A lot has happened since my time as writer and sub-editor for The Herald's international edition. But a brief stint in the mid-90's has left an indelible mark on my psyche. Having said that, the Herald for me is largely synonymous with India, journalism and leaving home, so discussing it in isolation isn't easy. Also, there was no clearly defined plan — it was something I more or less stumbled on by chance.
It turned to be a chance encounter of which I still feel the repercussions.
I arrived in Goa from the UK early in 1995, after scrapping a potentially lucrative yet un-inviting career in accountancy, originally no more than another faceless backpacker with meagre funds hoping to enjoy the chilled hazy life of a shack-wallah. Shame I didn't check the weather forecast. The small matter of a monsoon put paid to any chances of beachside employment.
Offices filled with ledgers piled to the roofs were enough to put me off venturing into the world of Indian accountancy and, not wanting to follow the aimless road back home, I desperately cast the net out wide. An answer to an advert for a 'Person Required for English Publication' — one of the more ambiguous ads to grace the career opportunity pages — led to an interview and my first trip to the Herald offices.
Finding the office more energetic and boisterous than previous working environments I had experienced, a barrage of writing tests and interviews left me feeling like I had been through a whirlwind. The whirlwind moved quickly. That very same day I found out I was the new sub-editor for the Herald International Review, a paper intended to serve the Goan diaspora.
Well, what this role meant in reality was that I would read the articles awaiting publication, picking up the odd grammatical error, but more importantly I was the lowest common denominator litmus test — if the pages didn't stand up to my paltry knowledge of the Goan political system then (the argument goes) it would not be understood by Goans in the furthest-flung corners of the globe.
Day in day out, I would take the long dusty climb up to the top floor — at the time we were sharing office space with accounts. Not quite the close separation of duty to which I'd become accustomed. And although their elaborate entries in ledgers never became any less cryptic, it did give me the opportunity to mingle with those outside the editorial department.
During the early weeks of my tenure in May, the heat soared. Then early in June the rains broke — with a fanfare of grumbles from most of the populace for the three-day delay. Funny for me, as in the North European climes to which I was accustomed, rain pretty much randomly came and went. The ferocity of the storms also came as a shock. Days heavily punctuated with storms. The power cuts that ensued, hobbling our much needed computers, led to a greedy lunge for the last drips of juice out of the backup generator in order to crunch out a few extra words. Once that dried up, we would have little more to do than meditatively stare at the elements.
In the English political system, the summer is the silly system. It's the time for stories of twins joined at birth and how a routine trip to the hospital to have a wart removed leads to three-years incarceration. Falling over the same months, the monsoon season in Goa seems to have a similar effect. The supply of news is low, but the column-inches keep up their incessant demand. Ministers with long-shot pleas for 'raindrop tourism' (to wake up a beachside industry all but dried up over the period) is enough to make front page news.
Perhaps that is the reason that it was felt pushing me out into the midst of Goa on the hunt for fresh stories couldn't do too much harm. It was only later that I saw this as one of the perks of working in a small team (there were only three full-timers bringing out a 24-page tabloid weekly edition). Feeling like a young bird pushed from it's nest way before time I was forced out, between showers, onto the streets of Panjim, to interact with the local populace. Quite early on, I was struck by the stony faces of small-league civil servants. The UK broadcast journalist Jeremy Paxman claims the relationship between a politician and a journalist is like that between "a dog and a lamp post". I could relate.