Footage!

On Thursday evening, as we were standing outside the Chowdiah auditorium mulling about missed opportunities at the just-concluded Landmark Quiz, I got a call from Deepa Balakrishnan of CNN-IBN. They were doing a feature on CAT prep, it seems, and so needed my expert comments on that. Thrilled to get footage for something that I had done four years back, back when Wimpy was happy, I quickly agreed. Deepa agreed to come near my office on Friday morning to record my statement. Five minutes later,

sw_aadisht

?got a similar call.

Deepa didn’t turn up (she had to rush to the BJP office for some work it seems), and in her place landed up one cute reporter called Shruti. I thought it was going to be an interview and she would ask me some questions. Instead it was going to be a monologue about my CAT prep and related stuff. I think I spoke for some two minutes continuously. And that was about it.

At three thirty yesterday, I got a call from my mom telling me that CNN-IBN had scheduled a program called “Bell the CAT” for 530 yesterday evening and that I should come home to watch the self-footage. It turned out to be an utterly useless program. There was one guy from the T.I.M.E. factory who was answering queries by aspirants. Questions ranged from “how much time should we give for the quant section” to “will the paper be easy this time”. The guy did his best to answer the questions (he answered fairly well I thought) but I don’t think he would have added much value to the aspirants. As an aside, I told my mom that none of the people who had called in would ever make it to an IIM.

Somewhere in the middle of the program, leading up to the first break, they got expert comments by alumni. I said something to the effect that you need to chill before CAT and that I spent the week leading up to CAT playing football and that the night before CAT I had watched a movie and all that. I forgot to mention that I had injured my face playing football that week!

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talked about going for an ice cream the night before CAT and sleeping early and all that. We were fairly insightful I thought!

The program will be telecast again at 1330 today. Watch it only if you want to see our faces. The program doesn’t add much more value. And, when it was telecast yesterday it was supposed to be a “live” program, but after reading this article by Vir Sanghvi, I doubt if it was actually live.

Anyways it did add some value for me. So what if I appeared on screen for only ten seconds? Given the scarcity of footage nowadays, some footage is better than no footage.