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Satyamev Jayate hopes to turn the tragedies of India into Primetime entertainment. Atleast for the first week it has had the nation buzzing , but I don’t think this interest level will last for more than 3 weeks. The viewership of the first episode was driven by the slick marketing campaign, which to a large extant misrepresented what the show was about. It is afterall showing us the ugly reality of India which we all have very conveniently chosen to ignore and live with. Trying to sell it back to us on an entertainment platform wont be easy; Societies don’t change so easily.

Aamir didn’t tell me anything new about sex-selective abortion in India – there is enough information about it all over the press if you cared enough to notice it. Actually he might have missed out on telling us that the female sex ratio has actually improved in India. There is enough to be shocked by in India – open up any issue, and there is an ugly truth ready to jump out and grab you by your throat. But my blog isnt about the issue of sex-selective abortion, or the million other problems that India grapples with everyday – it is about the sentiment behind the TV show.

I am all for Indians waking up to becoming more self aware citizens. There is nothing wrong with using the power of TV, and packaging some of our worst issues into a easy to digest entertainment form with sprinkling of bollywood magic dust over it to try and get into the hearts and minds of Indians. But I feel that hoping for change in this way is mere wishful thinking. We are all suspended in an absent minded existence, gorging on our Cricket and Bollywood to really notice anything around us.

Putting a Bollywood star to lead a social crusade is a sure recipe for losing credibility for the cause, and to some extant it even undermines the effort of the many unseen heroes who have been working behind the scenes. To see Aamir win a 3Cr fee per episode fee (and it is surely a win, given that he would have benchmarked it against what Salman, SRK or Amitabh would have got for their TV debut) and then to take on a social cause dosent feel honest – it feels like some higher order exploitation. Neeta Ambani too jumped onto the bandwagon with one-too-many mugshots of her in the Reliance foundation advertisement. Her blatant self promotion in the name of philanthropy was in the spirit of the show I guess.

As for Aamir’s performance, unfortunately that is what I thought it was, just a performance. Watching him was like watching him act in a movie – the tears, and pauses, and expansive gestures, the dramatic attempt at dialogue delivery; all just a bit too well timed for it to be genuine. For once, perfect acting wasn’t a good idea here.

But then any positive movement in this nation of miseries is welcome news, whatever the motives. In this country where a “wailing and a blood soaked news paper that gets delivered to our doorstep everyday” (borrowing from a friends twitter comment), I want to believe that this will get atleast some part of India to wakeup. More power to Aamir and his ilk, and to the new attempt at commercialising the social change in India… Satyamev Jayate.