Some insights
Posted by Malik Siraj Akbar on April 23, 2007 · Leave a Comment
You thought I was dead. No, man. I am not. It is just the intensively exhaustive sessions of the Summer Academy that have caught all of us from all sides. The sessions commence at 9:00 am and we continue till 9:00 pm. Of course, tea, lunch and dinner breaks are there!
We were escorted around the city in the past two days. Chennai, I must say, is culturally very rich. It has a very prolific cultural heritage. The pre-historic temples and centuries’ old churches are a must-see.
I enjoyed Britta Petersen of the Financial Times when she spoke about “War and Conflict Reporting – from a correspondent to Afghanistan”.
From her evening lecture, I loved these points:
• You can’t afford to make a mistake while reporting from a war/conflict zone.
“On the war front, a mistake might prove to be your first and the last mistake.”
• You die when you are alone or when one enters two great power games.
• Covering wars has become sort of a fashion these days. It would be far more effective if the correspondents pay attention to the peoples’ miseries in the conflict areas. They should go to the far-off areas to find out the state of people’s living states.
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