there was the traditional rivalry between
sub-editors and reporters -- an unpalatable and
unacknowledgeable fact to many. In the Herald, we had
another kind of rivalry. This running feud was between
compositors and sub-editors on the Goa desk. The
intensity of this feud became more pronounced during
the night shifts. It used to turn into a bitter fight
complete with the usage of the choicest abuses
available.

Department of Information press notes (trust the
politicos and their wise words of wisdom to have a hand
in any kind of fight) and hard copies sent by stringers
were the cause. The compositors used to concentrate on
composing advertisement, after reporting to work
regularly irregular, while we sub-editors breathed down
on their necks to type our stories which were our
life-line to fill the page. I think that Herald was the
only place which recruited an assortment of a
government servant, wannabe-advocate and a shoe-shop
vendor as compositors.

In short, Herald became their heart break club.

Mehboob was one of the finest composer we had, although
he could not discern the difference between bail and
jail. One night shift, I gave him a faxed copy from
Margao bureau filed by Minoo Fernandes. It was a court
case and Radharao Gracias was the advocate for a
defendant. Our man, Mehboob, usually is deadpan on the
keyboard but that particular day, he finished it on
time. When I opened the copy, suddenly, the story
seemed to be different from what I had read earlier.
Wondering whether I got my story wrong, I rechecked the
hard copy and found that apparently, Mehboob misread
the surname of Radharao wrongly and so it read like
Advocate Radharao Greasiness instead of Gracias. From
that day onwards, I opened a new file called 'MTV
Enjoy' and stored all the bloomers of composed copies,
courtesy Mehboob.

This same guy, during the Lent season, decided to skip
work on Maundy Thursday, because someone told him that
Good Friday fell on Thursday that particular year. All
said and done, Mehboob was a sweet guy because he would
come with delicious beef kebabs for all of us during
Ramzan evenings.

Talking of bloomers, readers of the Herald newspaper
would have had an early morning wire trip one morning
if this one hadn't been detected just in time. The
edition was put to bed, and the customary good-nights
were done with. At that time, there was a process known
as spooling, in which Page 1 was printed on a film
paper to