Towards Christmas, to lighten the load of the heavy political wrangling, I took to the fields. The paddy fields that is. As a Goan urban dweller, I am familiar with the white side of rice -- as it appears in all its culinary simplicity and elegance on the plate. I am however completely ignorant of the involved process of getting to that stage. An 'expose' on the inner workings of the paddy harvest -- the cutting, thrashing, pounding and milling -- gives me the chance to wade through the paddy, chase frogs, and be generally mocked by good-tempered field workers. Not quite sure if this is in the general job descriptions of most journalism openings. As the season starts to draw to a close, like a hungry tiger the news machine goes in search of whatever morsels are on offer. Once again the rains come and Panjim is filled with the sight of sodden journalists speeding around in reversed raincoats. For personal reasons, it's time for me to head home. On return, an enthusiasm for media leads into trendy multimedia and somehow I end up dumped in full-blown information technology, where I am today. As such, I'm not in the perfect position to be able to compare the practice of journalism in Goa with that of elsewhere, although the peculiarities of the working environment do stand out. From the original office on the dusty top floor, we are eventually reshuffled into the air conditioned first floor vault. The cool air brings a much needed respite from the heat and dust, and the environment is definitely less makeshift. The room does have another feature -- low hanging beams at the end and (particularly hazardously) in the middle of the room level out the worst excesses of pomposity with a short sharp shock. I'm not sure if they are part of a larger shrewd plan of management, but over the years they have cracked the head of a number of prominent Goan journalists and contributors. Exactly quite how this has affected the quality of output, I'm unsure. And then there was the technology. Aside from the hardcore printing machines, large metal plates and dangerous chemicals lying around, the computers that sponged up our picture and prose were actually more contemporary than the ones I had left behind as a Liverpudlian accountant. As the adoption of the computer had come in here at a much later stage, the Herald machines tended to be newer, faster and bigger. There were just fewer of them. Working under such limited resources would at time inevitably lead to fractures. Although we worked on the computers feverishly in the morning to make way for the daily staff (whose strict deadline gave them precedence), as deadline approached tempers could occasionally erupt.