PANJIM: Padma Shri well-known journalist, freedom activist and writer, Lambert Mascarenhas passed away on Sunday morning. He was 106.
Mascarenhas was awarded Goa’s highest civilian award- Gomant Vibhushan in 2014 and the fourth highest civilian award of India- Padma Shri in 2015 for literature and education.
He is survived by wife, three daughters, Nayantara, Ameeta and Anjali and son Jude.
The funeral will take place on Monday at Taleigao cemetery at 10 am.
Mascarenhas was many things to every person. A journalist first and always, that is how he was known as in Goa and Mumbai and across the Goan diaspora. And it was for his dispatches as a journalist that he was arrested by the Portuguese in Goa in 1949.
Born in Goa in 1915, he did his early education in Pune and later at the St Xavier’s College, Mumbai.
He started his career as a journalist in the Morning Standard Mumbai. He worked as a sub-editor at the Bombay Sentinel.
Mascarenhas later joined the Onlooker as Assistant Editor. He later edited the Goan Tribune, which espoused the cause of Goa’s liberation. Upon his return to liberated Goa in 1961, he joined as the Editor of The Navhind Times and three years later founded his own Goa Today.
Mascarenhas also contributed to Goa’s liberation movement.
Apart from this, he has also authored five books– The First City, Sorrowing Lies My Land, In the Womb of Saudade, The Greater Tragedy and Heartbreak Passage — the last that he wrote at the age of 93.
Union Minister of State for Defence Shripad Naik said, “Shocked and saddened to hear about demise of great Freedom Fighter and senior journalist Padma Shri Lambert Mascarenhas. His contribution to motherland will always be remembered. My deepest condolences to his family.”
