Ch 7The Interview — Class 12 English (Core), concept-first.

The Interview is unusual in the CBSE Class 12 English NCERT syllabus because it is built from two separate pieces of writing joined under one title.

The first part, drawn from Christopher Silvester's introduction to the Penguin Book of Interviews, reflects on the nature and worth of the interview.

The lesson's foremost theme is a genuine debate about the interview itself. Is it an intrusion or a service? Silvester lays out both verdicts side by side.

Part I, drawn from Christopher Silvester's introduction to the Penguin Book of Interviews, has no single hero — instead it gathers a chorus of famous opinions about the interview and sets them against…

Silvester notes that many celebrities have seen themselves as the interview's victims, despising it as an unwarranted intrusion into their lives or feeling that it somehow diminishes them — much as so…

Against the hostile voices, Silvester places a strong defence of the interview. Some, he says, make quite extravagant claims for it — that in its highest form it is a source of truth, and in its pract…

Part II turns from the idea of the interview to a real example of it: Mukund Padmanabhan of The Hindu in conversation with the Italian scholar and novelist Umberto Eco.

Eco is the central figure of Part II and the lesson's most vivid presence. He is a prodigiously productive scholar — a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna with an enormous output of ac…

Mukund Padmanabhan, of the newspaper The Hindu, is the interviewer who draws Eco out. Though he stays largely in the background, he is perceptive and well-prepared: his questions are intelligent and p…

The plain title The Interview carries the whole two-part design of the lesson, and its two connected messages reward a closer look.

The single, plain title The Interview is deliberately broad, because the lesson is about the interview in two senses at once.

Two connected messages emerge. The first concerns the form itself: for all the discomfort it can cause the famous — the sense of intrusion, of being pried into or diminished — the interview remains a…

- Part I (by Christopher Silvester) reflects on the interview as a journalistic form. Though only about 130 years old, the interview has become a commonplace of journalism.

The NCERT chapter closes with an "About the Unit" box that names the pedagogical focus of the lesson. It frames The Interview not merely as a text to be summarised but as a study of a whole genre of c…

Extra exam-style practice questions written by us on this lesson — beyond the NCERT textbook's own exercises — for more CBSE board-exam preparation.