Shekhar Gupta’s Walk the Talk programme last week with Ustad Bismillah Khan was banal. It did credit neither to the editor nor to the Ustad. The questions were so commonplace that the answers could not have been better. One of the questions was "if you sing Raag Malhaar, it begins to rain." Looks like the age of miracles is not over. Did Shekhar Gupta think he was interviewing Satya Sai Baba? The Ustad’s reply was on the same level as that of the question.
If the editor was a connoisseur of music, the questions gave no hint. They also showed that he did not do his homework and approached the programme with the casualness characteristic of journalists generally. Did he know that he was interviewing a phenomenon in music?
The editor referred to the Ustad’s contemporaries who made tons of money and live in great comfort and asked him if he has any regrets. The Ustad replied, "I won’t go anywhere for any amount of money." Shekhar Gupta could have politely reminded him of a press conference in
Dasu Krishnamoorty