After the much touted and much publicised millennium rave party by Mumbai tycoon Jay Wadia was banned by the High Court in December 1999, I was witness to two rave parties in January 2000, though on a smaller scale, but where the corruption by the police was displayed in its full naked glory nonetheless. At one rave party at Bamboo Forest in Anjuna, instead of stopping the party, the police arrived, collected their share and left the place as unobtrusively as they came. They were blind to the open sale of drugs and were deaf to the raves' sound pollution which carried on well past midnight into the wee hours of the morning.
Another rave party also organised near Anjuna was completely insulated against police harassment. Such was the extent of influence asserted by the organisers of this rave party that the police just turned a deaf ear to phone calls made by Choppy and me just to check how much the police is interested in enforcing the law. We do not know whether money had changed hands but when we did not get any response to the repeated phone calls we made to the nearest police station we personally went to speak to the police officer on duty — but to our horror found the police station was closed, lock stock and barrel, as deserted as a place hit by a typhoon. But our labour was not in vain. Next day, this was in February 2000, Ashley ran an exclusive report on the front page based on our first hand account. But the surprising part was the way the DySP North Goa denied everything, including our calls and visit to the police station.
My days in Herald are truly memorable. Along the way I did trample on a few toes inadvertently, but my well wishers and the learning tips they provided me are invaluable. Any memories I carry of Herald must be painted with the pictures of Choppy, Rico and Ashley, who contributed greatly to my development as a journalist. I can safely include this trio into the list of the other great people like Devika Sequeira, Pamela, Derek Almeida about whom I have heard a lot.
I guess, the journalistic calibre of the above mentioned people and their attitude of being go-getters rubbed off onto people like me. The excitement of running after news, rather than waiting for news to land in the form of press notes or government hand-outs, is a different ball-game altogether. It was a question of being there first which I liked most in Herald. During the police firing incident at Cortalim on the anti-Meta Strips agitationists, when two or three people were grievously injured, I know it was we from Herald who reached the hospital first. I fail to recollect whether it was Choppy or Ashley with whom I landed at Goa Medical College where the injured were brought.
Although the photographer had gone missing during this crucial hour, we were nevertheless armed with our dictaphones to record the first hand accounts of how the police firing started in Cortalim. We managed to elicit the names of injured, right from the horse's mouth so to speak, got reactions of the people who accompanied the injured and were back in the office in front of our computers.
Even as the day's incidents took shape in the form of a lead story for the edition, our faces were somber and anger welled up in us as we could not forget the gory images of the body parts of one injured youth. He was shot through his genitals. But we were journalists and were supposed to objective in our reports. That was Herald, getting it right the first time and all the time.
In a sentence, I stitched my cloak and bought my dagger, from Herald.
Chapter 11: In black & white… newsdesk nuggets
Derek Almeida
—————————————————————————————————————— Derek Almeida, besides being one of Goa's finest and most aesthetically-balanced deskmen, steals time to write humour columns whenever possible. This product of Goan journalism has won the respect of his juniors by his honesty at work, his ability to stand by his subordinates, as well as his considerable if under-appreciated talent. Memorable headings like 'Sirsat elected, Tomazinho selected' (after a controversial election to the Goa Speaker's post) are credited to Derek, as every self-respecting deskman of that era in this state would recall. —————————————————————————————————————-