The Mahavishnu of Mount Road is coming of age, and how. It is not every day you read an interview on The Hindu that is peppered with adjectives like ‘innocuous’, ‘terse’, and where the journalist blames the interviewee for being 'uninterested' in the conversation. Sudhir Srinivasan’s interview of actress Shruti Haasan for the newspaper is all that and more.
“Something must have been bothering Shruti Haasan during our conversation. What, I am not sure, and of course, I didn’t ask,” he writes, with the blurb describing the piece as him ‘trying to interview a seemingly uninterested Shruti Haasan.’
The interview was headlined, “Dude, I have bigger things to worry about.”
A miffed Shruti Hassan seemingly reacted to the interview by tweeting, “When someone has a preconceived notion about you in their minds – what can you do? Nothing much really.” The interview, criticized widely online, saw support pouring in for the actress. Sridevi Sreedhar, a popular film journalist rubbished the interview by tweeting, ‘This is not the Sruthi Haasan I know.’
The nature of the interview is being widely debated in the journalism circles of the south, with a section of journalists questioning the purpose of the interview itself. The headline of the story itself deviates from the usual narrative of the newspaper. The interviewer comments in the copy that it was not his intention to ‘slight her’, but keeps referring to her father’s approval of the films she works in, comparing her performance in Kollywood to Tollywood. Srinivasan writes in the interview, “I had touched a nerve somewhere. I said it wasn’t my intention to slight her. “All right, okay.”
The journalist, through a Facebook comment on a post appreciating his interview, said, “Gotta work within the constraints of the medium. And of course, I’d be doing a disservice if I made the conversation seem like something it wasn’t.”