7 The Interview Class 12 – NCERT Flamingo Chapter PDF

Here is the official 7 The Interview Class 12 PDF from the NCERT English Flamingo textbook, followed by a plain-language guide to the chapter. The chapter pairs two texts: Christopher Silvester’s introduction on the interview as a genre, and Mukund Padmanabhan’s interview with Umberto Eco. Download the PDF first, then use the sections below to make sense of both parts.

The official 7 The Interview Class 12 PDF – NCERT Flamingo on ncert.nic.in reproduces the chapter exactly as printed in the book, footnotes included, so you can read, search or print the whole text without a paper copy.

If the direct file ever moves, the official NCERT index page for Class 12 Flamingo publishes the current edition and every chapter of the textbook.

Reference: NCERT Class 12 English Flamingo textbook, chapter 7, official edition on ncert.nic.in.

Chapter at a Glance: 7 The Interview Class 12

Look here first to see the shape of the chapter: two reading texts, the exercise sets that go with each one, and the discourse and writing sections that close the textbook’s treatment.

The table below, rendered from the official NCERT edition, shows the chapter’s size and contents at a glance; the rest of this page explains what each entry teaches.

In plain terms, the chapter runs in this order:

• About the Author — a short note on Christopher Silvester, a former Private Eye reporter and Vanity Fair feature writer.
• Part I — Silvester’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Interviews, surveying how the interview became a commonplace of journalism and how opinions of it split.
• Think as you read — comprehension questions on Part I, meant to be answered as you go through the essay.
• Part II — the extract from Mukund Padmanabhan’s interview with Umberto Eco, opening with Eco’s famous line, “I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays.”
• Understanding the text — questions on Part II, answered after you finish reading.
• Talking about the text — discussion prompts about interviews you have seen, the best medium for interviews, and celebrities’ right to privacy.
• Linkers and Signallers — a discourse section showing how the interviewer’s and interviewee’s turns are tied together.
• Writing — the task of converting the Eco interview into a short report.
• Things to do — conduct and record an interview with a person you admire.
• The closing activity page — states the chapter’s theme and sub-theme, and lists the skills it trains.

What This Chapter Covers: Two Parts, One Theme

Know the design before you read: the chapter sets an essay about interviews beside an actual interview, so the first text explains the genre and the second one shows it working.

Part I comes from Christopher Silvester’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Interviews, An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day. It is an essay about the interview — its short history, its divided reputation, and what its critics and defenders have said.

Part II is an extract from an interview of Umberto Eco conducted by Mukund Padmanabhan of The Hindu. Here the genre itself is on display: one person asking, another answering, and the written record of their exchange.

The textbook’s closing activity page names the pair. The theme is the interview as a communication genre; the sub-theme is an excerpt from an interview with an author. Read Part I with the genre in mind, and Part II as the genre in action.

Key Concepts: The Interview as a Genre, and the Eco Interview

This section turns the two texts into the ideas you will answer questions about: the split verdicts on interviewing in Part I, and the way Eco reasons about his own work in Part II.

Part I: Why the Interview Is Loved and Hated

Silvester starts with a fact: the interview is a little over 130 years old, and it has become a commonplace of journalism. Almost every literate person has read one, and thousands of celebrities have given them, some repeatedly.

Opinions of it vary sharply. The positive claim is extravagant — at its highest the interview is a source of truth, and in its practice an art. The negative claim, usually from celebrities, is that it is an unwarranted intrusion that diminishes them, much as some primitive cultures believed a photograph steals the soul.

Silvester’s method is to assemble witnesses rather than argue. The one table worth memorising is who said what:

Two ironies carry the essay. Kipling called the interview “immoral” and “an assault”, yet he had interviewed Mark Twain a few years earlier. Wells called it “the interviewing ordeal”, yet he gave interviews often and, forty years later, interviewed Stalin.

The footnotes add context that answers sometimes need: Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 and Bellow in 1976; Kipling wrote The Jungle Book; Wells wrote The Time Machine.

Silvester’s own verdict sits between the extremes. Despite the drawbacks the witnesses name, the interview is, he writes, a supremely serviceable medium of communication — and Denis Brian’s line about the interviewer’s “unprecedented power and influence” explains why it endures.

Part II: The Umberto Eco Interview in Plain Language

Before any fiction, Eco was a professor at the University of Bologna with a formidable reputation for ideas on semiotics — the study of signs, literary interpretation and medieval aesthetics. In 1980 The Name of the Rose made him an intellectual superstar; it sold more than 10 million copies.

His first answer sets the pattern. Mukund quotes David Lodge’s puzzle — how can one man do all these things? — and Eco replies that he only seems to: “in the end, I am convinced I am always doing the same thing.”

Academic work, novels and even children’s books all pursue the same ethical and philosophical interests. His “secret” is the idea of interstices.

Remove the empty spaces from the universe, Eco says, and it shrinks to the size of his fist; lives are full of the same empty spaces, and he works inside them. Waiting for a guest’s elevator to climb from the first to the third floor, he has already written an article.

His academic style began at 22. A professor at his first doctoral dissertation observed that scholars usually learn, hypothesise, correct and conclude — while Eco had told the story of his research, trials and errors included.

The professor accepted the work as a book, and from then on Eco’s essays carried a narrative aspect. He started novels late, at about 50, and by accident — one day he had nothing to do.

The numbers matter for answers: five novels against more than 40 scholarly works. Ask him what he is, and he says it plainly: “I consider myself a university professor who writes novels on Sundays. It’s not a joke.”

He attends academic conferences, not writers’ meetings, and identifies with the academic community, even while accepting that novels reach a larger audience than semiotics ever will.

The success of The Name of the Rose closes Part II. Eco says he was never puzzled by it — journalists and publishers were, because they assume readers want easy experiences.

With six billion people on the planet, Eco argues, sales of 10 to 15 million copies reach only a small percentage, and those readers are the ones who “don’t want easy experiences”.

His American publisher expected 3,000 copies to sell in a country “where nobody has seen a cathedral or studies Latin” — it sold two or three million.

His conclusion is the one to quote: the success of the book is a mystery; nobody can predict it, and had he written it ten years earlier or ten years later, it would not have been the same.

Definitions: Key Terms and Expressions in The Interview

Use this section to clear up the words and phrases Class 12 readers actually stumble on in this chapter, each tied to the line where it appears.

Notice that Eco defines two of these terms inside the interview itself. Semiotics appears in brackets as “the study of signs”, and interstices is explained through the elevator story. If a question asks for either term, answer from those two moments in your own words.

Linkers and Signallers: How the Interview Stays Connected

This is the chapter’s own language lesson. A written interview must read as one conversation, and the textbook shows the two devices that keep it smooth: linkers and signallers.

Linkers tie each turn to the previous one, using reference pronouns such as “that”, “this” and “which”, or by repeating words. Signallers announce a shift of topic so the listener is ready for the change.

The interview itself supplies the chapter’s examples:

The textbook’s point is practical. Without linkers a written conversation fragments into isolated speeches; without signallers a topic change feels abrupt. Use both in your own writing, and watch for them when you read any interview.

Common Mistakes Students Make in This Chapter

This chapter trips students in a few predictable places, and every one of them costs marks in an answer. Name the mistake before you make it.

Five errors come up again and again:

This chapter has no separate “points to ponder” block, so these confusions come straight from the two texts. The who-said-what table is the best fix of all, because Part I answers live or die on attribution.

Exam Notes: What the Chapter’s Tasks Ask You to Do

The textbook’s exercises are the map for revision: each set trains one skill, and the sets line up exactly with the two parts of the chapter.

Think as you read tests comprehension of Part I. It asks for the positive views on interviews, why most celebrity writers despise them, the belief about photographs in some primitive cultures, the meaning of “thumbprints on his windpipe”, and who today is our chief source of information about personalities.

That last answer is the interviewer — Denis Brian’s “one man asking questions of another”.

Understanding the text tests comprehension of Part II.

It asks whether Eco likes being interviewed, how he finds time to write (interstices), what was distinctive about his academic style (telling the story of the research), whether he is a novelist or a scholar first (scholar — “a professor who writes novels on Sundays”), and why The Name of the Rose succeeded (a mystery nobody can predict).

Talking about the text moves to opinion and discussion: an interview you have watched or read, the medium you prefer for interviews, and every famous person’s right to privacy.

The Writing task is transfer of information: turn the interview into a short report, as if the newspaper had no space for the verbatim transcript. A working skeleton, in your own words:

• a headline that names the person and the hook — “Umberto Eco: the professor who writes novels on Sundays”;
• an opening line identifying who Eco is: professor at Bologna, semiotics scholar, author of The Name of the Rose, which sold more than 10 million copies;
• three or four salient points — the same ethical and philosophical interests everywhere, writing in the interstices, the narrative academic style adopted at 22, and the success as an unpredictable mystery;
• a closing line that returns to the hook, such as Eco’s own insistence that the novels came second to the academy.

Things to do extends the skill into practice: interview a person you admire in school or your neighbourhood, and record it in writing.

The textbook’s closing activity page names the same abilities — comprehension, talking about the text, noticing discourse linkers and signallers, and writing, which it defines as transfer of information from one genre to another, as in interview to report.

One honest note: textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical — check the current official CBSE syllabus for what is examinable this session.

Revision Summary: The Interview in Seven Points

Use this night-before recap only if you have already read the chapter. It condenses the whole argument into seven points, built from the textbook’s own theme block and both texts.

1. The chapter’s stated theme is the interview as a communication genre; its sub-theme is an excerpt from an interview with an author.
2. Part I: the interview is a little over 130 years old and is now a commonplace of journalism.
3. Opinions split between extravagant praise — a source of truth, an art — and resentment: an unwarranted intrusion that diminishes the subject, like a stolen photograph.
4. The celebrity witnesses — Carroll, Kipling, Wells, Bellow, Naipaul — mostly despise the form, yet Kipling interviewed Twain and Wells interviewed Stalin; Silvester’s verdict is that the interview is a supremely serviceable medium.
5. Part II: Eco is a professor first — five novels against more than 40 scholarly works — and calls himself “a professor who writes novels on Sundays”.
6. He writes in the interstices, the empty spaces everyone has, and his academic style has told the story of the research since he was 22.
7. The success of The Name of the Rose is, by his own account, a mystery nobody can predict; and the discourse section shows how linkers and signallers keep an interview coherent.

Related Resources

This listing is maintained for the 2026-27 academic session using the NCERT textbook information available to us. NCERT remains the authority for confirming the latest edition.

Continue to the rest of Flamingo, the chapters around this one, and the official source of the textbook.

• Class 12 English Flamingo book page — every chapter of the textbook on one page.
• Class 12 NCERT books hub — all Class 12 subjects and their chapters.
• Previous chapter: Poets and Pancakes — the Flamingo chapter before The Interview.
• Next chapter: Going Places — the Flamingo chapter that follows it.
• NCERT Books home — browse the full NCERT book directory by class.
• Class 12 English notes hub — revision-notes style help for the same chapters.

For the source itself, the official NCERT index page for Class 12 Flamingo publishes the current edition and every chapter PDF, including the 7 The Interview Class 12 chapter.

NCERT settles the textbook editions and PDFs; CBSE settles the curriculum and examinations.

Sources and Data Verification

This page describes Chapter 7, “The Interview”, of the NCERT Class 12 English Flamingo textbook — official edition as published on ncert.nic.in.

It covers this one Flamingo chapter: Silvester’s Part I, the Eco interview in Part II, and the chapter’s exercise and discourse sections. It does not cover other Flamingo chapters, other books, or CBSE examination papers.

This listing is maintained for the current academic session against the NCERT edition NCERT publishes on its website.

NCERT settles textbooks, editions and chapter PDFs; CBSE settles the curriculum, syllabus and examinations. Textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical — check the current official syllabus.

Frequently Asked Questions About The Interview

Do you think Umberto Eco likes being interviewed? Give reasons.

Yes — at least in this extract. Eco answers every question at length, laughs at his own elevator example, and volunteers stories “like a Chinese wise man”. He also shows no irritation at Mukund’s questions; his only correction is aimed at journalists and publishers, not at the interviewer.

What are interstices, according to Umberto Eco in The Interview?

Interstices are the empty spaces in life — the small gaps of waiting that everyone has. Eco’s example is the time your guest spends in the elevator while you wait for them; in that gap, he says, he has already written an article. The point is that these gaps exist for everyone; Eco simply uses them.

Why does Eco call himself a professor who writes novels on Sundays?

Because he identifies with the academic community, not the literary one. He says it is not a joke: he attends academic conferences rather than writers’ meetings, has written five novels against more than 40 scholarly works, and sees the novels as the same ethical and philosophical interests pursued in narrative form.

What is the difference between linkers and signallers in this chapter?

Linkers tie one turn to the previous turn, through reference pronouns like “that”, “this” and “which”, or through repeated words — Eco’s “Over 40.” is answered by Mukund’s “Over 40!”. Signallers prepare the listener for a shift of topic, like “Which brings me to another question…” or “But let me tell you another story…”.

According to Eco, why did The Name of the Rose become so successful?

Eco refuses to give a mechanical reason. He calls the success “a mystery” nobody can predict: his American publisher expected 3,000 copies, and the book sold millions in the U.S. alone. He adds that had he written it ten years earlier or ten years later, it would not have been the same.

What are the positive and negative views of the interview in Part I?

The positive view calls the interview, in its highest form, a source of truth and, in practice, an art; Denis Brian adds that our most vivid impressions of contemporaries come through interviews.

The negative view, mostly from celebrities, calls it an unwarranted intrusion that diminishes the subject — like stealing a soul through a photograph, or “thumbprints on his windpipe” in Bellow’s phrase. Silvester’s own verdict is that it remains a supremely serviceable medium.

Reference: NCERT Class 12 English Flamingo textbook, chapter 7, official edition on ncert.nic.in.