Bobby Ghosh: We will come to Satyamev Jayate in more detail in a minute, but I want to ask you because we saw again in that video that very earlier when you decided, particularly in entertainment, that women oriented shows will be a very big part of what you had to offer and that quickly became the differentiating factor from other channels. How much was this guided by what you were hearing from the market and what you were hearing from the audience, and how much of this was your instinct, your decision that, this is part of your social responsibility?
Uday Shankar: Interesting question. We do a lot of market research. We have a very comprehensive and evolved team that’s plugged in to what the consumers say. But to be honest, I don’t see ourselves as a market research driven company. I see STAR as a company which is very focused on observing society and whatever is happening. So if a political movement is going on, if there are concerns that are being expressed informally, then often times the research insights do not really capture them. But we also try and anticipate. We are at a level where we try and stay ahead of those concerns, so meaning that when you are in the business of media, you should be shaping the concerns, you should be voicing and helping people connect their dots to themselves and whether these are dots of aspirations or these are dots of concerns that are holding their aspirations.
Bobby Ghosh: For the benefit of those who don’t get to see STAR on a regular basis, talk a little bit about the women orientation of your channel. The kind of programming that you are showing and how it is so different from your competitors?
Uday Shankar: Creatively we have targeted women to be at the core of, and it is not just women, it is families and we believe that in most of the Indian households, the mother is the nucleus of the family but the focus is the entire family. This is just for personalizing the messages.
The characters are women, as well as men. The driver characters for change are women, primarily because we have felt that they are the biggest ambassadors of change and proselytizers in their own context. If a woman gets convinced, then the first impact is felt by the children and then subsequently on the male members and that is why we have targeted that initially.
Just to give you an example, an anecdote that the first very big drama which had a central female protagonist was a drama called ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’, which talked about the emerging conflicts in the family structure and how maturely women were stepping up to ascertain their own personality and yet resolve those family conflicts. The central protagonist in that show had just earlier this week taken over as the Minister of the Human Resources Development in the country. Her entire political career was and her public persona was shaped by that show. She was a 22 year old young woman who first appeared in public life on national television on STAR Plus, did that show which was a wildly successful show, ran every single day for nine years. She left that show and entered politics and today she is one of the senior most ministers in the Indian government. I say this because that’s the kind of influence that it has had.
The number one show that we are doing right now is the story of a young girl who lost her parents in an accident and then had to go through a set of dramatic twists, had to get married early into a very conservative, uneducated family and she had the dream of becoming top police officer and how, while maintaining her responsibility towards her family and other members of the society, she pursues her dream to become a very successful, a very high quality, ethically upright police officer.
In the journey, it gave us the opportunity creatively to focus on everything that is wrong with the police system, everything that citizens expect the police to do and what a morally upright public servant could be. It just so happened, we started the show three and a half ago, we didn’t know there was a political ferment going on and there would be a huge movement against corruption and political change, but it so just happened that the show caught like wild fire and every night almost 150 million people watch the show.
Bobby Ghosh: Let’s talk about Satayamev Jayate (SMJ), “only truth prevails”, if you don’t mind I’ll give a little introduction to the show. It is quite an astonishing thing. I remember TIME did a story two and a half years ago when it first launched and it is like nothing else on television that I am aware of, in anywhere in the world.
This is a show that prime time on Sunday morning when Indians want to watch television, it takes an hour and a half to do a very, very deep dive into some of the very unpleasant parts of Indian life. Everything about the show suggests that it shouldn’t work. You are dealing at a time when people want entertainment, you are dealing with issues like female foeticide. It is an hour and a half long. There is no break in terms of…this is not like Opera with a segment on ‘how to make cookies’. Unrelenting and very, very tough and it deals with the issue that are tended to sweep under the carpet.
The one reason for people to initially go for the show was because of superstar Aamir Khan, one of the greatest movie stars in Bollywood, but he too was breaking a taboo, one of the traditional relationship between STAR and his fans in India is one of admiration and idol worship, but the unspoken rule was that ‘don’t you wag your finger at us’. We’ll worship you and give you our love and affection but you just be a star and that’s your job and Aamir was going past that mirror through your show on his audiences and what they go to see was not pleasant. And yet, the success of the show, I will let you rattle off the numbers, has been astonishing! This was a big bet by you, personally, by STAR as a company. Why did you do?
Uday Shankar: At STAR, we have now gone a step ahead and we believe that all content that we create is corporate social responsibility (CSR) seriously. I had a meeting with Minister of Corporate Affairs when they were drafting the Companies Act in India and they needed inputs, and they were saying that a certain fixed percentage of profits should go towards CSR and I said, while I am fine to do that, but you must make a note that all media content, if it goes on air is towards CSR. If it is not, then, we as media community have failed and that was our whole issue.
In 20 years we have done a series of subtle messaging through all kinds of entertainment programmes that we had done and they were very successful, we had seen a different kind of Indian woman, teenage girls were coming up, who were articulating and we were shaping influence. Retail companies were telling us that people walked into the stores and they needed bedroom material and dress material and linen of the kind that was portrayed on STAR TV shows. We realized that if we had that kind of influence, then we could use that for further push to the kind of change that we wanted to bring about.
There was some discomfort that I had and the rest of the team had, on how the discourse, while it had to be a central discourse to talk about the concerns on the economic changes taking place in India, or not taking place in India. But we thought that economic changes, if they were completely divorced from the social perspective could be unhealthy, especially in a country like India, with so much diversity. And that’s when we started thinking.. should we just go and change the traditional understanding of an entertainment channel value, where you are invited to come and watch someone sing and someone dance and make you laugh. We said, could we call people and start challenging each one of them? And that’s when we said it was probably worth doing something like that.
Around the same time, Aamir Khan, who is this megastar but had clearly made a change in his own career. He had become a star who stands for the right things using his “star appeal” to trigger right messages. I went and met him and I said should we use the power of television to do something to change this country? He was very excited about that, and then we worked together. It’s a show where the two teams worked together for over two years, but Aamir’s commitment was phenomenal. We first decided that we would take up all the challenging issues, be it child sexual abuse or female foeticide or problems with alcoholism.
Bobby Ghosh: The sense of the risk they bring with them…
Uday Shankar: You are right. One of the first challenges was that in the evening, people just wanted to watch a dance show, the Indian version of ‘America’s Got Talent’. We said, how do we do this then? We will pick up Sunday morning, this is the most challenging time for two reasons, one, the whole family was there. Aamir and I spent a lot of time discussing and finally we concluded that we are not going to pull our punches, neither in the creative expression, nor in the format and then we said that, we will take this show not for the select member of the society but we will take this show for all the members of the society. So just imagine we were talking about child sexual abuse and we came up with the advisory in the beginning that this subject is sensitive for children, however we would encourage you to watch and get your children to watch it. Because your children need to know that they are vulnerable to sexual abuse. Aamir and I believed that there was a contradiction, we wanted to protect our children from sexual abuse and yet we were not preparing them on how to first understand if someone was trying to abuse them.
Bobby Ghosh: Now, we have to go for a Q&A pretty soon, just so that you can get a little taste of what the show is like, there is a quick video, you can see it now and then afterwards I want you to tell everybody what the numbers are. Because that’s why they are here.
Bobby Ghosh: One final question from me before we go to the audience. This show changed lots, didn’t it.?
Uday Shankar: The sex ratio in India has been under pressure. It’s been declining, the gap between female and male children has been rising. But for the first time in 40 years in the state of Maharashtra, where Bombay is, it was reversed by a factor of 24:1000. The state government, the state Health Minister publically went and acknowledged that every single policy and intervention remained the same. The only external stimulus that had come in was Satyamev Jayate’s episode on Female foeticide, and he said, his officers felt that it was the impact of the show that gave women the confidence to resist abortion.
The second thing that changed was in generic medicines, we did a very big episode and we are still fighting the pharmaceutical industry on that episode where we said that the labelling of the drugs was just an exercise to raise the prices of the drugs, and if the generic drugs were sold and encouraged by the government then the drug prices would come down substantially and it would be much easier for people. Three or four state governments passed legislations and orders to make sure government hospitals only supply generic drugs.
We wanted fast track courts, because the Indian Judicial System can sometimes be very slow and rape victims were struggling with the time it took to get justice. So we demanded, in one of our episodes, fast track courts. Four states went and set up fast track courts. So you know lot of such actions have happened.
Q&A
Question from a Guest: I have two questions about the regulatory environment. The first is on the pending unbundling of distribution. How do your think that will affect the current alliances in the market place, will it ultimately lead to consolidation of some of the players. And then on the enforcement on the advertising limits, how is that affecting your business? Ultimately do you think it benefits if you move more to a CPM based model. What is the impact for you?
Uday Shankar: The unbundling will affect everybody, the regulatory it’s just so that you understand the Indian channels were usually distributed by bringing together a lot of third party channels to create a bouquet and offer it to the people and the regulator has said you could do that but contracts will have to be separate. So, effectively it has been unbundled. I think for the first time the power of the content has come into play very aggressively. If you have channels that are leader channels, that people want to watch, then you will be able to distribute the channels without any problem. So I think in each market the power of content is finally coming into play, far more aggressively than it was.
On the advertising front, I think advertising had gone very undisciplined. There were channels who were running 25-30 minutes to an hour of advertising. There was a lot of consumer frustration, it was not good. No professional broadcaster was doing that, STAR for instance, even when there was no limit, we were very disciplined about it. But it was generally building consumer annoyance. And the beneficiary of this was not the channels. The channels were not making money, it was just keeping the advertising rate low. It was the advertisers and the advertising agencies who were able to buy cheap, because inventories could bloom. Now, there is rationalization in the rates and deliveries of the channels. So I think in the long run, limiting the advertising inventory is a good development for the consumer and content creators both.
Bobby Ghosh: There is a question there and then Raju.
Question from a Guest: :Uday I have worked with you on Women on Strategic Partnerships and thank you very much for inviting us. Unfortunately Lakshmi Puri isn’t here. So, I really appreciate what you have already said and also the fact that you talked about people centred media and also using STAR television as creating accountability in the governance of India, I think it’s played a critical role. Having said that, we are looking at Beijing Plus 20, women empowerment in general equality. One aspect which is very important is the issue of media and patriarchy. So I really want to understand STAR television’s role in really questioning the Indian patriarchy and changing the hegemonic forms of masculinity. Because we do have the protagonist in the serials you talked about, but we still have men who tend to be holding onto traditional values. Aamir Khan has done fantastic work, but how do you and I know this is very close to your heart, how do you look at changing the patriarchal system and specially the patriarchal media that exists all over the world and specially in India. So are there any plans to do that?
Uday Shankar: Look first of all, I think we changed a lot of that. The traditional understanding and the concepts of patriarchy, I would like to claim are not reflected on our show. Of course, it’s story telling so there is drama, so there is a villain and there is a negative character or a grey character, who just in order to highlight the point you wish to make; you need to have those characters. And also it’s a social reality, as far as the patriarchy media is concerned, yes I think patriarchy in India is as prevalent as in any other business or any other part of society.
I think we should all work towards changing that. It’s a social reality, so it’s changing, but there is a lot of counter pull and pressure. Patriarchy is an institution that developed over 2500 years or so. You are talking about changing that, it will take time, but I am one of those who believes that it’s changing. The world today is very different from what it was 20 years ago, when it comes to the strength of the patriarchal institutions. The fact that we are having a public debate on this, more and more women are asserting. I think we see that in real life, we see that portrayed in stories and media content. I would not be very cynical about it, when you try to demolish something that’s been there for thousands of years, you need to be relentless. One show, no matter how strong cannot change that.
Raju Narisetti (News Corp): Hi, I’m from News Corp and my only claim to fame is that I went to journalism school with Uday, so I can say we knew him well.
Uday, so STAR has been very good at both, embracing foreign shows and turning them into much more Indian like Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), or now creating a lot of shows that are uniquely Indian. Do you see a time in the near future that India can actually export interesting formats and programmes and data’s that have a wider appeal. I know Bollywood has really struggled to do that, or is the Indian market too big that you don’t see need to do that? I am just curious about whether any formats or any shows that come out of India can be embraced outside?
Uday Shankar: There are two-three issues, one, as you yourself pointed out, Raju. Raju and I went to the Journalism school together, he was the more sincere one there, that’s why he continues to be a journalist and I had to hide in other professions.
But, the first one you identified yourself. That the Indian market is so big that both Bollywood and the Indian television industry is quite satisfied. Especially in the early stages of development. You get good growth, you make good money, you are satisfied and you get national recognition. I think Indians have not yet taken that ambition, you know it’s a romantic aspiration that someday we will make a global film or a global television show, but it will happen. The big problem that I see is, cracking the distribution pipe, it’s not very easy. Hollywood has built this amazing distribution ecosystem all over the world, it’s not very easy to break into that. I think it’s the trade channel and finding the way of creating a global brand. Whether it is a global storyteller. A Hollywood film or show also sells because the director is known world over, the actor is known world over and then there is this amazing marketing and distribution infrastructure. Indians haven’t been able to do that, if I mention the name of a top Indian director here, I don’t think there will be many people who would understand that. It will take some time.
Bobby Ghosh: We are done to the last question, I’m afraid. One more question…
Question from a Guest: The women and their role in the society, which of course, are a lot of traditions, I’m working with women entrepreneurs in the Indian market. I’m wondering, if there is a lot of pushback in terms of acceptance. First of all, entrepreneurs, even though we have such magnificent Indian entrepreneurs here in the United States and around the world. Still finding it hard for women to get the kind of support in the market place. I’m sort of wondering, if you think that the new elected officials of government will be helping to change some of the attitudes towards entrepreneurs of the market place. What can television do to help us advance the cause of people starting and running businesses, especially women?
Uday Shankar: It’s early days of the new Indian government and we are all very excited about the new government. I think the new government is very focused on that, it has the highest representation of women ministers, compared to any government since independence. 30% of the cabinet ministers are women, so we think this by itself should give an impetus to the whole process of change. Television I think can do a great deal more, than it is doing even now. A lot has changed, but television and print, and media in general is a heavily encouraging, motivating and proselytizing agency, so to speak. And that is a role that it can play very well. I’ll just quickly tell you a story, that I think when the reservations for women in the local bodies was first introduced all over the country, in rural as well as urban areas. The first time there was a lot of resistance for women to come in and even if women were elected for those seats, the men in the household determined the agenda for the women. But, that did not last for more than a year or two. Within two years the women started telling their men first gently and then bluntly to lay off.
And I think that today, there are very few women who take their brief from the menfolk in the house when they come to the parliament or the local government. So I think same thing is happening in entrepreneurship. A lot of women first start this to help their spouses, their brothers or their parents, so see them asserting themselves.