The penny dropped much later when one moved to Goa on assignment. Poor pay and lousy working environments surely could not make up for Goa's fabled joys of life. But then Mumbai's charms too quickly faded in the face of the daily grind one had to endure. So it was only a matter of time before the Goans pulled up their posts and set sail Westwards, to the Middle East and to other uncharted territories. One doesn't have to go too far -- only till the Goajourno Mailing List (http://indialists.org/mailman/listinfo/goajourno) -- to figure out how far the hack pack from Goa go. They are out there in Bangkok bringing out a jumbo newspaper for a community that can barely read English. In Fiji, from where the Indian population flees after every coup d'etat, journos of Goan origin move in the reverse direction. In Stockholm, it was a Goan journalist who found himself on the headlines while trailing the killers of a Swedish Prime Minister. So why do journalists from Goa bloom only on alien terrain? A conversation I had with the venerable Lambert Mascarenhas comes to mind. Just settling in for a long chat at someone's house at Dona Paula, Mascarenhas asked me why I was not trying my luck outside. I told him about the variety of experience I enjoyed as a journalist, the wide range of stories I could do and the opportunities to travel though the profession paid only slightly more than my earlier employer, the government. Free Goa's first English-language editor sighed, nodded his head wisely and told me no newspaper in Goa would ever send out a reporter even to cover a major event. "And the money is so much better... the Gulf newspapers pay so much more," Mascarenhas told me. Perhaps Mascarenhas would have thought differently had newspaper owners in Goa exhibited more commitment to professionalism. Just browsing through the back issues of Goa Today edited by Manohar Shetty proved to be an eye-opener on what could have been. With Devika Sequiera and others, the old Goa Today turned out to be a delightful surprise. Well researched and crisply written stories like the ones on the protests against charter tourism in the early 1990s were a joy to read long after the magazine became a pale shadow of itself. One saw similar flashes of the classic fire in the belly kind of journalism during the agitation against Meta Strips metal recycling plant four years ago. But matters have since slipped back into the safe routine of old. While mediapersons elsewhere in the country are agitated over the loss of substance to the infusion of style and gloss in the age of colour, it's prolonged siesta time in Goa.