When I approached Mathias Vaz, owner of the Maureen Printing Press, and P.M. Vaz, proprietor of Manvins Courier Service and Manvins Hotel, with the idea of bringing out a bilingual paper, which would contain news catering to both English-language and Roman Konkani readers, they immediately agreed. Papers which published general news in Konkani, were in Devnagri script, which many of the Catholics, specially those in the 30+ age group, could simply not read. It was for this section that the Konkan Mail would cater to. While Mathias handled the entire printing, P.M.Vaz would take care of the distribution and couriering part, besides providing office space and the use of his computers in his hotel, while I would handle the editing. The soft launch of the first copy of 18 pages, costing Rs. 2, was done by the Member of Parliament Eduardo Faleiro, in the city, where a few prominent citizens were the invitees. For the nearly four years the paper was regularly published, there was great enthusiasm shown by the readers. But this in itself is not enough for the success of a paper, as any publisher will vouch, without advertisements, which is the main revenue provider. And that is exactly what we lacked. This could be because of a variety of factors, including perhaps, bad management. After several appeals to the readers via the editorials for such revenue support bore no results, we decided to suspend publication, as we could no longer continue suffering losses. We still hope to restart, provided the finance is available; but for the moment we haven't a clue of where this money is going to come from. Though sports has been my first love, reporting on sports has been an add on. Except for a brief stint on the sports desk of the Free Press Journal, my main grounding on the news and reporting desk was with the Times of India, Bombay, and then on The Navhind Times and back to the Goa page of the Times of India, Bangalore edition, as a stringer, where I also did a lot of sports reporting. I believe that sports journalism helps a lot in the shaping of a good all-round writer, simply because it gives one a free reign to use descriptive language and a variety of verbiage, ordinarily not suited for general reporting.