How Not to Do an Interview...

 

How Not to Do an Interview...

First, let us get one thing right – when an interview is done one-on-one, the interviewer is the one who asks the question, and the interviewee is the one who responds. We agree on this, don’t we? If we do not, I request you to not waste your time and slip away, please.

Not out of habit but more out of nothing else to do to waste time, I go to YouTube and watch whatever my mind fancies. I am sure you can imagine my going through a three-hour-and-some movie on Moses (1999) with Ben Kingsley of Gandhi fame playing him.

But this post is not about that mythical story. It is about a YouTube (podcast, broadcast, commentary or whatever one may call it) of total duration 13 minutes and 40 seconds. I did not waste even 15 minutes, please note, till I started typing out this.

The fellow who helms this whatchamacallit takes all of 285 seconds in this 820 seconds long whatchamacallit. That is, about 35% of whatchamacallit (Talk show?) is spent in the host setting the stage. The guest is no less of a word smithy! No, I am not going to give the time occupied by the guest in percentage, and focus only on the 35%.

Quite a few years ago, I was allowed to attend some prep sessions for a debate competition in the evening at the university. The lessons I learned have stayed with me for far longer than the ones I learned for which I paid tuition fees! In fact, I could even learn things about interviews. The main point is to be concise and use as few words as possible. Of course, body language helps, but not excessive hand waving, eye rolling or other facial contortions.

Brooks and Capehart on PBS is the exception to the rule. The show is densely packed and I get more than my fill for the day. That is more than I can say for the other mainstream broadcast stations, including Fox News network.

Coming to the particulars of the whatchamacallit, the host has forgotten the art of interviewing. One, you need to compose your thoughts before the camera turns on you. Next, get your thoughts as crisply as you can, a few potato chips of Pringles might help! Most importantly, though may not be completely ethical, at least indicate what you are aiming to tell your viewers through the Q&A session. And, most importantly, keep it a Q&A session, not a long winded statement from you and no prompt to the guest to make hers. Then, it becomes merely a sharing of thoughts, no opportunity to probe. No one cares.

If you needed 35% of the time to set the stage for an answer to the question you are about to ask, it says a lot about your fluency in that language. Fluency is not like the Shinkansen in Japan or the TGV in France. Fluency is to convey what is wished to be conveyed without fillers like um..., er....

In the YouTube videos, in many of them, the speakers, both the host and the guests are good only in wasting the viewers’ time. I have seen a number of Tamil YouTube videos too, and some of them are good. Questions are not extraordinarily long and the answers do offer relevant explanations. But, the ones that are bad are no better than what I see in the videos that permeate US political discourse. These are, with a few exceptions, are fit only for a trash can.

Raghuram Ekambaram