About the Author and the Text

A lesson in two parts

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 reflects on the interview as a form of writing and journalism; the second is an actual interview, giving the reader a live example of the form in action. Read together, the two parts let the student both think about what an interview is and watch a fine one being conducted.

Part I — Christopher Silvester

Part I is an extract from the introduction that the journalist Christopher Silvester wrote for the Penguin Book of Interviews, an anthology tracing the history of the interview over roughly the last hundred and thirty years. Silvester surveys the sharply divided opinions that famous people have held about being interviewed. Some celebrities and writers have detested it, regarding it as an unwarranted intrusion into their privacy — even, in a half-serious way, as something that "diminishes" them, as if a part of the self were being stolen. Others have prized the interview as a genuinely valuable and revealing means of communication. Silvester's essay thus sets up a debate about the ethics and worth of the form.

Part II — Umberto Eco interviewed

Part II is an excerpt from an interview with the Italian scholar and writer Umberto Eco, conducted by Mukund Padmanabhan of the newspaper The Hindu. Eco was an extraordinarily wide-ranging intellectual. By profession he was a distinguished professor of semiotics — the study of signs and symbols — at the University of Bologna, and he produced a vast body of scholarly work on philosophy, literary interpretation and culture. To the surprise of many, he also became a world-famous novelist through his richly learned mystery The Name of the Rose, a demanding book that nonetheless sold in enormous numbers.

Why the text matters

The lesson works on two levels. Through Silvester it makes the reader weigh the interview thoughtfully — its power, its intrusiveness, its usefulness. Through Eco it offers a memorable portrait of a productive, playful mind and, in his own reflections, some practical wisdom about how a person can achieve so much: by using the small, otherwise wasted "empty spaces" of everyday life. The pairing turns a routine journalistic form into an occasion for genuine ideas.