Elston Soares
—————————————————————————————————————— Elston Soares, a veteran of the desk, has worked at the Herald, Newslink and Gomantak Times. Since moving out of Goa, he has worked in publications in the Gulf and Singapore. ——————————————————————————————————————
February 15, 1987 marked a watershed in the history of English-language journalism in Goa. That date marked the launch of Goa's fifth English-language daily to be launched in the union territory-turned-state.
Fifth, that is, if one includes the now defunct West Coast Times and Newslink, an English-language newspaper launched by the Tarun Bharat Group, and targeted at Goa, though like the Tarun Bharat in Marathi earlier, it too was printed from the neighbouring city of Belgaum.
This writer spent two months with Newslink in late 1986 in Belgaum, together with Haseeb Shakoor and Derek Almeida, bringing out the newspaper in very trying and primitive conditions.
Strangely, the Tarun Bharat group then thought that they could do another Tarun Bharat with Newslink, that is, to produce a newspaper for the Goa market from Belgaum. But with one significant difference.
We did not have the wide correspondent network of Tarun Bharat. We were, instead, expected to translate the stories from Marathi — something we did rather more successfully in Gomantak Times a few years later.
But then, at Belgaum, this was a task easier said 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.