Playing the role of a television interviewer

Watch this clip from my days as the host of a TV show on TMG Enter, the technology channel launched by the company I joined back in 1999 in Bangalore.

Keep in mind that I have done a fair amount of research to be able to ask my guest relevant questions about a topic I am not an expert on. He is the expert. I am also listening to the answers so that I can ask follow-up questions.

Keep in mind, too, that this chat is meant for an audience comprising technology enthusiasts and people from the tech industry.

I hope watching this video will give Audiovisual Communication students some insight into how they can prepare for and produce their own chat programme for their TV news shows.

Why I'm reading — and enjoying — the first volume of the Paris Review Interviews

"The Paris Review books should be given out at dinner parties, readings, riots, weddings, galas — shindigs of every shape. And they're perfect for the classroom too, from high schools all the way to MFA programmes. In fact, I run a whole semester-long creative writing class based on the interviews. How else would I get the world's greatest living writers, living and dead, to come into the classroom with their words of wisdom, folly, and fury? These books are wonderful, provocative, indispensible." — Colum McCann, novelist and Hunter College professor

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"I have all the copies of The Paris Review and like the interviews very much. They will make a good book when collected and that will be very good for the Review." — Ernest Hemingway

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"At their best, the Paris Review interviews remove the veils of literary personae to reveal the flesh-and-blood writer at the source. By exposing the inner workings of writing, they place the reader in the driver's seat of literature." — Billy Collins

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"A colossal literary event — worth the price of admission for the Borges interview alone, and of course the Billy Wilder, and the Vonnegut, and and and and . . . Just buy this book and read it all." — Gary Shteyngart

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"The Paris Review interviews have the best questions, the best answers, and are, hands down, the best way to steal a look into the minds of the best writers (and interviewers) in the world. Reading them together is like getting a fabulous guided tour through literary life." — Susan Orlean 

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"I have been fascinated by the Paris Review interviews for as long as I can remember. Taken together, they form perhaps the finest available inquiry into the 'how' of literature, in many ways a more interesting question than the 'why.'" — Salman Rushdie

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"Nothing is lonelier or riskier than being a writer, and these interviews provide writers at all stages the companionship and guidance they need." — Edmund White

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"The Paris Review interviews have always provided the best look into the minds and work ethics of great writers and when read together constitute the closest thing to an MFA that you can get while sitting alone on your couch. Every page of this collection affords a ludicrous amount of pleasure." — Dave Eggers

• What is the Paris Review? To learn all about the literary magazine that was first published in 1953, go here.

• UPDATE (JULY 24, 2013): The second volume of The Paris Review interviews was delivered by Amazon this evening. So much to read, so little time. Sigh.

• ADDITIONAL READING: "Why the writer should be considered the "hero" of a film, any film", excerpts from a Paris Review interview with Oscar-winning director Billy Wilder.

I'm so glad I've this book waiting for me

Amazon.in delivered Lunch with the FT: 52 Classic Interviews a few days ago. I have been waiting to tuck into it after I finish what I am reading now (Following Fish, by Samanth Subramanian, and three other books). And snacking on Anvar Alikhan's review in Outlook last night has only served to whet my appetite.

Here's an excerpt:

We have everybody from Donald Rumsfeld to Angelina Jolie, from George Soros to Imran Khan, from economist Paul Krugman to Albert Underzo, co-creator of the Asterix comics. There’s even Saif Gaddafi, the doctoral student son of the former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi (though one wonders what wicked thought process led to him being invited). These personalities are drawn into conversation by the FT’s interviewers over a leisurely meal at any restaurant of their choice, accompanied by a bottle — or two — of wine, which, of course, is a wonderful device to get them to drop their formal persona, and reveal a little more of themselves than they otherwise would have.

Read the review in its entirety here: "Autocrats of the Talking Table".

And here, on the Financial Times website, you can read one of the more recent Lunch with the FT columns: "Kim Dotcom: Over salad and club sandwiches at his $24m rented mansion in New Zealand, the internet’s most wanted man says his crazy days are behind him".

The most insightful interview with Aamir Khan by the best interviewer in the country

It is only in Tehelka, India's foremost investigative magazine, that you get to read stories that no other publication prints.

And it is only in Tehelka that you get to read interviews and profiles that offer insights into their subjects like no other interview or profile does.

The Q&A with Aamir Khan by Shoma Chaudhury in the magazine's latest issue is a case in point. Chaudhury is a masterful interviewer and profile writer; in my opinion, the best in the country. Back in December 2009, Chaudhury gave us the the saga of a redoubtable Manipuri woman's epic fast for justice in her home state. In this fascinating and inspirational and touching story — "Irom And The Iron In India’s Soul" — she pulled out all stops to tell us why "Irom Sharmila's story should be part of universal folklore". Read it and weep.

MAKING A TELLING POINT: AAMIR KHAN ON THE SETS OF SATYAMEV JAYATE.

And now, when Satyamev Jayate is the mantra on every Indian's lips, Chaudhury, the managing editor of Tehelka, gets us answers to all the questions we have — and also the questions we didn't know we have — about Aamir and his brilliant television show.

She begins with a basic query, then draws the superstar out with some penetrating and perceptive probing. Here is a sample:

After the idea struck you, did it take a long time for you to cave in to it? To decide to risk moving from cinema to TV.

What was the toughest part to crack about the show?

Television viewers are famously fickle. Was there any resistance from the channels to your desire to make the show one-and-a-half hours?

In terms of the breadth of research that the team did, how many personal stories did you actually get? Were there any that particularly touched you?

What made you stop all your advertising contracts for this year?

You bring a sort of purity of intent to your creative commitments. Then once it’s ready, you mount super canny marketing strategies on them. How did you work the marketing strategy for this?

Read the interview in its entirety, and get the answers to these questions and more, here: "We’ve been through so much raw emotion, our whole team feels we need some counselling".

Also read, on the same page, "The power of one", by Tehelka special corespondent Sunaina Kumar.

And check out Shoma Chaudhury's other stories for Tehelka here.

• If you are an Aamir fan and watch every episode of Satyamev Jayate avidly, you will want to read this interview in Outlook, too: "I'm Not A 24x7 Social Activist".

• UPDATE (June 6, 2012): Aamir Khan, who now writes a weekly column for The Hindu, explains how he and his team came to choose "intolerance towards love" as the topic for the fifth episode of Satyamev Jayate: "More honour in love". You can watch this particular episode here: "Is love a crime?"

• UPDATE (July 12, 2012): CNN-IBN deputy editor Sagarika Ghose, writing in the Hindustan Times, says Aamir Khan has reminded journalists of the tasks that lie before them. Read her thought-provoking column here: "Back to the basics".

A bizarre encounter with Gaddafi

...if I refuse to accept your Jamahiriya [congress of the people], what will you do to me? Will you arrest me, shoot me, hang me?

ORIANA FALLACI

This was the audacious question thrown by Oriana Fallaci, one of the world's most courageous journalists, to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi when she interviewed him in Tripoli in 1979.

The Libyan dictator replies: "But you cannot refuse it! Jamahiriya is the destiny of the world! It's the final solution!

Fallaci presses on relentlessly:

The forty officials that you had shot last year refused it. The other fifty-five that you had shot in 1977 refused it. The ten students who you hung publicly in a square in Benghazi a few months ago refused it!

Gaddafi counters: "Lies. Slander from the West. These are the things that make me lose faith in you. Why do you say these things about me?"

Fallaci's response is laden with sarcasm:

Because we are envious, I suppose we say them out of jealousy. Anyway, tell me one thing: are you really sure that your little book will change the world?

Fallaci continues:

The rope gave a final, definitive jerk. [Fallaci had written earlier, after one session with Gaddafi, that her aim was to give him, in the form of her questions, "enough rope to hang himself".] And while his sick brain hung down above the cord and his lifeless body, the delirium exploded again: this time so tremendous and so terrifying that the crisis of the previous day seemed like a sneeze by comparison. He got up slowly, he slowly raised his linen-wrapped arms and in a thundering, Messiah-like voice, he began to yell his answers directly in English.

What did Gaddafi begin to yell? And what was the dramatic conclusion to a bizarre interview? To find out, read the 56-page article in Oriana Fallaci's superlative book, Interviews with History and Conversations with Power. In addition to the interview with Gaddafi (who was killed in Libya by rebels two days ago), Interviews also features Fallaci's encounters with a host of world leaders, famous and infamous, including Ayatollah Khomeini and the Dalai Lama, Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Fallaci, who died in 2006, had a reputation for being fearless and for asking the most probing of questions, questions that were a reflection of her chutzpah. Here, for instance, is Fallaci's opening gambit when she met Indira Gandhi, who, at the time, was the all-powerful prime minister of India:

Mrs. Gandhi, I have so many questions to ask you, both personal and political. The personal ones, however, I'll leave for later, once I've understood why many people are afraid of you and call you cold, indeed, icy, hard...

This is a book no journalist, or aspiring journalist, can afford not to read.

• Another must-read: Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview: In a eulogy written for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens recounts "his last visit with the tempestuous Italian journalist, and her last — never published — scoop, a sit-down with the Pope".

Larry King: 50+ years in television

Do you agree with the perception that you ask soft questions? -- Michael West, Copenhagen

Larry King (pictured here at the mike in the late '70s): Don't agree with it. I'm not there to pin someone to the wall. If I were to begin an interview with [speaker of the House of Representatives] Nancy Pelosi and say "Why did you lie about torture?" the last thing I'll learn is the truth. I'd be putting them on the defensive to make me look good. At that point, they're a prop. To me, the guest is not a prop.

To read some more questions and King's perceptive answers in a recent issue of Time, go here.
 
And go here to absorb the seven lessons from King's life.

• Photo courtesy: TV Guide

How do you get a one-on-one interview with someone who has been on the run from the law?

"[Koteshwar] Rao has been on the run from law enforcement bodies for 31 years and is guarded by a protective circle of 25 bodyguards. The 51-year-old Maoist leader refused to be photographed and set his own terms for the meeting. Mint’s reporters were asked to arrive at a school in Chakadoba where they waited for around 5 hours. At around dusk, they were escorted to where Rao was — a clearing in the jungle that was reached after a brisk 30-minute walk."

Read the full interview by Romita Datta and Aveek Datta in Mint here.

• Photo courtesy: Mint

• UPDATE (NOVEMBER 25, 2011): Koteshwar Rao, better known as Kishanji, was killed yesterday in a gun battle with security forces in West Bengal. Read details here.