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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Views | Satyamev Jayate: Let’s forget the cynicism for a minute
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Views | Satyamev Jayate: Let’s forget the cynicism for a minute

Views | Satyamev Jayate: Let’s forget the cynicism for a minute

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Confession No 1. I’ve always viewed the imminent arrival of an Aamir Khan project with faint alarm. The mammoth marketing juggernaut that he unleashes every time there’s something to which he is connected in any capacity (actor/ producer/ uncle, whatever) is about to hit the screens sends me running for cover. And there’s hardly any place to hide, unless you insulate yourself from all media for a few weeks other than home shopping TV channels and properties supplements of newspapers. So it has been with Satyamev Jayate, Khan’s first TV show.

Confession No 2. I am glad he did it— carpet-bomb us with ads, give dozens of interviews in the media to create the buzz, get the show carried on Doordarshan and regional channels.

As with all that Khan does, the meticulous planning was visible to anyone watching carefully—everything happened on cue as per the tightly controlled script with no room for any uncertainty or even spontaneity, emotional buttons were pushed at just the right moments, we had shots of members of the audience weeping, Khan called over the daughters of the victims to sit with him during the last song. Even the entertainment quotient had not been forgotten—how could he?—with an interview with unmarried men in Kurukshetra district designed to produce a few laughs. Maybe I should get my glasses checked, but whenever I look at Khan, I seem to see a super-thin synthetic sheen covering him: one is always aware of an intelligent and focused mind ticking away, but not revealing what lies beneath.

But Satyamev Jayate is not for cynics like us. It is aimed at a mass audience where, when a star like Khan puts his might behind a social cause, the impact should be significant. At every step, his intelligence is on display. Khan is absolutely correct to have insisted that Satyamev Jayate appear on Doordarshan. In the show, when he kickstarts a campaign, he does not leave it at a generalised level, but brings it down to a focused actionable point—to petition the Rajasthan government to set up a fast-track court that will bunch together all the 140-odd cases being fought in various district courts against doctors who had been caught on hidden video cameras offering female feticide services.

And his marketing efforts have hardly stopped with the audience. Khan has also roped in top corporates to the cause. Airtel will charge 1 for every sms sent by those who support the petition, and the money will be donated to a chosen NGO. People can also send money to a specially set up Axis Bank account. Funds coming in from the public will be matched by the Reliance Foundation run by Nita Ambani. In other words, commercial market mechanisms are being used cleverly at a very large scale to build mass participation, in a strategy that promises a universal win-win. Aamir Khan charges a hefty sum for the show, the channels make money on advertising, the corporates get the Aamir Khan and TRP rub-off and strengthen their social responsibility image, awareness is spread, money is raised, a clear verifiable change is attempted. I just hope it all works out.

The juggernaut has hardly stopped rolling. The next morning, the media is full of reports of how the show’s site crashed within an hour of Satyamev Jayate airing on television (one hopes that wasn’t part of the marketing plan), and how the show went trending on tweeter (well, even Khan could hardly have stage-managed that one), and now he’s started a weekly column in a national newspaper.

Let’s suppress the cynicism for some time. We should be glad that Khan has a giant marketing brain, an uncanny understanding of his audience and a keen sense of the space he has carved out in the popular and media imagination. This is the first time that a big star has used all his charm and intelligence to attack issues about which we as a nation should be hanging our heads in shame. And we should be thankful for Khan’s obsessive determination to succeed in all he does.

Will all this make any difference? Do you have a better idea?

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Published: 08 May 2012, 05:11 AM IST
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