I wrote the brief biography of Goencho Saib which GOAN OBSERVER has now printed. At a time when I was cured physically to the extent that I could given in to the damage that had been inflicted on my body by corrupt politicians, goons and criminally irresponsible doctors. The writing of Goencho Saib was the best therapy in that it revived my flagging spirit and my faith, if not in God in my fellow human beings.

 FIFTEEN YEARS AGO in November, 1989, I was brutally assaulted by hired goons barely a hundred metres from my residence at Dona Paula. The crippling attack followed a campaign I had launched in the Herald against the then Speaker Dayanand Narvekar who had allegedly attempted to molest an 18-year-old lady clerk in the Speaker’s Chamber. I was admitted to the Goa Medical College Hospital. I had agonizing pain in the lower limbs and the spine. Presumably with a view to relieve the pain the then Head of the Department of Medicine Dr. N.G.K. Sharma who was personally supervising my treatment resorted to the medical fraternity’s favourite quick-fix solution.

 This marked the beginning of five years of excruciating pain, mental agony, torment and torture. I went to a succession of hospitals and consultants. I was referred to the best known names in the country. And the Mecca of neurology, Queens in London, the U.K. In quest of the Holy Grail which would relieve me of the torment I was going through. But all to no avail. Not a single one of the so called experts were willing to tell me that the first doctor had possibly made a mistake. That I may not have polymyositis. That I should not have been put on steroids at all. That my only salvation lay in detoxification. They did not want to take the risk. In the fear that if they withdrew steroids and something happened to me their precious reputation which enabled them to command exorbitantly extortionate fees would be damaged. Why fool around with a journalist?

 And so the mortification of the flesh continued. Four years down the line my dependency on steroids had taken a deadly toll of my body and my mind. Long term use of steroids causes water retention. Leading to the bloating of the body. My weight had gone up to an ungainly, unhealthy 180 kg. Steroids lead to loss of calcium which makes the bones brittle. Steroids cause cataracts and glaucoma. My vision was so badly affected that I was afraid of going blind. And since it is difficult to predict how a steroid drugged body would react to anaesthesia no one was willing to operate. Steroids make you hyper. Which in turn leads to instant combustibility. So I used to go into inexplicable rage at the slightest provocation or even without any provocation. I was put on very strong downers to keep my aggressive tendencies under check. This led to violent oscillation of moods.

 There was no light at the end of the tunnel. Not even the flicker of one. And by 1993 all my friends including my close doctor friends in Goa had given me up. On my birthday on July 4,1993, my doctor friends had virtually performed my last rites. This was on the eve of my going to the famed Arvind Netralaya at Madurai. In a last ditch attempt at saving my vision. Since reading and writing was my whole life the threatened blindness was terrifying. The doctors in Madurai turned me away. They told me that my general condition was too precarious to risk an operation. Coming out of the hospital I had a fall and almost lost consciousness. I managed to board the plane to Bangalore en route to Goa. I collapsed at the Bangalore airport and was taken by a friend who had come to receive me to the Mallaya Hospital. And this was when the series of miracles which made me hold in body and mind and in spirit began.

 A young endocrinologist trained in  Massachusettes in the U.S.A. had joined the hospital just a week before. He took one look at me and concluded that steroids were the cause of all my problems. A simple, candid, straightforward truth which none of the top neurologists of the country or in London were willing to acknowledge. I told Dr. Shrikanta, the young endocrinologist, that all the top neurologists had warned me that if I stop taking steroids I would be dead in a fortnight. Dr. Shrikanta very gently but very firmly told me that if I continued to take steroids I would probably be dead in a month anyway. Dr. Shrikanta was emphatic that all the other doctors who had examined and treated me were wrong. That I did not have polymyositis. That I probably never had polymyositis. Dr. Shrikanta virtually pleaded with me to subject myself to steroid detoxification. Let us together climb the Mt. Everest of good health, he pleaded. Dr. Shrikanta warned me that detoxification would not be easy. That the withdrawal process would be extremely painful. That it would take time and patience on my part. And even after I had got fully detoxified I would still need months if not years to recovery fully.

 I returned to Goa. I was already convinced that I had no option but to undergo detoxification. I had excepted the doctor’s suggestion fatalistically. Anything was better than the living hell that I had to endure day in and day out every waking hour. And there were precious few of those hours where I could escape into heavily drugged sleep. I decided to return to Bangalore. Not really hoping for a cure or even surviving the detoxification. But it was better to have tried and lost than never to have tried at all. I had a few commitments to fulfill before though. My then housekeeper Nalini Gauns and her fiancée wanted to get married. So I performed the marriage. I was so pessimistic about returning from my voyage into the unknown that I gave away my vast collection of books to friends. Even my collection of images of Ganesh collected lovingly over a period of 15 years were given away. And then I packed my bags and went back to Bangalore. I went back alone because I did not want anybody to witness my agony in the next few weeks in Mallaya Hospital.

 The detoxification  took all of almost three months. Dr. Shrikanta had indicated that it could stretch to five to six months. But I had told him to speed it up for a very simple reason. I could not just afford to stay in hospital that long. When I think back to those dark days I still shudder. I was in constant pain. There were any number of times when I felt suicidal. I was virtually locked into  a room so I would not harm myself. There was a nurse in attendance 24 hours a day. A psychiatrist came in every day to help me cope with my anxieties. A neuro-physician and a cardiologist were on stand-by. And Dr. Shrikanta besides supervising my treatment would come and spend several hours with me every evening reassuring me that everything would be all right. And even reading passages from the Bhagvad Gita. At the end of my hospital stay I had been completely detoxified. I was able to discard the chemical crutches which had become an extension of my body. I had entered the hospital weighing 180 kg. I returned to Goa after my three months journey through madness weighing 36 kg.

 I was cured of my dependency on steroids. But the process of recovery was long. I had been warned not to undergo any stress. It would be a long time before my adrenal glands began functioning normally again. I was confined to bed. Though I did not go to office I continued to write my editorials. And since combative editorials would have led to stress I limited myself to writing editorials on bees, flowers and all the pleasant things I could conjure up. But all this was not enough to keep my mind occupied. It was then that I thought of working on a book on the life of St. Francis Xavier. By happy coincidence a friend of mine from Delhi, N. Lakshmi, had decided to take a sabbatical in Goa. She was looking for something to keep her occupied. She undertook to do all the research for the book under my guidance.  And every morning she would come home and I would dictate to her. One chapter at a time. At the end of the book I felt a tremendous sense of not just relief but a sense of achievement. That I could function if not to my optimal pre-steroid mental ability and capacity, that I had at least pulled myself out of the despondency that had marked my life after returning to Bangalore.

 Things were difficult for me when I came back. My employers like everyone else had given me up. They had decided that I would be an invalid. The situation was worsened by the fact that my publisher A. C. Fernandes who had always stood by me and given me complete freedom to run the newspaper in the best interests of the Goan people was ailing. And soon after I returned he passed away. Unfortunately, the son who inherited the newspaper did not share either the vision or the commitment of his father. To him the Herald was purely a business proposition. He was only interested in the bottom-line. I realized to what extent the situation had deteriorated  when I presented him with a copy of my book on St. Francis Xavier. Instead of applauding my courage in having undertaken such a challenging venture in as delicate a state of health as I was then he very promptly decided to stop my various allowances a that I was getting till then. On the flimsy premise that I had been doing private work at office cost. All of which did not help in reviving my  spirit and restoring my earlier zest for life and for journalism.

 For almost five years after my return from Bangalore I vegetated. My employers and even close friends had decided that I was a burnt-out editor. And since this was repeated to me so many times not very subtly I had begun to lose confidence. I had lost much of the vital spark that had animated me through my life leading up the assault and its aftermath. True, I had received a new lease of life. My body had mended to the extent it could.  Some irreparable damage had taken place. Or at least damage which I had come to accept as irreversible. And I existed rather than lived in a limbo till yet another miracle happened.

 It was November,2002. I got a call from a friend whom I had known in Mumbai. A journalist, Tara Patel, who loved Goa and had spent her birthday month of November in Goa for several years. On previous visits she had called up if I could give her a job as she was keen on relocating to Goa. And I had always put her off conscious that of pathetic salaries our pathetic salaries would not do justice to any one with talent and experience from Mumbai. In November 2002 she asked if she could come and interview me for the paper she worked in Mumbai, The Afternoon Despatch & Courier. I told her I was not worth interviewing. She insisted. And I relented. She came home and we talked about journalism. It was only then that I learned that I had first met her exactly 25 years ago when I was editing a magazine called Onlooker way back in 1975. Apparently she had come to me with a short story, her very first short story, which I had promptly published. But I had then forgotten all about her. But apparently she had kept track of me and my career. She went back and wrote an extremely flattering piece about  me in The Afternoon Despatch & Courier.

 The write-up was a turning point. It was a major turning point because it greatly revived my faith in my self-worth. It took me back to my youthful idealistic phase when I was convinced that I could change the world. The days when I felt a compulsion to fight injustice and oppression in any form. The days when my journalistic dharma was honed. When I had decided that a journalist by definition had to be critical of the establishment irrespective of the establishment in power.   Tara was a mirror to my soul. And the fact that someone believed that I continued to be the same idealistic, irreverential, committed, passionate journalist, gave me the impetus to rejoin the good fight. To become fully engaged with life again. And perhaps somewhere at the back of my mind must have been a desire and determination or perhaps even an obsession to continue to enjoy the respect and the faith which Tara had reposed in me. In the state in which I had been in I needed reassurance that I could be whole again. That I could take on the world. And that I would have sufficient resilience to battle all the demons real and imaginary which the path of adversorial journalism inevitably bring.

 Writing this preface ten years after my detoxification on the eve of the last Exposition of St. Francis Xavier in 1994, I feel a sense of exhilaration. A sense of exhilaration over the fact that I had the courage to walk away from a newspaper and a management which had reduced me to a puppet and made a mockery of all that the Herald had stood for. I feel a sense of jubilation that I have been able to launch a news weekly owned by readers and run by professionals, and accountable to a responsible, enlightened Board of Directors, who share my conviction that a newspaper should be committed exclusively to fulfilling the aspirations of the people. And should not succumb to pressure either from the  government of the day or advertisers. The launch and success of the Goan Observer which will coincidentally complete a year on November 15, 2004, just a week before the commencement of the  Exposition, is a culmination of my  struggle to be whole again. Not only in body but in mind and spirit.  I hope  Goencho Saib will continue to guide me in His infinite mercy and compassion.