stepping
stone to this peripatetic breed. Reporters, deskies,
the butterflies flitting through the features pages...
one can count first generation migrant Goans everywhere.

As a rookie reporter in Mumbai in the 1990s, lesson one
was about Goan journos fresh off the boat (the
Bombay-Goa steamer was a recent memory then) gladly
beginning at the bottom despite having done duty in one
of Goa's three English-language newspapers. Editors
marveled at the `material' coming out of Goa with
well-rounded exposure in a city where people are
quickly slotted into different 'beats'.

At first, one wondered why someone with several years'
experience in the profession was willing to take the
bullshit dished out by preppies all for a measly six
grand gross monthly. And just when we got used to
seeing their bylines, off to the Gulf the Goenkars went.

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 eve