Born as a journalist

Born as a journalist

I had been visiting the newspaper office in Panaji in Goa for nearly two months, pestering the news editor there for a part-time or a fulltime 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 teacher's post after securing the MA degree in philosophy.

The news editor had no hesitation in giving 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 PG classes while the news editor M M Mudaliar wanted me to take up a reporter's post. I was too naïve to know the functioning of various posts in a newspaper.

Mudaliar was a thorough gentleman who gave a patient hearing to his numerous visitors. This was in stark contrast to the newspaper editor who was young, impatient to hear others and ever restless but very dynamic with his ideas. But the young editor had high regard for the middle-aged news editor and would not normally veto his decisions. I had gained these insights during my numerous visits to the newspaper located in an old one-storeyed building with a wooden stairs and floor and a typically Goan tiled roof.

During one of such visits, the young editor once sent me to a school in Ribandar where the headmistress had beat up a student with a wooden scale. The news editor also asked to write an article on the furniture sale that was going on on the banks of the nearby Mandovi river. Incidentally, both the stories got published in the same issue of the newspaper, one with a byline and the other with a tag of 'By a Staff Reporter'.

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...” he said as he lit his pipe.

“Since when?” I asked, astonished.

“From yesterday, August 18..Those two news stories were your first assignment,” he replied as a matter of fact.

August 18 was my birthday. His reply meant that was also the day I was born as a journalist. I recalled this today as this incident had taken place exactly 32 years ago.

Bitter test of first newspaper assignment

Sakal Times
Point of view
Bitter test of a first byline
Camil parkhe

My first newspaper reporting assignment and my byline carried along with it has left behind a bitter test in my mouth to this date. I have destroyed the not even A newspaper editor had promised me a job and when I visited the newspaper office that morning, I was asked to rush to a school and to file a story. The nature of the assignment indeed baffled me. A school teacher had assaulted a fifth standard school with a ruler and a leader of a students union had approached the newspaper editor to publish a news item. When I wondered what was wrong with a teacher punishing an errant student, the editor said that corporal punishment was against law and we must highlight this incident.
Along with the students union leader, I rushed to Ribandar, a couple of km from Panaji, where the school was located. The teacher couple who had founded the small school were surprised when I, along with a photographer and the student leader, approached them to seek their version of the assault. The husband who was his early sixties was too shocked to react to see newspaper persons arriving at 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. 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 with my byline. The same day, the editor told me that I had been hired as a reporter with one day retrospective effect. The joy of getting a first job had no bounds. But 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 my old newspaper cuttings that faint memories of these incidents are revived. After a few years, I destroyed the clipping of my first byline but I have not managed to wipe out that incident from my memory.