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My interview on Chalchitra Talks (by Vaibhav Munjal)
Posted on March 13, 2021
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Rahini David
March 14, 2021
I haven’t finished watching this but already the best interview of yours in quite sometime. Non-redundant questions for once.
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Vikram s
March 14, 2021
Very nicely done, chops to you and Vaibhav…
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Sylvan
March 15, 2021
Loved the interview. There were many interesting nuggets. Though I dont comment much on the site but I wanted to ramble about certain things.
BR, the “Gharonda” lines you mentioned were so insightful. 2 Sentences (5 words each) and each word being so simple yet the combination of 2-3 simple words (din and khali bartan) mean so much. I wonder how Gulzar might have come up with “khali bartan” (empty utensil) metaphor. Whether there were other candidates for that comparison (khali kalam/pen, khali kamra/room). Maybe, kahli bartan would signify a kitchen which is a stand-in for home and since the movie’s name and context (couple searching for a flat earlier, now hero wandering the same under construction building/flat they dreamed about having), so maybe that metaphor suits perfectly. Just wondering about this fascinating process of a poet (or any writer for that matter) picking up right words to convey the exact meaning or nuance.
Again, I dont get poetry anyway since used to hate the poems from the English classes in school which we used to read without context. I mean, the words in that above song make sense when we know where words/emotions are coming from but wonder how people just get a poem just by directly reading them without the scaffold of context.
But anyway, thanks a ton to you and Vaibhav for the interview.
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vijay
October 24, 2021
The questions were not bad, but could have been more probing. for instance:
when you say, I put pressure on myself to be perfect earlier, well what is “perfect”..why is opening a review with a bang-on line “perfect”. isn’t that subjective? you wanted to open and close reviews with bang-on lines because you thought that’s what made them perfect. But that’s just your view of what constituted a perfect review at that point in time. In fact the concept of perfection in art itself is hazy.
when you say “I have become a much better writer” now, is it based on your own self-analysis, which could be a little biased? Or do you seek peer reviews of your work? how do critics/writers get constructive& objective reviews of their own work? how do you know whether you have improved or actually regressed? this is actually a very old question that I may have posed in this blog. The insecurity in this line of work that stems from lack of objective metrics. The fact that a particular youtube review/interview video got higher number of views is not the metric really, as that could easily be because it was a Vijay/Ajith film in question or the interviewee was a popular celebrity.
comparison with somebody like Blue sattai maaran etc. is not quite appropriate I think.. he is not a writer turned reviewer and he operates in the mainstream film commenting space and his plain-speaking style and personality is naturally well-suited for the sarcasm-loving young youtube audience. A Nawazuddin wont say “iam not as popular as Akshay Kumar”..well of course you aren’t because you operate within a different niche. Comparison should be with other serious film reviewers-turned-youtube analysts
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vijay
October 24, 2021
and also, with these video interviews, the conflict of interest issues becomes a bit more pressing. Filmcompanionsouth gets its youtube hits because of who the interviewee happens to be as well and not just based on the interviewer alone. so how do you balance being objective and fairly persistent with your questions vs not upsetting the celebrity to the point of him or her not giving an interview again? do some of them demand that the questions be shared with them beforehand? (forget the promo interviews, talking about the other type of interviews). You mention (maybe in another video also) that certain actors refuse to give interviews to you unless you assure them of positive reviews. So it’s already happening. so how does an organization handle the financial implications of such trade-offs? it looks like I need to be already well-off or have enough money put away if I have to work in this area and be uncompromising 🙂 so, for aspiring film reviewers out there who need to pay their bills and who don’t want to compromise what suggestions do you have to make a career out of this.
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