Decade of the Princess!

It could easily go down as the world's longest drama - a whole decade long. And, in the end, it's the villian who seems to be winning!
Laughing all the way to the bank will be Sanvordem MLA, Anil Salgaocar, whose Salgaocar Mining Industries owned the River Princess when it was grounded way back in 2000, and god knows who else. But the fishermen, the shack operators and dozens of other tourist tradesmen will continue to mourn the demise of Sinquerim-Candolim beach, thanks to a lame-duck set of politicians and bureaucrats Goa has had in this decade.
The state government is actually resigning to its fate where it is now giving the original villian responsible by his company's criminal negligence for the River Princess disaster, the 'first option' to remove it!
Why? Because it's all about money, honey.
It's not that the River Princess is the only vessel to be grounded here in recent history and the state is inexperienced to handle such situations. Another such vessel grounding disaster had occurred in 1994, when the MV Sea Transporter was in similar conditions grounded with tonnes of oil in it just 1.5 nautical miles south of where the Princess is happily embedded on the bottom of the Arabian sea.
In one-week flat, the tonnes of oil were pumped out from MV Sea Transporter, its oil tanks flushed and treated to ensure that even residual black matter is removed, and the ship itself removed from the scene in another four weeks after the monsoon.
So, why didn't the same happen in the case of the River Princess?? Simply because the owners of MV Sea Transporter had insured the vessel and had all its paper work in place, a responsibility which the owners of River Princess criminally neglected. No insurance means no money to foot the bill for salvaging/removing the vessel. That's why, River Princess continues to rampage the beach and Sinquerim-Candolim, even 10 years after it was grounded.
And what does the government of the day do? Nothing, when otherwise its 'goons-in-uniform' go around the streets exhtorting lakhs of rupees from the Aam Admi in fines, both under and above the table, for not possessing valid insurance papers of their two-wheelers and four-wheelers.  The mining baron and now politician is not only having the cake, he is soon likely to eat it too!

CWG, Diggu and Goa’s press corps

Magnanimous Diggu! Just 24 hours after his beloved journos from Margao slapped him on his face, literally, the Chief Minister presided over a meeting of his cabinet which among other decisions approved a bonus for my tribe - doubling the Rs 2,000 per-month pension for retiring journalists to Rs 4,000 per-month.
Just the previous day on Sunday, a band of reporters, part-time correspondents and mofussil correspondents acted macho and 'boycotted' (sic) a press conference which the Chief Minister was to address along with Sports Director, Dr Suzanne D'Souza. From what I gather, the reason for the boycott was an unannounced change of venue and a reported two-hour delay for the arrival of CM.

Is it reason enough to keep the readers deprived of the information on the arrival of the Commonwealth Games baton relay in Goa which the CM was to elaborate about at the press conference?
In my eighteen years of journalism, I do not remember a single instance of such high-handedness by the press corps. Yes, there was boycott of ministers and CMs but only in a brief fortnight when we journos launched an agitation to protest the contents of the Right to Information Act. CM after CM that Goa has had in the last two decades have not been known to be punctual. Pratapsing Rane, Dr Wilfred de Souza, Ravi Naik, Manohar Parrikar, Luizinho Faleiro, Francisco Sardinha, have all been CMs and none has punctuality as their forte. Yet, not once do I remember a scheduled press conference was boycotted for delay.
Seems like there are too many carrots dangling before journos these days, leading to addiction.