From Our Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network - Panaji
Panaji, May 13: The pages of social a networking website are now rendering much needed eye balls for Goa’s longest surviving Konkani weekly printed in Roman script and promoted by Catholic priests.
Social networking is a buzz word for Goa’s oldest surviving Konkani weekly-- Vavraddeancho Ixtt (V-Ixtt), which was launched as an attempt to reach to the peasants during erstwhile Portuguese era.
Fr Feroz Fernandes, Editor-in-Chief of V-Ixtt said that `the magazine has received tremendous readership amongst the younger generation after it went on social networking website.’
The magazine which celebrated its 78th Birthday on May 12 is in Roman, a language which is popular amongst the Catholic community.
Fr Fernandes said that since its launch on facebook, a year ago, the magazine has now dedicated fan following of more than 2,000 people and several lakh visitors read it online.
V-Ixtt is already on the website which gets around 1,000 hits weekly.
“We are getting lot of young readers, whom we would have missed if we were just in print edition because of the physical limitations,” Fr Fernandes said.
He said that the magazine has started an English column called `English-Konkani mix bhaji’, a humourous piece which is turning into its unique selling proportion (USP) on social networking website.
“When youngsters come to read this English column, they also browse through Roman Konkani articles,” the Editor in chief said adding that the aim to go on the social networking website is to give a platform to Konkani language.
The publication, one of the oldest in Goa, is managed exclusively by priests on a professional basis and it raises issues cutting across religious lines, he said.
Published from an office inside the campus of Society of Pillar - a wing of Church - about 15 kms from here, the not -for-profit weekly touches doorsteps of Goans in the countries like UK, France, Canada, Australia, Italy, Germany and those in Arab world and and African continent.
Started in 1933, it was Church's attempt to retain its links with the workers in a fast changing secular and political world, the journalist-priest explained.
The weekly was to reach out to the working class and people at the grassroots to educate and inform them on issues like `communism vis-a-vis religion", he said.
Since the beginning, Fernandes said, the magazine followed a line of thought closer to the aspiration of the freedom movement of India and Goa.
The weekly enjoyed ample freedom of expression and escaped rigorous Portuguese censorship up to the early 1950s. However, the picture started changing after the Liberation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and the freedom struggle to liberate Goa from the clutches of the Portuguese.
"During this period, the press buckled under the pressures of rigorous Portuguese censorship. Nothing could be published in Goa without getting it passed by the Portuguese Police with the rubber-stamp that read 'Visado pela censura' (seen by the censor)," former editor Fr Peter Raposo has said in an essay on the history of Romi Konkani journalism.
"On August 12, 1961, three months before the liberation of Goa, then Governor Vassalo da Silva suspended the publication of Ixtt for 90 days as a punishment for not being patriotic towards Portugal and showing pro-India tendencies," Fernandes said.