An associate of mine recently called to ask how one manages to hold a truly objective interview with the figurative man on the street.

She was going around with a video camera and a microphone trying to talk to people on the streets to gather their views on corruption, terrorism and the energy crisis for a research paper that she was working on. I asked her what problem she was facing. This is what the hapless researcher said:

‘They (the interviewees) all sound like the people we see on TV channels!’

She added that every time a man or a woman that she tried to interview saw the microphone and the camera, they would go off like angry robots using almost exactly the kind of monotonous rhetoric about corruption, crime and inflation that one hears on TV talk shows.

Her bout of frustration in this regard peaked while she was interviewing some middle-aged women at a shopping mall. Some were in niqabs, some in trendy dresses, but all were carrying huge shopping bags containing pricey products that they had bought at the mall.

However, once in front of a camera and a microphone, each one of them began bitterly complaining about inflation and how it was becoming almost impossible for poor folks (such as them?) to eke out a living.

‘Almost everyone I interviewed on the streets, shops and malls; working class people, middle-class aunties … they all seemed to have a top-of-the-head radical spiel ready,’ my associate complained.

‘The moment they saw the camera, off they went like radical Maoists of yore!’ She laughed.