Year Ender 2018

Stories give form to life, which is complex and thus pave the path for evolution…

2018 was a very powerful year for everybody in the media, entertainment as well as development sector. There were plenty of challenges and many lessons that were also learnt. Among them the most important lesson that we at the Asian Center for Entertainment Education (ACEE) learnt was that if content is king, then audience is its queen and everything else therefore, also spectrum, belongs to the public.

No I’m not kidding neither getting political here, although we’re in the thick of the general election season, but what I’m saying is that strategies, models, data, technology, distribution and marketing are shaping themselves with the objective to enable storytelling and are therefore the outcomes of content as well as its consumption.

At the flagship program of Asian Center for Entertainment Education, The Third Eye, we as usual incubated several possibilities by which storytelling, which is the primary vehicle that transports a plethora of ideas, concepts and innovations to populations across the world; could be leveraged to save lives and influence human consciousness to make its way to evolution.

Elevate 2018, ACEE’s annual conclave where experts, specialists and social activists exchange notes with creative communities through carefully curated panels, discussions, round tables and presentations, was electric. Held on 15th February 2018, the conclave attracted Edutainment practitioners from around the world.

We are very grateful to our partners for the tremendous support they provided to host this meeting of the minds of some of the most powerful people in the field of edutainment in the world, particularly Kate Folb, Director USC Annenberg Norman Lear Centre’s Hollywood Health and Society; Victor Orozco, Economist with the World Bank’s DIME unit; Laura Costica, a researcher with the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) unit of the World Bank’s Development Research Group and whose work entails supporting researchers in designing impact evaluations of social programs and coordinating the implementation of these studies on the ground; Maria Correia, Founder of the WeVolve Program of the World Bank; and Adriana Cepeda, CEO Cinema Park, a division of Cinepolis Foundation. A very special thanks also to P N Vasanti, Director General, Centre for Media Studies, Delhi and Alka Malhotra, Communications Specialist at UNICEF India for having gone all out to support Elevate 2K18.

Through the partnership with UNICEF and CMS, we have thereafter established The Change Narratives Alliance (TCNA), which has brought together several organisations to join hands with each other and build on a common objective. With a vision to “Build a better world through stories”, the Alliance now enrolls along with media giants, research and social development organizations, various entertainment sector professionals like scriptwriters, actors, directors, creative directors, producers and various associations or unions, on important social and development issues. The aim of the interactions and engagements, which are organized between diverse professionals, is to encourage innovative narratives; shift in content correctness; and to enable creation and distribution of more pro-social content.

The partners in this Alliance include Foundations (BMGF, UNICEF), NGO’s (Population First, PFI), Research and Evaluation partners (World Banks DIME unit, CMS), Content Strategy and Storytelling Development experts (ACEE, Cinema Collective) Academic Institutions (Ashoka University), Audience Research Council (BARC India), Networks, Studios (ZEE, Star), Producers (PFI, BBC Media Action, Sesame Street, ACEE), Digital Platforms (Indian Television.Com, The Daily Eye) and Associations that govern the Industries of Media and Entertainment like the Producers Guild of India, CINTAA, Indian Film and Television Directors Association (IFTDA), Creative Council of India, Cinema Collective, Progressive Directors Alliance and Screenwriters Association (SWA).

Our identities matter to us. Who we are and why we behave in certain ways, is a deep concern to everybody. When such great forces like all of the above as well as Mr Kulmeet Makkar, CEO Producers Guild of India; Mr Partho Das Gupta, Executive Director Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC); Dr Shravan Kumar, Joint Secretary Ministry of Culture, Government of India; and Augustine Veliath, Communications Specialist, populate spaces like Elevate, diverse thoughts connect to each other at one level, and interestingly deviate at another. The path we travel in each of our lifetimes is an expansion of the many things that happen around us and which we either absorb or reject, separating the wheat from the chaff at every transformative step of the way that we travel. We may not be aware of it all the time, but we do know that when we take certain decisions, there are very important reasons behind them.

So somewhere as most of you reading this piece will agree with me, we are wired not to take things for granted, but then we go and contradict the notion ourselves when commercial considerations of the business that we are in, compel us to make evocative and fluid compositions that cable our thoughts surrender themselves to the box office.

Therefore however hard it has become now to avoid caving in to commercial considerations, the theme of Elevate 2018 was #DontCompromise.

Elevate 2K18

When we don’t compromise, we confront and when we bend to ideas that we are in disagreement with, we submit ourselves to forces which negate our identities and perpetuate a fiction that may not be the history we want our future generations to read or for that matter believe about us.

Today the world is in turmoil and the reason for it, we believe is, that the stories we have been telling each other for the last couple of decades, speak down to people. So #DontCompromise was an affirmation unleashed, that compelled us to look deep within ourselves and understand that all stories of worth are those, that resonate and therefore stories that we want should echo the sound of our times, can neither look up and speak to their listeners, nor down at those whom we captivate with our art. People only engage with and absorb those stories that they connect with, which ally with their aspirations, which guide their evolution, which impact them and their lives in metamorphic ways.

As a precursor to Elevate 2K18, the Asian Centre for Entertainment Education also launched the Raj Kapoor Awards for Excellence in Entertainment, Media, Literature and Leadership.

Few in the Indian film industry can lay claim to the title of “Showman Auteur” bestowed on Raj Kapoor by global and Indian film experts alike. Considered one of the most influential filmmakers and actors of Indian cinema, Raj Kapoor had several awards and accomplishments to his credit. This includes three National Film Awards, two nominations for Cannes Palme d'Or for Awaara (1951) and Boot Polish (1954), while his production Jagte Raho (1956) won the Crystal Globe award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Raj Kapoor was later bestowed with the Padma Bhushan in 1971 and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1987 by the Government of India. Having started life as a clapper boy at 11, and going on to work at Bombay Talkies and Prithvi Theatre, Kapoor was schooled in the aesthetic traditions of theatre and cinema. He was making films from virtually the official birth of India, when the violence of partition marked the transition from British rule to democracy, and even without a close reading of history it's clear that undercurrents in his work often measured the changes, both economic and social, in Indian society. At the same time, R.K. Films was a commercial enterprise, intent on box-office success. Raj Kapoor transcended the artificial line between commercial and art cinema long before anyone in India had even spoken about the divide and what is perhaps unparalleled to date is that he made it work and how!

He wowed the critics and the box office simultaneously, be it with the romantic drama of Awaara which explored issues of identity; with its unapologetically socialist overtones of Vidya (Nargis’s character representing knowledge and the high moral ground) over Maya (Nadira’s glam vamp character representing shallow materialism) in Shree 420; Boot Polish as a response to the socio-political realities of a newly-independent India; Jaagte Raho which laid bare the hollowness of materialism, or even his later ventures like Bobby and Ram Teri Ganga Maili, apparently romantic dramas but which clearly underlined the class and religious divides, and in the case of Sangam introduced the Indian audience to a westernised heroine. With Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram, Raj Kapoor explored themes of inner beauty, love, desire and redemption; Prem Rog was a stinging critique of patriarchal hypocrisy and a ringing endorsement of widow remarriage.

His filmography (as director, producer and actor) shows that he was drawn to substantive issues of the time. He took his cinematic influences, his nationalist ideology and humanist world view, and infused them into mainstream cinema. As a noted film expert, James Nolen said: “He's looking at telling stories in different ways and keeping it fresh, but also keeping his audience entertained which is really important, too. Raj is amazing in that respect. I don't know if there's an equivalent anywhere.”

As Raj Kapoor said in a documentary made by his daughter, “Money, position and success - all are secondary. The basic thing is tomorrow: the knowledge and promise that tomorrow will be better than today. Nothing else matters.” (Raj Kapoor Speaks, Ritu Nanda). Perhaps, it is this insistence on the essence of reality infused in the dream-like that makes the showman inimitable, even today. As a tribute to his legacy as well as the tremendous talent that has flowed from his family over the next three generations in the last 50 years, an award has been instituted in Raj Kapoor's name: ‘Raj Kapoor Awards for Excellence in Entertainment Media, Literature and Leadership’, which will felicitate the most powerful creative work from across all disciplines.

Raj Kapoor Awards

On a grant provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), The Third Eye program worked on a project to study the impact of popular storytelling on issues related to family planning upon audiences of Indian television/ entertainment, from across the entire spectrum of demographics in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Specifically, this intervention seeked to influence 1) Delaying child marriage; 2) Delaying early childbirth; 3) Spacing births; 4) Valuing girl child/ Discouraging son preference; 5) Male participation in family planning decision-making and practice.

Objectives of the study were:
• Increase knowledge about the benefits of spacing, delaying child marriage and childbearing, valuing the girl child, and active participation of men in planning for and practicing Family Planning.
• Influence attitudes, norms and self-efficacy of the target population in a positive direction to delay marriage of females till at least 18 years of age, delay childbearing, space children with modern FP methods and limit family, recognize and accept the important role of men in FP, reduce son preference and value the girl child.
• Test the efficacy of short duration, high-intensity story interventions in popular and mainstream television to affect change in deep-seated beliefs and behaviours.
• Forge lasting alliances with broadcast media, production houses and eminent media and research personalities to scale-up the program.
• Advocacy for sustained story interventions with out-of-the-box, low-cost innovations.

The research aimed to understand how viewers, primarily underserved lower socio-economic categories of Socio Economic Classifications (SEC) C/D and R2-4, respond to compelling storytelling and whether this form of communication influences change in their attitudes and behaviours towards deeply rooted social norms surrounding reproductive health and family planning. Efforts were made to reach out to several demographics mentioned above and thus, interventions were made in various genres, like Reality Shows, Comedy shows, Fiction drama and Talk shows, which appeal to this diverse population.