Don Bosco is such a fine school because, as one realised later in life, this was a school which awakened the latent talent in every student. Here my appetite for news (and, or course, lunch) grew day by day. Every morning, just before classes began, snippets of important news used to be read out over the school loudspeakers. One fine morning, it was announced that a newspaper has been launched in town called the Herald, and that the front-page and sports-page of this newspaper would be displayed daily on one of the ground-floor notice boards. A crowd of boys used to gather around this newspaper board during the 11 am interval, snacking on every word. I used to be part of this crowd. It became a ritual, to read the front-page and sports-page of the Herald in school. In my higher classes, one enterprising fellow used to buy the whole newspaper and bring it to class, inevitably triggering a mad scramble for the eight pages. It was in my eighth standard, when one of the then Salesian fathers, Jude Borges, who taught moral science, brought copies of the Herald into the class and asked us to count the number of advertisements and the number of news items on each page. The verdict: There was more news than advertisements. The moral that day for us kids was: read the Herald newspaper, it enriches your knowledge because it has got more news than advertisements compared to the other leading daily. Father Jude left us behind with one moral. I felt like crying. Meanwhile, Rajan Narayan's editorials and Stray Thoughts rose to dizzying heights, and so did my reading interest in the Herald. So finally when I met the man himself, I was in a kind of daze. Of course, the man never ceased to amaze me. Much water has flowed under the Mandovi bridge carrying with it the angst, dismay, despair, frustration of many people who worked with me in the Herald into the Arabian sea over my style of functioning. Call it what you want, my stars, fate, karma, foolishness, anything, but I have this knack of raising the hackles of people. This inherent nature was actually a boon for me as it was a kind of weeding out process through which I landed in the company of those who mattered most. Because, for a rookie like me, who had no formal training in journalism, getting trained or learning the nuances of journalism was of utmost importance. If I need to tweak my brothers for that, a little 'mea culpa'.