But I feel it was needed then, specially if you have
are up against a powerful political figure. For those
who still doubt this view, I can only point to the way
the Miramar sex scandal died down without the guilty
being brought to book. However, one is not suggesting
that the victim in sex abuse cases should be named. The
only reason I have raised this issue is to explain why
the girl was named.
Sorry for digressing; but another turning point in the
history of paper came in 1993 when we were faced with a
contempt notice from the Supreme Court. Sadly, this
proved to me that whatever a management tells you, if
you get into trouble you face it alone. In the case in
question, we were hauled up for what was taken to be a
suggestion, in a cartoon, that a Supreme Court judge
was being bribed to adjourn a hearing in a case related
to the disqualification of then chief minister Ravi Naik.
How I got involved in the matter -- even though it was
my day off -- is another matter. But the real icing on
the cake was that what the court claimed we had
suggested in the cartoon apparently was the truth.
Unknown to us then, a colleague in our sister newspaper
had apparently tried to bribe a judge. But the deal had
fallen through because the judge wanted more money than
the politician was willing to pay. The story came out
when the journalist apparently did not return all the
money that he was given by politician and claimed he
had incurred "expenses".
Ravi Naik ultimately resigned, ironically after himself
losing an appeal against his disqualification in the
Supreme Court; and I was cleared of contempt charges.
Two years later I left GT.
But the memories remain.
Chapter 14:
An era of free sheeters
Miguel BraganzaHaving an educated father with a flair for speaking and
writing helps : Miguel's is a typical case study. As a
school student of St.Britto, his contributions to the
school magazine were like a celebrity column -- ghost
written by his father! His first original contribution
to the printed word was in a tabloid, bilingual 'free
sheeter' of sorts called the 'Vanguard' ('O Vanguardo')
in the mid 1970s. While at the University of
Agricultural Sciences,Bangalore, he was a
founder-member of the "Writers' Club" and one-time
Editor of the FYM: the Farm Yard
Manure..ooops...Magazine. Since then, Miguel has been
Goa University's first and only Garden Superintendent.
He took to writing more seriously after getting in
touch with journos in local newsrooms. He became the
first Consulting Editor of the Mapusa Plus free-sheeter
in July 2001.
Just imagine a user-driven economy in which the user
has to only pay attention; absolutely nothing else.
This improbable scenario has arrived in an increasingly
consumerist society with the birth of the 'free sheeter
', now making their presence felt in Goa too.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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