A few weeks back the CNN IBN team of Paras Tomar & Priya Krishnamurthy came over to Chennai as part of their Minus 30 show. They gave me a call saying that they’d like to cover me as part of the show and so, we met up at Cafe Mocha.
It was a fascinating experience. My part of the 4 minute video took nearly three hours of shooting and multiple retakes. I have seen Paras before and I think he is one of the most entertaining and creative anchors on TV.
The show is called Minus 30 and apparently that ’30’ stands for age. Oops. I’m pushing 34. I mildly pointed out the statistics and as long as they didn’t seem to mind, I was fine with it. Like one of the crew said, I look under 30ish. That felt good.
Paras was a lot of fun. He kept innovating on the fly and I don’t think he came prepared with any script. We would brainstorm between takes and he’d come up with wacky ways of getting the answers out.
The story ofcourse was on blogging. He went around Mocha, a hip cafe which was packed with youngsters and went around asking if anyone blogs. And embarrassingly enough, not a single soul did. Not good for Chennai’s image of being the blog capital of India. Honestly, I don’t think that’s true any longer.
Anyways, the show was fun. I couldn’t catch it on TV and missed it both the times it was on air because I was traveling. Thank goodness for web videos. IBNLive rocks in that angle.
There are three videos covering the entire Chennai episode of Minus 30. Here, Here and Here. I liked the coverage about Sudhish Kamat’s making of That Four Letter Word and that pretty bartender who does awesome moves with the bottles.