The Art of Asking Questions

What makes a good question? There’s the deceptive casualness of Geo’s Sohail Warraich, the let-me-hand-you-the-rope-to-hang-yourself method of the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, or your neighbour’s interrogation at the gate. In an art house cinema recently, I found myself asking myself this as I watched Sepideh Farsi’s film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. In the documentary film, the art of asking questions feels like it takes a backseat to the unbearable task of telling the story of a woman surviving a war. The film is a compilation of video calls between Farsi and the photojournalist Fatma Hassouna; spliced with cutaway scenes of the devastation wreaking Gaza as Israel carries out its genocidal campaign: clouds of smoke, the streets full of rubble. Calls disconnect between France, where Farsi is working from, and Occupied Palestine.

Watching it, I was frustrated with Farsi. Hassouna puts in so much effort just to be on these calls; and Farsi — for all her attempts to want to tell a story — seems to struggle with the basics. She can never quite get the phone in the right position, the cat is always at the door while they’re on the call. Fatma’s in a war zone and you can’t seem to hold your phone straight, I thought.

What is striking is Hassouna’s ability to smile, to keep going on through the conversations, and a singular luminosity and talent that is so evident even as Israel keeps trying to snuff it out. She answers questions and talks about herself even as she is displaced and the war rages outside, even as she craves simple pleasures, even as she smiles through Farsi’s attempts to build a relationship with her, even her responses to the questions that seem designed to tick something off a list — soliciting Fatma’s views on Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, or talking about why Fatma wore a headscarf - that seemed to be anything but about her work as a known photojournalist, documenting daily life in Gaza.

It was wildly frustrating and deeply sad to watch, as the war literally seems to be closing in on Fatma Hassouna. (Fatma and five of her family members were killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2025; a Forensic Architecture analysis found that the family’s apartment was specifically targeted.)

When Farsi is asking about the scarf, she’s basing it on her experience in Iran, not of Fatma’s in Gaza; there is a world of difference between personal choice and state-mandated dress codes. I understood, watching her flail, what it’s like when you are trying to build a connection with someone whose reality you can never inhabit, to build a rapport in another language over calls that disconnect and lag; even if you have some shared points of reference, they can fall flat. What can you say to someone surviving a genocide? How many times can you ask how they’re doing before those words lose meaning altogether, before they become blithely impotent?

While in no ways is anything I’ve ever reported on comparable to the war in Gaza, watching Farsi, I recognised many of my own faltering attempts to build connections with interviewees, of freezing in a social situation and asking the most inane of questions. I could hear the voices of editors past and rejected pitches in my head: editors who always said they need characters, not just ideas, but I often wondered how that was even possible. How is one supposed to find someone straight out of central casting, because it’s impossible to find the right character to tell the story through on day one? Anytime I have ever found an amazing character, it has always been after hours and days of reportage, of unexpectedly stumbling on some reveal in the middle of an interview, of hearing a great line and thinking, that’s it. That’s the headline, the chapter, that’s the story in a nutshell.

So, how do you ask a good question? So much of this is timing, and chemistry, and understanding what the other person wants you to be in this situation — a sounding board, a notetaker, a sparring partner. Do they want to dictate in paragraphs? Do they need you to spell out a theory? Do you just need to be a fly on the wall? When I do interviews in Pakistan, I find myself playing a role depending on the person — sometimes I am the naive ingenue who needs to be mansplained a subject to; other times, I try to establish my expertise early on. But it’s primarily a lot of getting comfortable, drinking chai, seeing where this is going.

I learned a lot about the dynamics of asking questions while researching Society Girl, my book with Tooba Masood-Khan on the death of the poet Mustafa Zaidi. I hadn’t realised how much an interview could change with another person in the room — the two of us often felt thrust into the roles of good cop/bad cop, or could sense that the interviewee was only able to connect with one of us, and the other one had to take a backseat and let their energy play out.

Interviews, of course, don’t always go according to script or plan. There is a specific horror of asking someone for a time to sit down, them being cagey about a slot and then responding — well, I have five minutes now — and that’s the exact moment you’ve somehow forgotten to bring a pen, or charge your phone. But sometimes, five minutes are all you need; it cuts through the work you might have had to do to build a rapport and lets you get right down to it. And some people — lawyers are particularly good at this — can give you an excellent answer (with citations) in just five minutes too.

I think people often assume that being hostile or asking “difficult” questions is good interviewing, but anyone can be rude, really; that’s not talent. Anyone can be probing too — but there’s a difference when Sohail Warraich can casually ask one of the richest men in Karachi how much money he has; which is one of my favourite interview moments. It’s because — at least to me, naive viewer at home — he’s built a rapport through the slow, drawling questions where he can ask that, where he cares about whatever answer he gives, where humour couches the question, but where it’s evident that malice isn’t intended here, perhaps not even judgment. So many times, people are looking for some gotcha moment, but the gotcha moment only works if you’ve had them say something truly revelatory, not when you’ve verbally beaten them up.

The only way you can ask a good question is to prepare. Disinterest is contagious; it poisons the entire mood, and shows up in your work. Asking questions — good questions — only comes easily if you are genuinely invested in the story. It’s always surprising to me just how quickly the mood can change in an interview from dismissive to oh, you know your stuff; it’s why celebrities often come across as bored in interviews these days, because the person asking questions is often an influencer who hasn’t really engaged with their work (or often, another human being, it seems.)

You have to playact a character too: be a little audacious. Be artful without being rude, probing without shouting. Sometimes, it’s a game of chicken, and you have to see which one of you cracks first. You have to give people the space to treat the answer whichever way they choose to, to let them articulate a thought they haven’t been able to before.

But you should always ask the question — you never quite know what the answer might be, even to the most innocuous of queries. The greatest example to prove this is Zia Mohyeddin asking Madam Noorjahan how many songs she’d sung, to which she responded: “main ne kabhi geeton aur gunahon ka hisaab nahin rakha.” I’ve never kept count of songs or sins.

It’s the answer of my dreams.