New assignment
SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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Meet Damian Grammaticas, the new South Asia correspondent of BBC.
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Photo: R.V. Moorthy
ALL SET TO REPORT Damian Grammaticas at his New Delhi office.
His career graph talks about his stints in strife-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. He has covered the Bali bombings, the Philippines revolution that overthrew President Joseph Estrada, North Korea's nuclear programme, the `Orange' revolution in Ukraine and Georgia, Chechnya, the effects of Chernobyl nuclear disaster among other conflict situations.
Well then, your initial observation makes you point out to Damian Grammaticas, the new South Asia correspondent of BBC, that he seems to have seen too much of the bad side of the world. A smiling Damian, who has just joined the BBC's New Delhi office, flashes a broad smile and replies, "Not really, I should say because of these assignments I got to see some of the most beautiful places and moments too." Giving an instance, he mentions a closed-down monastery somewhere in Georgia after the Russian Orthodox monks living there were sent to prison camps. Damian was reporting for BBC the story of their coming back to the monastery when peace had returned. "It was a moving sight," he recalls.
On looking back at his experiences, this former BBC correspondent of Moscow and Hong Kong says, "Covering Afghanistan was the most interesting, the most rewarding so far." He did report the Tora Bora bombings, and says, "It was a complete fiasco. We could see the mistakes. There were not enough coalition troops."
Not that Damian hadn't done embedded journalism in Afghanistan but he had also covered the country on his own.
Covering conflicts
Having joined BBC Television News as a trainee reporter after a broadcast journalism diploma from Cardiff University, Damian, who is of Greek origin from Nairobi, became a London based reporter covering British, European and international news for BBC World Television, BBC News 24 and BBC Television News. Gradually, he became BBC's foreign correspondent, and with increasing strife in many regions of the world, he soon found himself covering regions of conflict.
And covering war-like situations is not like covering a king's coronation, you know. "So to equip correspondents to deal with emergency situations, BBC gives training to its team every three months," he says. And this includes dealing with situations like kidnapping, how to walk in a minefield, bomb attacks and firing, dealing with hostile locals, maintaining calm during a crisis, how to handle a checkpoint etc.
"We are trained by the army. All the training sessions were good but the kidnapping one made me a little uneasy, specially when they put the mask on you it becomes very claustrophobic. Though these are mock sessions, they don't treat you gently. You are pushed and shoved around so that you get a real picture of such a situation," he elaborates.
Though he has filed a story from Islamabad recently, Damian is yet to open his innings from New Delhi. "Right now I am busy looking for a house to stay here. Stories will soon follow," he sums up.
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