I think that one of the most painful moments for a reporter in any broadcast medium must be when you simply cannot wrap your mind around what your interview subject is saying.
It’s an understandable problem when the subject is, say, Renaissance economic theory. Such was definitely not the case today, however, on Definitely Not the Opera - my favorite CBC radio show, as anyone who knows me can attest.
Host Sook-Yin Lee is interviewing Shawn Majumder, a stand-up comedian from Newfoundland who’s been a frequent guest on This Hour Has 22 Minutes (and is honestly, one of the only reasons to watch said show anymore). As you might be able to tell from Mr. Majumder’s last name, his father’s from India. His mother is a Newfoundlander to the bone. And Shawn grew up in the somewhat less-than-diverse 400-strong community of Burlington, Newfoundland.
So, Shawn is telling an amusing anecdote of how as a young boy growing up in Burlington, he had no conception of what it meant to be "Indian" - as in, someone from India. He remembered describing his father as someone who wore a headdress, because that was the only sense in which he’d ever heard the word "Indian" used. The small-town, often pejorative sense.
It was a charming story about childhood naivete. And Sook-Yin simply did not get it.
She could not put together that the point of Shawn’s story was that, as a small boy from rural Newfoundland, he’d never seen someone from India. You could practically hear the gears in her head chafing against one another, as she tried to reconcile why a man with a Hindi accent would be wearing a headdress. It was painful.
That, or she didn’t want to acknowledge the use of the "I" word on public radio. Which would be unfortunate, considering the story was in no way racist or inadvisable for broadcast.
The rest of the interview - which lasted over a half-hour - was up to DNTO’s usual standards. It was an odd moment, though, in an otherwise very excellent show (much of which was devoted to Johnny Cash and the opening of his new film "Walk the Line.")
Scenes from fall in Ontario. The first shot is taken from an alleyway behind my house, and the following two are taken on my street (Markham St.) three blocks north of my house.
