I had been visiting The Navhind Times office in Panjim in Goa for nearly two months, pestering the news editor, M.M. Mudaliar, there for a part-time or a full time. I had just appeared for the BA final examination of the Bombay University and wanted some job to continue post-graduation studies. I was aspiring for a college or university teacher's post after securing the MA degree in philosophy.
The news editor who said there was a vacancy in the newspaper had no hesitation in giving me a job. The only issue was that I was inclined to accept a proof-reader's post which would have permitted me to attend my classes at the post-graduate centre at the nearby Sushila Building on the 18th June Road in the city. News Editor Mudaliar, however, insisted on me taking up a staff reporter's post which, he said, was a higher post and had better salary. But I was too naïve to know the functioning of various posts and designations in a newspaper, let alone the pay scales as per the Justice Palekar wage award applicable to various posts in newspaper. (The wage board and pay scales of journalists would be matters close to my heart in my subsequent role as a trade unionist in Goa Union of Journalists !)
Mudaliar was a thorough gentleman who gave a patient hearing to his numerous visitors. This was in stark contrast to the newspaper editor Bikram Vohra who was young, impatient to hear others and ever restless but very dynamic with his ideas. The young editor had high regard for the middle-aged news editor Mudaliar and would not normally veto his decisions. I am referring to Bikram Vohra as `young editor’ because at 28, he was just seven years elder to me but younger than the news editor, the two reporters and the news desk staff. I had gained these insights during my numerous visits to the newspaper office. The Navhind Times office was located near the Panjim Market. The typical Goan style one-storeyed newspaper building had wooden stairs, also a wooden flooring and a tiled roof with balconies facing the Dayanand Bandodkar road along the Mandovi river.
During one of my such visits, editor Vohra asked me to rush to a school and to file a story. There was no reporter around in the office and so I was asked to rush to the site.
The nature of the reporting assignment baffled me. The headmistress of a school (she was also the school founder) in nearby Ribandar village had assaulted a fifth standard school with a wooden ruler and Avinash Bhosale, a leader of a students union, had approached the newspaper editor to highlight the beating incident. When I wondered what was wrong with a teacher punishing an errant student, the editor said that corporal punishment in educational institutions was against law and we must highlight this incident.
And so, along with the students leader Bhosale, I rushed to Ribandar, a couple of km from Panjim, where the school was located. The school founder -cum teacher couple were surprised when I, along with a photographer and the student leader, approached them to seek their version of the `assault’. The school principal who was in his early sixties was too shocked to react to see newspaper persons arriving at his doorsteps to give a bad publicity for his reputed school. His wife who was in an aggressive mood saw nothing wrong in punishing the child who, she said, was at that time attending her classes, having fully forgotten that she had been punished the previous day.
Her statement had, in fact, convinced me that she had not committed any crime at all.
When I briefed the newspaper editor about the visit, he excitedly said that there was a good 'copy' for publication. The next day, the story written by me and heavily edited by the editor, was published in the newspaper with my byline.
The next morning, I was in the news editor's cabin, beaming with joy of publication of my byline in the newspaper.
“Sir, what about my job...?” I asked him again.
“But you have already been hired...” Mudaliar said as he lit his pipe.
“Since when?” I asked, astonished.
“From yesterday, August 18..The news story you covered was your first assignment,” he replied as a matter of fact.
The joy of getting a first job had no bounds. But nonetheless I had a nagging feeling that I had committed some of kinds of injustice to the school's dedicated founders.
In my journalism career, I have had some proud moments and some not so proud moments. Some of the incidents have gone blur in memory with the passage of time and it is only when I wipe off the dust from the file of thousands of my old newspaper cuttings that faint memories of these incidents are revived.
After a few years, I destroyed the clipping of my ‘first byline’ as I did not consider the news story as a matter of pride. But to this date, I have not succeeded in wiping out that incident from my memory.
