It's a tiger! (February 09, 2010)

Finally, as 'Big Goenkar' Rajendra Kerkar said, the truth has prevailed. Reports from the forensic lab of the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, have confirmed that one of the samples (reportedly the hair) of the cat killed at Sattari last year is that of a tiger.

Kerkar, perhaps Goa's only sincere green, was convinced it was a tiger. This foot-soldier of Mother Earth has for years been telling us that the Goa section of the Western Ghats is a 'tiger corridor' but no one, including the Goa Forest Department ever took him seriously. He's even collected droppings and other tell-tale evidences and presented them to the Forest department, but it has all been mere water on a duck's back for all these years.

So now that there is scientific and authentic evidence that the animal killed is indeed a tiger, will the ostriches in the Forest department wake up and act? Doesn't seem like. For, no sooner the report came in from Dehradun, sighting Goa's Chief Conservator of Forests, Dr Shashi Kumar, turned even more difficult than sighting the striped cat itself. But four months ago, when a preliminary report that came in from Dehradun said the sample tested didn't belong to a tiger, it was Dr Kumar himself who went to town with the findings.

Small fish, big deal

Last week, almost every newspaper front-paged the report of a lowly peon in the Civil Registrar's office at Junta House in the capital city having been booked for corruption charges. According to the Vigilance Cell, Falcao was booked for taking bribes to speed up issuance of certificates -- birth, marriage or death -- by the office of the Civil Registrar. According to PI Rajesh Kumar of the Vigilance Cell, who conducted the raid, Falcao was caught with a few certificates and Rs 2,000 in cash, which the poor fellow could not account for.

Kudos to the vigilance cell! It appears the Digambar Kamat dispensation is on a mission to weed out corruption from the system and give us super-clean governance. Except that in accomplishing this mission, the government is zeroing in on the piddly sole fish at the bottom and allowing the killer sharks and whales have a field day at the top. So, a Falcao with all of Rs 2,000 in his pocket gets netted and the big guys who splash Rs 1.6-crore worth SUVs as birthday gifts for their kids, live on. Wonder why the Vigilance sleuths couldn't look beyond their nose and the peon Falcao at the Civil Sub-Registrar's office and catch the top guns there, who charge four-figure sums for simple registration of land sale and lease deeds!

Blackmail at fest of ideas!?!

Yesterday, the third edition of the DD Kossambi festival of ideas began with an expectedly brilliant discourse from Girish Karnad. But before it did, we journos were treated to a 'festival of ideas' of a different hue -- media blackmail. Sometime around noon, my peers and I got provocative text messages from a senior colleague heaping expletives at the organisers of the real 'festival of ideas'. Something to the effect that the media should boycott it because the "Art & Culture department (the organisers) has decided not to allow tv channels to record" the full proceedings.

Nosy that we journos are, some of us decided to probe a little deeper and get to the bottom of this entire controversy. It so turned out that one famous Goan journo, who heads a local TV channel, had approached the Director of Art & Culture, Prasad Lolyenkar, with a proposal to cover the festival live for a total sum of Rs 1.25-lakh. The proposal was flatly turned down by Lolyenkar. Incidentally the same TV channel, which like all its sister channels here in Goa are "illegal entities" according to Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni, was paid a whopping Rs 10-lakh by the Digambar Kamat dispensation for similar 'live' and 'dead' coverage of the International Film Festival of India last December.