Bombay was paid a princely sum
of Rs 25,000 to come up with the new design.

But that was where the good news stopped. The company
which had sold the Chowgules the d