een police and
journalists.

Today, a journalist inadvertently narrated to me a
story from the Jataka tales, with a moral vis a vis a
peculiar situation in his office, a local
English-language newspaper. Endless hours have been
consumed by journalists especially at Cafe Prakash as
to how an editor could allow his dupester reporter to
carry on, despite complaints of cheating filed against
the reporter at the local police station. It is another
story that the officer Police Sub Inspector Raut
Dessai, who was handling the complaint, was also duped
off a few thousand rupees by the same journo.

Sorry, I have digressed. This is how the story goes....

A she-monkey is trapped in the middle of the flooding
river. As the water level rises, she keeps pushing her
little one upwards away from the watery jaws of death.
But as soon as the water reaches her nose, and keeps
swelling further, the mother shoves her little one
below the water on the bed, and stands on it, in order
to gain additional height that could possible allow her
to survive.

The story's original moral is the survival of the
fittest. But I think one should give the listener some
liberty enough to alter it a bit. The moral which fits
the bill here, I think, is survival of the canniest.
And Goa is no more alien to such philosophies, which
generally appear to have a genetic similarity with
Bihar and the other cow-belt states, where the motto of
survival is, Jiski lathi uski bhais (He who wields the
stick, own the buffalo).

(For more information on this issue, one could contact
just about any journo from The Navhind Times)

We could shift to the equation between the Police Press
Relations Officer (PRO) and the media.

If a layman is of the opinion that this is a source
where the news from the police department actually
flows from, it is a very incorrect assumption. For, in
the Goa Police, the office of the PRO is that of a
sorting department. The juiciest morsels extracted from
the reams of wireless messages and kept under lock and
key, while the unwanted and sanitized thrash is offered
to media representatives.

No complaints there. That is the PROs brief.

But if there was one PRO a few years back who managed
this with elan, it was Deputy Superintendent of Police
Apa Teli. This man had generated such goodwill amongst
mediamen, that the police department should really
offer him a police medal, solely for ensuring that the
image of the police in t