Watched a couple of BBC documentaries this evening, pretty insightful stuff, one was Holidays in The Dangerzone: Places That Don't Exist and it was about Georgia and its breakaway states, as well as how war could be imminent. I really like such shows (All BBC current affairs/human interest programmes tend to be good, Panorama, Simpson's World, Earth Report etc.), they peel away a lot of the superficiality and sensationalism (save for perhaps in the process of editing) in other (predominantly local or commercially-driven) media by following a correspondent through a journey. Almost everything is presented in truth because it's impossible to rehearse how the secret police of a country could be trailing you, how you'd be asked to stop filming, how tapes are confiscated, how passerby interviewees respond, how people's emotions flow freely, how an unexpected turn of events shape what the programme comes to stand for.

The second one was about the Beslan School Siege, the story told by the children. To be frank, it almost left me in tears. It's a tragedy, and it's horrific. It's interesting to see what the surviving children have to say about whatever happened and what they feel, from naiveity to grief to fear to hatred to vengeance. And the programme had no narration of any kind, just cuts of different children speaking (subtitled) accompanied by some rather compelling visuals, telling the story of what happened in the course of those 3 days, as well as the aftereffects, both physical and psychological. It's haunting, you don't ever want to imagine yourself in such positions. There was this boy who was a sort of acted as a guide through the school building ruins and similarly recounting the events, by the end of the programme, he said he desired to go to Chechnya to fight and avenge his father's death, and he was probably about what, 8?

What's my point here? I don't know really, maybe it's to recommend these shows to what readership I have, but I think it's also self-reflection... to hear and see about such happenings in this very world sort of renders my post 2 days ago obsolete, doesn't it? On the other hand, you could say that when things such as international terrorism and poor national diplomacy are so rampant and growing in magnitude and effect, there's no need to bother about the little things anymore.

And I didn't even realise it's already 11 September 2005.

Such is the nature of Man.