Business Standard, in the mid-nineties. He is
today based in Singapore. On a lighter note, RG says he
was offered, several times during his stint in Goa,
bribes by various colleagues envious of his posting as
inducement to trade places with them. Instead, he went
to Bombay to quarrel with newspaper vendors, went to
the Gulf to start up a dot-bomb, went to Singapore to
learn Mandarin, and is now wondering if those bribes
are still on offer.

Arriving to live and work in 'aparanta' -- a place
beyond the end, as the Sanskrit texts would have us
believe, where time stands still -- was always going to
be a challenge for the conscientious newspaper
correspondent. Even when one does not do so blind, as I
comforted myself in 1993.

It was Goa Dourada, Golden Goa, Perola do Oriente,
Pearl of the East, Roma do Oriente, and other such
colourfulness that I was being assigned to. The imagery
was breath-taking -- corsairs, corruption and
conversions. There were heart-warming tales of gruff
compassion -- whether from the dashing Marathas or
their debonair Portuguese rivals. There were edgy
accounts of the rivalries of contentious nationalisms,
delicious stories of grand thievery, fabulous stories
of immoral profligacy, of debauched viceroys who
equalled in pomp and splendour the Asian potentates
they dealt with.

This was, I thought to myself, the stuff of a hundred
feature stories, the mother-lode of post-colonial
memorabilia, the gateway to phantasmagorical
explorations. Indeed they were, but in no way that I
had imagined at the outset, overcome then by the
cultural fecundity of 'aparanta'. Imaging Goa, as a
curious ingenue, as a journalist, as an informed
participant, has never been an easy task and indeed is
one that has grown more onerous over the years.

Indeed the provenance of such a view is a curious one,
and yet one that is well-known. The widespread tendency
in Western writing of India -- and, by extension, of
Goa -- has been to condense the description of the
scenic beauty and natural resourcefulness, the
cosmopolitan life and the imagined mercantile
prosperity of the early colonial period, into
pastel-coloured, palatable images. So it is too with
Goa Dourada, or Golden Goa.

The Goa that has been perpetuated in the newsrooms of
the media conglomerates of urban India -- an English
construction, I would like to emphasise -- has even now
more in common with the hazy feel-good miasma that
occulted the commun