‘Death by buffet’ is an insightful piece written by Jonathan Harley into the life of becoming the ABC’s New Delhi-based South Asia correspondent. Faced with a new culture and restricting deadlines, in Harley‘s own words ‘working to constant and rigid deadlines in a country infamous for its unreliability is a volatile combination’.
Writing in the first tense, he writes about his experiences, I really enjoyed his descriptive tone and the emotions he used, especially in his melt down titled ‘Boys don’t cry’ where after managing to pull together his piece for the morning submission to Australia despite his computer running out of power and unable to secure a power cord, which he has very inconveniently left in New Delhi.
His emotions expressed derive from the pressure his faced with as well as the realisation of the events witnessed during his first story of the torching of Australian missionary, Graham Staines and his two sons. Harley says ‘India can scrape away your norms of behaviour like a sandblaster’ as he loses his nerve with the hotel night manager.
One of possibly the most interesting areas of this article are when Harley exposes his raw emotions and uses those experiences to paper and present an entertaining piece of writing. In preparation for our own ‘first tense’ writing, I find the use of the emotions and the descriptive lengths that this author goes to a representation of what we should aim to involve ourselves in as writers.
I also enjoy the textual references of the chapter titles, ‘Boys don’t cry’ and ‘To sir with love’ taken of course from ‘The Cure’ and the Sydney Poitier film. Being a journalism student the insight into the world of being a foreign correspondent is really what draws me into this piece, the line where Harley says “I adopt the correspondent’s mantra: never explain, never complain – just deliver” and furthermore where Harley realises that the world of news is fickle after he rings Sydney – “Whatever they have thought of the stories, they definitely had no idea about the hassles I was having”.
Finally his rejoice, towards the end of the chapter when the historic summit between India’s Prime Minister Vajpayee and Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif becomes a good news story and his statement that ‘Too much peace will mean too few stories”.
The piece also follows the classic story plot of initial harmony, harmony disturbed, hero is found, the quest, the trials, harmony re-established.
0 Responses to “(week 9) – death by buffet ‘classic story plot’”