Bollywood star turned talk show host Aamir Khan talks to Zainab Salbi about the cultural taboos he illuminates through his innovative TV show Satyamev Jayate, which has garnered an audience of 500 million.
Aamir Khan, Indian Movie Star and Creator and Host of Satyamev Jayate, interviewed by Zainab Salbi, Founder, Women for Women International and Nida'a Productions; Editor-at-large, Women in the World

"These laws tell us who we are" - Aamir Khan on the laws in India.
He has impeccable command of English with no fake accents. A man who stays true to his roots and culture. He is a true inspiration to all of us.

Zainab Salbi: Hello everyone I'm Zainab Salbiand and I have the great honor to be on stage with the India's biggest movie star Aamir Khan. I mean we are talking beyond the actions movies of James Bond and Daniel Craig. We are talking beyond the romances of Richard Gere. We are talking beyond the charms of George Clooney. We are talking ladies and gentlemen above and beyond all of that a man who has been acting since the age of nine who has conquered the hearts of 600 million, yes 600 million Indians. This is half of the Indian population.This man has done it, unbelievable. And in 2012 he surprises India, he surprises the world with launching a new TV talk show, Satyamev Jayate, that tackles social issues, taboos heads-on. I mean you just put yourself out there. What inspired you to do that?

Aamir Khan: Well oh hey good evening to everyone here I think it started somewhere when I was a very small child and it began with my mother I think. My mother's been a big influence on me and I'll narrate an incident of my life which stayed with me all along. I used to play a lot of tennis when I was a kid and competitive tennis you know, state level, national level. I was pretty good at that time and she knew how anxious I was about the game how much I love the game. And every time I had a match she'd be waiting for me to come home and when I would come home she had asked me: "Did you win, did he lose?". Usually I would win so my answer would be I won. And then after about five minutes, the first time she did it, it really shook me. After what five minutes she would come and say to me: "You know the the boy who lost to you today, he would have reached home about now and his mom would have asked him the same question and he would have said, he lost. So his mother must be feeling really bad right now." And the first time she said that to me it really hit me. I mean her ability to think for another, a woman she's never seen, ever met, really hit home to me. And I don't think she was meaning to tell me or teach me anything, that's just how she is and I think a lot of what I am is, it is a result of her. I think the second person who had been a big influence on me, is my friend Satyajit Bhatkal who happens to be the director of the show. Satyajit and I went to school together. He was a topper in the class, I was the back-bencher. And he was brilliant so he had the world at his feet, he could do what he wanted, but after we passed out, he decided to work for other people. So he didn't become an engineer, or a doctor or a chartered accountant, which could have been or MBA whatever he wanted. He decided to spend his life, you know, working for people who were less privileged than he was. I got into films and gone into acting and my career took off and I was (...). So each time I would meet him I feel really guilty. I mean, I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was doing what I loved doing, but every time I met him, I used to feel: "Man, this guy is living for others" and I'm I wish I could do half of what he's doing and that kept troubling me. So I think a lot of all this finally resulted in what happened as SMJ - Satyamev Jayate. Television also grew strong in India at that time and I reached a point in my career where I had earned a fair amount of goodwill and I kept thinking that, "how can I contribute?". You know, you wake up in the morning, you read the papers and you read about injustice. You read about poverty, you read about people who are less privileged than you and you want to really do something about it. I think most of us feel that way we don't know what to do and I felt that for a number of years and then I realize that I should do what I know best and which is storytelling and I should use the strength of storytelling to try and change minds in trying, you know, enrich perhaps the discussion on certain issues that we face as a society. And I saw that no one's really doing it on that kind of a scale on a public platform and I thought if I combine the strength of TV with the goodwill that I've on and you know we try and actually combine journalism, investigative journalism and storytelling. So we would really research each topic and then bring it to the country of India and share what we have learnt with the people and hope that we can transform minds. hearts. You know, I always felt that there are two ways of bringing about change. One is top-down. When you make laws and you tell people to follow them. Now you make policies and you expect people to follow them and the other way. And sometimes it works but sometimes, a lot of times, it doesn't. I think the other way is a longer route, but I think that is what we have chosen to do and that is to reach out to people's hearts. Not with anger but with love and know try and transform minds at a young age.

Zainab Salbi: Let's take a look at let's give the audience a look at your first show actually if we may. (Some Indian voice-over segments here, skipped...)
Now that was your first show that is not an easy topic. What triggered you to choose this one?

Aamir Khan: oh well I'm not quite sure why we chose this one in particular, but I felt that initially we had researched four topics. One was female feticide and one was public health. The other was child sexual abuse and so for some reason I think we instinctively stopped with female feticide as our first episode. I also feel it somewhere - it is a huge problem in India first of all, and it also connects with people on a very gut level. We chose to put the show forward not as a woman's problem, but as a mother's problem. You see, what we try to do is, when we get the information that we have, we try and put it to people in a manner that you know gets them emotionally. so I don't start the show by saying you know "Today we're going to talk about female feticide...". I start the show by saying, you know, I've often asked people, "who the most important person in their lives is" and usually people say my mother and I feel the same and I talk about motherhood and get people into a certain emotional state and then I say: "let's take a look at how we're treating our mothers today" and we meet our first guest, who is a mother, who's been through eight abortions in six years. Forced abortions by her mother and in-laws and husband and so when you're looking at her and you're hearing her story, you looking at a mother and what a mother goes through and then of course what a woman goes through when she's, you know, forced to go through an abortion. So I think that kind of really got people you know, the first episode itself, has a very strong emotional connect is what we felt and that's why I think we chose female feticide as a first episode, and you'll be happy to know that, you know, in 2011 was when the episode aired and before that the census that was carried out, had a certain numbers, it was the national average was 914 girl child, against thousand boys born every year and it was sliding. Sliding alarmingly in certain states like Rajasthan and other states, Maharashtra, were very bad. Eight hundred and ninety, eight hundred and eighty, you know, per thousand boys. You'll be pleased to know that these two states have revealed their numbers today, after three years. Rajasthan and Maharashtra, and in both these states the ratio has gone up by fifty to sixty points. So it's now around 950 to 1000 boys. And I believe, I believe it's a combination of the show, which is reaching out to millions of people and talking to them ,you know, emotionally and it's also the governments, the Rajasthan government and the state government of Maharashtra really acted very, very dynamically and it's a result of all of this, I think, and people actually reacting to it and deciding that they don't want to do this anymore, a lot of them.

Zainab Salbi: Now it is illegal in India?

Aamir Khan: Well abortion is legal, but sex selective abortion is illegal and that itself is strange. I mean, in the U.S. I don't think there's a law, in which, you cannot ask your doctor what the sex of the baby is going to be, because in the U.S. the doctor doesn't expect you to go and abort the child if it's a girl. So you don't need a law over here which tells you that. So in India we have a law where you cannot ask the doctor what the sex of the child is and the doctor is not allowed to tell you, so both the doctor and the parents could be in jail if they ask the question and that question is answered. Now this law is actually - it tells us what we are. This law is needed for us, unfortunately, otherwise you know in other societies you don't need this as a law.

Zainab Salbi: Usually you celebrate: "I have a girl!"

Aamir Khan: Yeah, there's another law we have in India, where as a criminal you can't stand for elections. You need a law for that. I mean, it's it's sad. What I'm saying is sad, you know, it's like black humour. Because if a criminal stands for elections anywhere in the world he won't get a single vote, but in India we have to have a law, because as Indians we've, in the past, seen that we do end up voting for criminals. So we need to have a law which tells us, you know, you can't stand for elections if you are a criminal. So, you see, these laws actually tell us also a lot about what we are, and yeah.

Zainab Salbi: That's true. Now you tackle another issue which sort of impacts almost every single Indian household, as I understand it, and that is the dowry issues. I want to have a another segment of your show on that. (Some Indian voice-over segments here, skipped...)
You put your neck out there, completely high, you know.

Aamir Khan: Well it do contextualize it for people who live here in the U.S. I would imagine about 90 to 95 percent of people in India have either given dowry or taking dowry or both. So when you are communicating to the huge majority of the country and telling them that what they have been indulging in, perhaps is not the best thing to do and most probably the TV that they're watching your show on, has also come in dowry. So you, you have to, which is, which is why it is so important for us to communicate this with love and we had this discussion very early on with the core team. I said: "why are we - with what driving emotion are we doing the show?" Are we doing the show with anger, because then our conversation is different. And I'm not doing this with anger, I'm doing this with love, because I really feel that with only with love can you actually, you know, affect a person and bring about change. There are so many things that we need to and we have to look inward and I'm included in that, I'm not excluded in that. We have to look inward, you know, at ourselves.

Zainab Salbi: But did it make people uncomfortable that you touched on these very - I mean how did they respond?

Aamir Khan: Well you know, by and large the huge majority - the very positive thing I want to tell you, is that the huge majority of Indians has just loved the show and that speaks a lot for what India is today. It speaks a lot for the fact that India wants to change. India is ready for change. I mean, I would have imagined, none of us had imagined a show which is speaking such heavy topics, would be so popular across the country and the fact that it is so popular, really speaks well for us as Indians today. That we have issues, we have problems but we want to leave them behind, we want to come out of them and we really want to move ahead and improve ourselves. I think that's what the success of the show tells us.

Zainab Salbi: Has there like - how do you come up about choosing the subjects? I mean...

Aamir Khan: We have a lot of fights.

Zainab Salbi: And I mean are there subjects where you say "we're not going to touch that"?

Aamir Khan: No, so far, that's never been the case. We stick really difficult topics as well. One of a really difficult topics was untouchability, which is a big issue in India. The constitution of our country says that we are all equal, but in reality that's not so yet. It's a journey that we have to with still a journey that we are on to reach there. Sure equality is an issue in a lot of societies, I think but in India, because of the the way the caste system is, it just makes it a lot more complicated. So - and that's a very touchy topic as well. It's a topic that people feel very emotionally about, so, so - and 15% of India, roughly 15% India is Dalits, which is the untouchable caste and so therefore 85% is not Dalits and and we are communicating with the 85% of country. Speaking to them about, I mean are we what are we doing? What we doing is it, is it right, is it, are we comfortable with it, you know, so.

Zainab Salbi: So how did you go about that?

Aamir Khan: Well I mean we in in all our shows, in all our topics we're just honest, but we do it with a lot of love. We do it with a lot of love, so that people... Let me say this much that while the majority of the people have loved our show, there has been a minority, probably in every topic, that that doesn't like us. Like there is a couple of men's organizations which hate me. They keep writing to me emails about men's problems and why don't you take up men's problems. So we did in fact in our last season we picked up masculinity. What is, what is it to be a male? Because we figured that, unless we, unless we relook at and hopefully redefine what a man is, you know, things are not going to change. So, women have, you know, women have changed, women are changing, but, but men don't manage to change by and large. By and large we've done a lot. So we thought we'd look at, you know, what is a real man. Is a real man someone who goes and beats up people? Is a real man a person who's a protector, is either easy the guy who's going to, you know, so what's a real man? So we we I mean we strongly feel that we have to, from the time that the child is born, you have to treat both children equally, whether it's a boy or a girl and you have to allow the boy child to cry. You have to allow him to cry, because the first thing we tell a boy when he cries, "Don't cry. Are you a girl, why you crying?"
So he grows up feeling that I'm not supposed to cry and when you when you tell child not to cry, you're actually removing him further and further away from his emotions. He's feeling something and you're not allowing him to feel that. So you're distancing him from his emotions and then you're surprised why he's beating up his wife, because he actually, the fact is that you when you, you tell the child it is perfectly all right to cry, it's perfectly all right to feel terrible, it's perfectly all right to feel scared. Most boys are told, "Hey you can't feel scared, you're a boy", "Are you scared of the dark?", "come on, go on, go to the roof alone", you know. So boys feel scared and we have to tell it small child of four that it's all right to be scared, you know, and so that boys can grow up more sensitive. Right now we are creating boys, or we I mean we are working towards creating boys who grow up to be insensitive. So we have to change that. And that's what our show on masculinity was.

Zainab Salbi: And I want to see the sequence actually my favorite show on the masculinity. (Some Indian voice-over segments here, skipped...)
I mean that's a big deal that he's telling you this this is really really big deal. How, I mean, do you think they responded better to you that you are not only a man but the man in India, you know, coming and talking about this issue.

Aamir Khan: There's a, there's a portion of the show which, in which, I'm told by another man, he says that, you know, in India real men don't cry and real men don't hold their wives hands. The wife walks two, three feet behind. Now, you must understand, India's a large country, so when I'm saying this, don't take it literally, this is mostly in rural India and there are, there are a lot of extremely progressive people in India as well, so I don't want to give you the wrong impression, but this is an issue. There are villages in India, in rural India, where this is the believe this is how they've grown up. So on the show, I did say, I said, you know in based on all of these definition of what a real man is, I'm completely not a real man, because I hold my wife's hand all the time, I hug my children. You're not supposed to hug your children, you're not supposed to show affection to your child, as a male - a true male. So I hug my children all the time, I cry all the time. I was crying just before I entered to the stage.

Zainab Salbi: True, it is true, yes. We were both crying actually.

Aamir Khan: I was listening to, what's her name, Ceyda? I was listening to her speak and I was in tears, so I cry all the time.

Zainab Salbi: Have you cried on on movies, on TV?

Aamir Khan: On TV, every episode of mine, yeah. Not a single episode goes by that I don't cry and it's not only during the show itself. It's even when I'm researching it. You know, when you're researching these topics, it takes days for us to go through all the material we collect and inevitably in every topic that we've picked, we go through, we go, we get to a point where me and Satya and Swati and all of us get so disheartened I'm looking at an interview and I'm weeping and we kind of shut it off and be like, you know, why are we doing this? Nothing's going to change. You suddenly feel very disheartened, but then you come across a person who is working in that and has got so much strength so much resilience, so much grace and such dignity, that it brings you back to your feet. You know, in these five years that I've researched Satyamev Jayate, I've seen the worst in mankind, and I've seen the best, the most beautiful in mankind. I've come across people who are such amazing and inspirational people. You know, I spoke to this lady whose son had been murdered in. Her son had got married to a girl from a different religion and so it is an honor killing. This lady spoke with such dignity and such grace and with such forgiveness in a heart, I just couldn't get over it. It was such, it was so amazing to listen to a speech. She's talking about her son who's being killed and, you know, I don't know where she finds a strength from, to still look for love, you know, in people. I was speaking to these two women, we often assume in India that women who are from rural India, are uneducated and therefore not as strong as women from cities, etcetera, etcetera. So, these two women who in the same episode of honor killings, there one woman's son and the other woman's brother worked was killed and they were ostracized from the village. They were targeted, they were not given - they were not sold anything. Nobody spoke to them in the village. So the ashes are taken in what is called a Kalash, like a pot, that pot was not sold to them. That's the kind of segregation they faced in the village and then they did a police complaint and all of that, so the case was going on. They were threatened, they were offered money, they were, there was political pressure put on them. Every kind of pressure was put on them, but they didn't take the case back and they fought the case and they won the case and those men are now convicted. Now, what I'm going to say here, is that these two women are from a small village in India and the kind of courage they show in a city like Mumbai, when a political party announces that tomorrow is Mumbai Bandh which means, nobody dare go out of the house, we're going to stone every car that goes out. There's some kind of protest that they're doing, nobody leaves the house. In a city like Mumbai, which is a large city nobody even knows who I am. We are all strangers in the city, but you're frightened to step out of the house, because someone has announced that we can't. Hear these two ladies, are specifically targeted, they're still staying in the same village and they still have the courage to stand up and say: "No, we don't want money. We want justice". Where do they get this courage from? So it's, you know, it's really amazing. So I've met such wonderful people in this journey of five years.

Zainab Salbi: How, I mean we are almost out of time, but how did you respond to the India, I got a lot of coverage recently on the gang rape and on the movie India's daughters, what do you think about the, yeah.

Aamir Khan: I haven't seen the film so I can't comment specifically on the film. But I think it's, it's really sad that the film was banned. It should not be banned of course, it should be shown. I mean there should be freedom of speech everywhere. So there was a lot of people in India who fought for the fact that it should, the film should be shown. It's really unfortunate that the film was banned. And rape is a big issue in India and we did a top one of our episodes was on fighting rape. And where, our understanding very briefly is that the balance of power in India needs to change. Right now, rape survivor goes to the police and gets badly treated over there, goes to the health facilities, gets badly treated over there. Justice system takes really long by and large to come to the end of the case. Unless conviction becomes swift and certain, things are not going to change in India. Unless conviction becomes swift and certain and very very importantly, as a society, we have to shun the rapist and hold the survivor close. you know.

Zainab Salbi: You are doing that. Now it's, it's hard to sort of escape the fact that you lost weight or gained weight and you sort of were thinner in here. But why I'm saying it because you're in a movie right now. You're in the midst of shooting a movie.

Aamir Khan: I'm actually, I'm actually getting ready for this film that I'm playing of older man, who's an ex wrestler. So I'm putting on a lot of weight, which is fun.

Zainab Salbi: But has it changed your, has it changed your choices of stories as a star, as a movie start?

Aamir Khan: Not really. I wouldn't say it has changed my choices as an actor, but quite naturally I get attracted to films because of who I am, so this film that I'm doing for example it's called "Dangal", which means wrestling. And it's a stories about this wrestler, who has a dream to win a gold medal, an international goal for his country. He can't fulfill his dream because he doesn't have money, he has to give up wrestling and so he decides that his son will fulfill his dream and then he proceeds to have four daughters in the next 15 years. So the story is about his daughter fulfills his dream, yeah.

Zainab Salbi: And exactly. Well Aamir, you could have easily arrested em be in the limelight and yet you took, I mean, with courage and with integrity and with love and inspiration, you just went ahead and inspired, you know, half of India's population. This is a huge deal and inspiring all of us here in America. So chapeau to you and good luck, keep going. We are all behind you, thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you!