Peter D'Souza rightly pointed my mistake in writing
Sanjay Gandhi as PM. It was Rajiv, no doubt.
I may have made other errors, and the one I noticed
while scrolling through the stories on goanet is that
I said "Chair" in the story on entertainment. It
should be American Chai.
Filing stories for both a Toronto paper and India West
in San Francisco at the media centre at the end of an
exhausting day was painful, more so because of the
prevailing conditions in the media centre.
The centre was noisy, crowded and badly organized. The
Press Information Bureau (PIB) officials were not very
helpful. I and many others had lot of problems with
them, from getting our media passes to "special"
police clearance to cover the last day when the
president spoke.
It was so frustrating that I yelled at one of them,
who behaved as a big-shot babu. Despite a senior
official telling one of the junior officials to issue
me a pass, after showing him the credentials and also
the messages from the Consul General in Toronto to the
MEA, he behaved in a rude manner.
He had given me a hard time on the inaugural day,
keeping me outside the gate for more than a hour until
a senior official issued me an "invite." This guy told
me I would not be allowed to cover as I didn't have a
"J" visa, issued for journalists.
Even telling him that I came via Dubai where a tourist
visa was issued to me, he was adamant. Ultimately, I
got the pass. I had applied in November 2004 and I had
a copy of the email that the Toronto Consulate had
sent to the MEA in the same month. The applications
had to be routed through Indian diplomatic missions.
But no excuse for mistakes. As many journalists would
vouch, when faced with deadline and with more than one
story to write, it is a race against time. Errors crop
in and, hence, there are desk people who must catch
such mistakes.
Eugene
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