SIGHT & SOUND
The fine art of interviewing
Amita Malik

Interviews are now the staple diet, the daal-bhaath of all media. And we have an amazing assortment of interviewers, from the nervous newscasters who tremble as they ask rehearsed questions and then can’t follow them up to the experienced lot. Most interviewers are untrained in the art and should not be there at all, especially the ones who think they are the stars and hardly let the guest get a word in. The established stars have their own styles, from Karan Thapar’s hammer-and-tongs style to Vir Sanghvi’s amiable charm which carries solid homework behind it. Shekhar Gupta, in contrast, has no pretensions to being a star. As someone who had done reporting from the grassroots up, he simply and surely gets his interviewers into a relaxed conversation as he takes them on a walkabout. I think so far his best conversations — that is what a good interview is about — was with Arun Singh, Minister of State for Defence in Rajiv Gandhi’s Cabinet and his best friend, who just upped and retreated to a cottage in the hills and has deliberately cut himself off from public as well as social life. He confessed at the start that this, his first and last interview, was being given to Shekhar Gupta as he had known him as a young reporter on defence matters, and trusted him.

The interview has since appeared in full in print, but I rang up all my friends interested in good TV and urged them to watch it first hand on TV, because the way Singh looked and spoke, after serious thought, before answering Shekhar’s searching, but never aggressive, questions, was worth a visual look. It had the stamp of the utter honesty and sincerity of the man and at times brought a lump to the throat. How he was misunderstood by Rajiv Gandhi, the painful parting, his continuing affection for Sonia, and his personal and considered reaction to Bofors made for riveting listening and viewing.

Not for one moment did one feel bored or confused or suspicious. Here was a good man telling the truth without any guile and we respected him for it. The two interviews lasted for quite a while as both parties strolled up and down and sometimes stopped on the typical hill path with the charming cottage in the background. And the landscape and locale made a perfect backdrop for this man who had renounced the world to be at peace with himself.

Unfortunately, some interviewers are now sacrificing quality for quantity. It helps them hold up other channels which also want exclusives and gives the channel the luxury of badgering some poor man or woman indefinitely.

One such offender last week was Bhupendra Chaubey of CNN-IBN. I am not sure which of his two marathon interviews was more meandering and exhausting, the one before the pre-official release of the Pathak Report with Natwar Singh or the one with Shahrukh Khan over his shooting with Karan Johar in New York.

Natwar Singh made it clear at the beginning that he would not take any questions on Sonia Gandhi. This made Chaubey ask at least a dozen more to be met with the same refusal. He went on and on when what was required was briskness, since Natwar Singh was quite quick and clear with his answers. It was the old adage about flogging a dead horse.

The interview with Shahrukh Khan also went on forever and one constantly felt like reaching for the remote — the sign of a long-winded tedious interview. But Chaubey, who has had experience on NDTV, is a vast improvement on his female colleague, whose quick changes of costume do not hide the fact that she has no concept of the TV medium. She treats it like an edit page article by answering all the questions herself then asking the guest to shut up with a "right, right". About the worst interviewer on English TV but supremely unconscious of the fact. I pity her, but she does not help the viewer. On CNN-IBN, the best-dressed as well as most professional performers remain Suhashini Haidar and Vidya Shankar Iyer, a real find.

With all the turmoil about Natwar Singh and before that Jaswant Singh, the channels have really gone as haywire as their controversies. One has got tired of all the exclusives and firsts. Instead, I followed with anxiety, as did many viewers, the fate of lakhs of ordinary Indians suffering from the devastating floods, as well as the fate of the Right to Information Act which affects the aam aadmi most of all.