Namashkaar, Aadaab, Khushaamadeed, Satyamev Jayate

How I got into working - albeit somewhat peripherally - with the mad realm of television is another story. But the point is that my days and nights have merged - not always seamlessly - and the door that I opened has led me to a whole new world of sight and sound and terminology. All related to shooting and editing. 

In short, I agreed to an urgent request to come on board and help write material for the website for Satyamev Jayate, Aamir Khan Productions' new television show.  

One fringe benefit was that I got to meet Aamir Khan. And I mean meet in the real sense of the word - at work meetings with the team, sitting for endless hours over notes and briefings and presentations and more notes, and tea, and food, and once I even got to pet one of the cats at Chez Khan.

It's only towards the end of the second meeting that I realised with a sudden jolt that I was actually sitting about four feet away from Aamir Khan and talking quite normally (ie, not swooning) with him. It was like a slight time-warp shift at that moment, but there isn't time for daydreaming on the AKP caravan. One moves on, fataafat. It's electrifying, working with Aamir, because his energy is seemingly boundless. He's calm, sharp, doesn't miss a trick, and has a marvellous sense of humour. 

What I like the most about him is that his heart is so evidently in the right place, and moreover he's chosen to do something about it with the resources at his disposal. I've heard cribs that he's just another celebrity trying to cash in on the politically correct thing of being socially aware. But it's much more than that. If it was just that, he could have lent his face to some other production house. He could have done a social awareness ad campaign. He could have contributed a soundbite to some other kind of serial (a la Ashok Kumar in Hum Log, perhaps). But Aamir has put his entire might behind Satyamev Jayate. He's much more than a show host. If viewers are watching one and a half hours of an episode, Aamir has watched tens of hours of rushes and documentation and video testimonies and reconnaissance footage, he has spoken with countless people about their experiences, he has pored over scripts and edited episodes till the wee hours, he has done takes and retakes until he is satisfied that what he wants to say is coming across the way he wants it to.

He's no celeb riding on a bandwagon. He's a guy who is doing the job he has set out for himself, and doing it as well as he can.To my mind he's not a film star or any kind of star. He's someone who has seen things that are wrong, has felt a deep desire to do something about them, and has translated that desire into action. Many of us do do what we can. Lawyers fight cases, teachers teach, activists mobilise. Journalists write. Aamir Khan's medium is film. But one film would not have done what Satyamev Jayate is doing. Aamir has taken his expertise from the big screen to the small one - from the multiplexes to the living rooms and community halls of India. He's doing what many others have done before him and will do after him too. The fact that he is a “celebrity” is, to my mind, incidental. But the advantage of being a celebrity is (apart from the hazard of being constantly a target of many kinds) that one's reach is wider and possibly more potent than most other people's. The effect of that reach is making itself evident in the number and quality of the responses in all avenues of media from people who watched the first episode of Satyamev Jayate. 

There are late nights when the long corridor is empty and silent. Doors along the length of the corridor on both sides conceal the frenetic activity that goes on behind them - sound and colour and mixing and "please let me include just two more minutes" when the editor is already wondering how to squeeze in everything that the director wants.

These are nights when sometimes a little tiredness comes and taps on our shoulders. We think longingly of a couch and of "having nothing to do". Will that day ever come, we wonder.

Then the serial is launched, the world explodes with tearful applause, and those bleary eyes, those cramped feet, those aching shoulders all become worth it because Satyamev Jayate has touched hearts. Just the way Aamir wanted it to. The way the team wanted it to.