Rajeev Masand says his blind items about Sushant Singh Rajput weren’t ‘damaging, hurtful’, reveals everybody in the industry already knew those stories

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He continued, “I used to write a column which had multiple items, and one was a blind item. But were they damaging? Were they hurtful to people? I don’t think so. The idea was that it was supposed to be a puzzle that people were supposed to solve. In fact, it was information that everybody in the industry already knew. It was misrepresented, but what is not in your control, what can you do?”

Masand also recalled when actors such as Shahid Kapoor and Rekha asked him to can entire interviews because they weren’t pleased with how they came across in them. He obliged, but said that he generally avoided cutting portions of his interviews unless it was necessary. He said, “Once, during a roundtable, one actress snapped at another actress very badly. And not fairly. I think it was an unfair way of snapping. And I got a call from another actress saying, ‘Can you please cut this out?’ It was unfair, it was rude, so we did cut it out.”

Masand said that luckily, the people he interviews mostly understand that he isn’t looking for controversy. “Journalists know what to expect from their interview. People want free-flowing, candid chats. Even if they say something wrong, you correct it in the interview. You don’t need to cut it out. An interview is an opportunity to get to know who you are. We’re all imperfect, we’ve all got our flaws, we all sometimes say the wrong things. Sometimes our pronunciation is wrong, sometimes our accent is wrong. And there is a beauty in that. Anyone who understands that doesn’t ask for cuts,” he said.