EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW
What triggered the idea for you?
We often see things happening around us that disturb us but don’t know how to intervene. I thought TV is a very strong medium and if I can use it to reach every home, maybe a small dent can be made. The idea is to try and bring about an attitudinal change. We often want to point fingers at the government — sarkar yeh nahin karti — but there are many issues for which we are the solutions. We have to decide whether we want to think a certain way or not. Crimes like these are planned in bedrooms but you can’t have a policeman sitting in every bedroom.
So the entire attempt is to talk to every Indian and see whether we understand an issue, and if after understanding the issue fully, we can have a change of heart. Through these shows, we’ve tried to bring out the personal angle, the sociological angle and, depending on different issues, the economic and, sometimes, the legal angle. Sometimes we have focussed on the way forward because we’ve found somebody has found a solution in different parts of the country. Can we learn from that?
This is an effort to take 13 topics, one at a time, and really attempt a 360 degree perspective on it. What I understand from it is what I am presenting. For me, the journey is an internal journey of my change. I believe each one of us has to see if it makes sense to them.
After the idea struck you, did it take a long time for you to cave into it? To decide to risk moving from cinema to TV.
It started with Uday Shankar from the Star Network offering me a game show. But I wasn’t interested so he said, “Okay, think of something you’d like to do.” When I thought about it, I was pretty clear only two things would interest me on TV. Either something which is fiction, which is not suitable for films and needs a longer, episodic telling. Or a show which has the potential to bring about dynamic social change. He said, “Okay, tell me when you are ready.”
For the first four to six months, I thought about it alone. At most, I shared it with Kiran. Once the thought became slightly more concrete, I called Satya (Satyajit Bhatkal), who is a friend of mine and asked him, is this idea making sense to you? I needed someone I could trust completely. Being a celebrity it becomes difficult for me to go to the grassroots and have people talk to me in an unbiased manner. So I needed people who are unknown, who can go out there, but whose ears I trust, whose eyes I trust, whose sensibility I trust, whose sense of judgement I trust, whose value systems I trust. And that is Satya, whom I have known for 30 years now. I told him, he got excited, so we put together a team of four — Svati Chakravarty Bhatkal, Lancy Fernandes, him and me.
Initially I said, let’s work for six months, start our research, then we’ll take a call. I said, “I want you all to know this is still just a process. It may or may not land us a TV show. But at the very least, we’ll all learn something.” After six or eight months, all of us felt it was working. So a good two years after Uday had first come to me, I called him back and said, “I’m ready.” Did I feel nervous about it? I always feel nervous about everything I do. So that’s nothing new. Obviously, we worked with a lot of passion and love, so we want the show to connect with people. And that concern is always there whether it will connect or not. But the reaction to the first episode has been so overwhelming and so heartwarming, it really brought tears to all our eyes. We are thrilled.
What was the toughest part to crack about the show?
See, all these issues are actually already covered by print or television media. What I felt is if we cover them in a very knowledge-based way, or in current news style, the stories have no emotional impact. My purpose is to actually touch people’s hearts. That is the thing that we spent a lot of time figuring out. What I find when I research a topic is the same, but if I present it to you in an interesting and emotional way, it can change you, and change the way you look at or think about something.
Television viewers are famously fickle. Was there any resistance from the channels to your desire to make the show one-and-a-half hours?
I have never done TV in my life, so it’s not a medium I know much about. So yes, the length was always an issue. I wanted it to be an hour but I found I couldn’t fit in all the aspects of the research because in one hour, remember, there are ads also. Right now, I am getting 66 minutes of content in a 90 minute slot. These are huge topics. It’s very difficult to tell you all about it in one-and-half hours. But we are trying to.
You are right, TV-viewing habits are fickle. People tend to switch channels. The reason I chose the Sunday morning slot was because it’s considered graveyard time. But that’s the time I wanted, when nobody is watching anything else. I did not want people to have anything competitive to switch to. I wanted people to switch their TVs on for my show at 11 am and if they didn’t like it, they could switch their sets off. That’s an option you always have. But I wanted your commitment. I wanted appointment viewing. As an audience, I wanted you to take that step towards me. Ki yaar, I don’t normally watch anything at 11 am on Sunday but I’ll make the effort. I was requesting you to come.
‘There was a woman whose story we could not use. It really made me cry. She was so desolate, it’s tough to get her out of my head’
Personally, what was the biggest shock or learning for you from the foeticide story?
We often think people who are poor don’t want a girl child because of dowry and stuff. These are the preconceived notions. It was a shock for me to realise that people who are urban, well off, and highly educated are more likely to indulge in female foeticide.
One of the things we always feel is, why is our country so backward? We feel poverty and lack of education really pulls us back. Correct? This is our thought. But here with female foeticide, I realised it’s got nothing to do poverty, in fact the rich indulge in it more. It’s got nothing to do with education, in fact, educated people do it more. If, intellectually, we are not rich, if our thoughts are not rich, how does it matter how much money is in our pockets? If I am not a sensible or sensitive person, then how does it matter if I know the answer to difficult physics or economics questions. That was the big learning for me in this episode.
And, of course, the fact that most men don’t know what a woman goes through. Men just don’t understand. They think theek hai abortion ho gaya. There was also this realisation that there are some crimes we don’t do alone. Who is your bhaagidaar, who is your partner in crime? A doctor! Isn’t it amazing? A doctor is someone who is supposed to save lives. But it’s a doctor who is telling you the sex of your child. Just because they wear white coats and are in a hospital room you don’t recognise it to be a crime. But it is illegal to find out the sex of a child.
In terms of the breadth of research that the team did, how many personal stories did you actually get? Were there any that particularly touched you?
We got many stories, much more than we could put in. The three stories that are in the episode really touched me, and I found it very difficult to continue with my conversations. What you do not see on TV is the part where I break down. We had to edit that out from the telecast because obviously you can’t have me crying for 10 minutes on screen.
But there was a fourth story that did not make it to the final cut, and that is the one which really made me cry. It was a girl who didn’t want to come on camera. We had shot with her and blurred her face. And she explained what she went through in a very, very raw and emotive way, as opposed to a more cohesive narrative.
‘We think we’re backward because we’re poor, illiterate. The big shock is that education has nothing to do with it. The rich kill too’
What she said is, when her child was aborted, the child was five to six months old. So she had to give birth to it, she had to deliver it after it had been killed. She explained that they put a tashla, like a metal bowl, in which the baby, the foetus, came and fell in. And she said that the sound of my baby falling in, that is something that I just cannot get out of my system. Even now, when I’m in the kitchen, and some pyaaz falls into the pateela which we cook in, I remember that sound and I just break down.
You couldn’t go with it?
We were at 66 minutes already and we couldn’t change that. We had to choose what to drop. In this case, the girl is unnamed. Even in the show we call her Anamika because she wants to keep her identity unrevealed and we respect that. The face was made fuzzy. A lot of people said the connect will be less because we can’t see the person. I didn’t agree with that. She speaks so desolately it’s difficult to get her out of one’s head.
Also, the other three women are no longer with their husbands but this woman still is. When she gave the interview, she actually didn’t tell her husband. She was just very disturbed by the incident and wanted to talk about it. So she called Svati when her husband was not around. That’s how important it was for her to speak about it. Then a couple of months later, she told her husband about the interview. At first, he was upset but then they spoke about it. For the first time, he realised what she’d been through and apologised to her. Till then, it was an unspoken thing between them. So all that came pouring out. Then I spoke to the guy and he came and met me. He said, “Now I realise what happened, what my wife went through. I shouldn’t have done that.” It was all very cathartic and moving but would have taken even more time to present.
‘There is no logic. I stopped doing ads while this show is on. I don’t know how to put it. I just didn’t feel right selling something’
What made you stop all your advertising contracts for this year?
There’s no logic in that. There’s nothing wrong in doing an ad for a product you would like to endorse, and if there’s something wrong, you shouldn’t do it in the first place. It’s not as if I’m endorsing cigarettes or alcohol or gutkha or something. Two of my endorsements were getting over before this show came on. The other three, the contract was going beyond the date, but I requested the client to relieve me while the show is on. It’s very important for me that I don’t do ads. And I’m happy to say they respected my emotions. Then there were two three other people who wanted me to sign on and I said, “No, no, I’ve stopped doing ads.” I just felt that while I’m doing this show I didn’t want to be selling something. I don’t know how to say it. It didn’t feel right to me.
How much personal time have you dedicated to this?
(laughs) All of it. Professionally, in the past two years I’ve shot for a film for about four months, Talaash. Apart from that, all my time has gone here.
You bring a sort of purity of intent to your creative commitments. Then once it’s ready, you mount super canny marketing strategies on them. How did you work the marketing strategy for this?
I’m thrilled with Star, I have to say. In the first meeting, when I told them I had the concept ready, it didn’t take two minutes for Uday to say, “I’m on.” I told him I want multiple languages, I want Doordarshan, and these are all difficult things I’m asking for. He was bang, Doordarshan, yes, multiple languages, yes. Sunday 11 am — are you sure, because nobody watches TV at that time. I said, “I’m very sure.” So he said yes. This was their attitude. Very dynamic, very supportive. The creative team, Monika Shergill and Shubrojyoti Ghosh, were fantastic to work with. I’d feared that when I enter TV, they may want me to compromise on my, as you say, purity of intent, but they were as pure about it as I was. Be it Nitin Vaidya, the head of Star Plus, or Gayatri Yadav, the marketing head. Everyone down to the digital team.
The agency they hired was O&M, and they asked me what is it you’re doing. I gave them the whole explanation, then said all our sessions are recorded, either on a dictaphone or a camera lying around, like making notes. Why don’t you have a look, it’ll give you an idea. They spent the week looking at the stuff, then came back and said our campaign is ready. They said these conversations you’ve had about shaping and conceiving the show are so interesting, that should be the campaign. It will be true to the nature of the show. So that’s how the idea came about.
Of course, Star has put its full marketing might behind it, plus we had Doordarshan’s marketing. It’s never happened before. A show on a major general entertainment channel, plus on 8 of their other channels, whether it’s Star Prabha, which is Marathi, Asianet the number one Malayalam channel, Vijay in Tamil Nadu, and in Andhra, they’ve taken another channel which is not their own. This kind of platform even cricket doesn’t get; it comes on like one channel and one Doordarshan. But I was really clear I wanted it this way. If you really want to bring about strong dynamic, attitudinal change, then you have to reach people in their own language. These problems are common to everyone, whether you’re from Kashmir or Kanyakumari. This was thought out in a very deep way. I was planning for a very long time that I want it to reach everyone, so it doesn’t end here. Through the week, I’m on Radio Mirchi, All India Radio, Big FM, Vividh Bharti, my articles come in a newspaper of every language. We have a very strong Internet site. It’s a full blitzkrieg.
Has doing these 13 stories changed you?
Yes. It has. I’ll talk more freely when all 13 are over. But let me just say that I and the entire creative team, all of us are going to go for professional therapy. We’ve been through so much raw emotion, I’ve become very brittle. I’m not kidding, we’re all going to go for group counselling. We talked about it and we really need to do it. That’s the kind of impact it has had on us.
Three months later, after its first season had ended, Aamir spoke again about his show Satya Meva Jayate:
AAMIR KHAN could have done nothing. Privilege is a blessing very few entitled Indians use for anything more than lining the already silver clouds they inhabit. But Aamir stepped up and created Satyamev Jayate (SMJ), a show unprecedented on Indian television. It wasn’t a risky thing to do in the classic sense: there were no struggles for money; no threat to life; no power structures breasted. But there were the possibilities of failure, rejection, loss of popularity — the breath cinema stars live on. Aamir didn’t linger to calculate those ephemerals. Having decided to do the show, he mounted a massive and staggeringly meticulous operation to get it right. With his core team of three, Satyajit and Svati Chakravarty Bhatkal and Lancelot Fernandes — co-travellers, he says, he’d have been crippled without — Aamir went about acquiring 1,600 hours of background footage, capturing personal testimonies from across the country, ferreting out experts, statistics, legal positions and solutions. On the sets, he had 10 hidden cameras so guests wouldn’t feel their intrusive eye, and generated more footage per episode than entire seasons of other shows on Star TV Network.
There are many other impressive statistics. Over a billion mentions of SMJ on the Internet; between Rs 27 lakh and Rs 2 crore raised for each of the organisations mentioned in the 13 episodes, and many real-time administrative and political impacts. But Aamir’s real achievement is to have leveraged his stardom to reposition the moral spotlight on public discourse, and bring scale, sensitivity, nuance and a civilising intelligence to issues of burning importance, neglected too long by the media. The intangible ripple effect of this will always remain unmeasured: thought seeds sown in unknown hearts; ginger windows opened in anonymous minds. Emotional transformations unrecorded.
There have been carpers who have slung specious shots at Aamir even for this. Journalists who’ve sneered that SMJ is a personal brand-building exercise. Tweeters like Taslima Nasreen who’ve wondered why SMJ should get so much attention when there have been civil rights groups fighting in the trenches for so long. And other sundry critics who’ve claimed SMJ is the noble equivalent of Star’s saas-bahu serials.
These seem nothing but the pincer moves of the habitually negative. Anyone who sees the show would know that SMJ does not set itself up as competition to civil rights groups: it sees itself as their amplifier. Within the confines of a television show, SMJ has done everything it possibly could: it has made difficult issues like female foeticide, alcohol abuse and water crisis seem the most engrossing of stories with a rare dignity and devotion to complexity. In a country parched for serious engagement, this is welcome rain.
Coming from a world of entertainment, do you feel your intense immersion in issues through SMJ has changed you? Looking back, do you feel you were in a cocoon before?
That is certainly true. It’s been a huge learning. At an emotional level, the journey of these two years – and the background research and testimonies is much vaster than what you see on the show – has been very shocking and heartbreaking and difficult to deal with it at times. But it’s also been extremely inspiring. You marvel at the human spirit, at ordinary people who have no obvious signs of power like money or position but show such courage.
But the biggest change is at the level of information, my knowledge of what is happening around me. Take a simple thing like I didn’t know where the water in my house came from. I had no idea till we began our research. Now I know it comes from a place a 100 kilometres away and that people living there do not have water because of me. Or take the issue of untouchability. Given my upbringing, it was difficult for me to believe it’s so rampant even in a city like Mumbai. So much has come to light for me. I feel I’ve come to understand – actually understand is the wrong word because I’m still grappling to try and understand it, but I have come to know so much more. At least in terms of observing what is happening around me, I have improved. I feel I’ve grown up as a human being. The other change is, at the level of human interaction. I’ve lived a very sheltered life. Until we did this show, I’d probably never have had the opportunity of meeting people from so many different regions, languages, backgrounds and social strata. That has been extremely enriching.
Are you finding it difficult to fit back into your own circle? Do you feel an information divide separates you from their concerns now?
Well, not yet, because right now my circle is still limited to the SMJ team. But I have to say this. I recently started shooting for Dhoom 3 and I found the team on set – technicians, spot-boys, assistant directors – everyone had been watching the show and they wanted to discuss the people or issues on the show or tell me their own stories. I think a lot of people around me, who otherwise would not have been aware, have connected with the show, so I don’t find them that out in the cold.
‘I asked my team what is the one thought that emerges from the millions of messages? They thought about it and said: ‘I’m not alone’
There’s also something interesting I want to share with you. We’ve hired a company called Persistent to do the analytics on the show’s impact. They have a team of 500 people whose brief has been to capture all the discussions, messages or anything said about SMJ in the last few months in the digital domain. They have collected more than a billion traces, which makes SMJ the most talked about show on earth. I asked this team one question: can you tell me in one sentence, what is the one thought that emerges for you from the millions of messages that have been flying around on the show? They thought about it and the one line thought the team has come back with is: “I am not alone.” That’s a very big thought and also a very personal thought. Because people shared such intense personal stories on the show, the response has also been very personal. After the show on untouchability, for instance, we got many messages from young people saying from here on, at least in my environment, I am never going to discriminate. That’s a very big statement. In other ways, for instance, people who’ve suffered from child sexual abuse have realized that almost one out of every two people has suffered something similar so they feel less isolated. So to return to your question, am I able to connect to people around me after SMJ, the answer is yes. Because they have all been part of this journey, I feel I’m able to connect even better.
Are there particular stories that specifically affected you the most?
It’s difficult to say that because every story affected me in different ways. Take the story of Chandrapati, who’s about 65-70 years old, and her daughter Seema from Haryana. Chandrapati’s son Manoj was brutally murdered for marrying Babli, in an honour killing, or what I call dishonour killing. Now these two women living in a small village are threatened by the khaps, boycotted by the entire community, no one sells them milk, no one even sells them a kalash to take the ashes of Manoj. They are threatened with death, offered bribes, brought under political pressure to withdraw their case against the murderer. But these women in a tiny village have so much courage, they just don’t cave in. And that made me think of ourselves in cities, in positions of great privilege, if some party gives a bandh call, or some vigilante group asks for a ban, we all cave in.
There has been some criticism of the show from some quarters. That at times it reinforced stereotypes, for instance, of women as appendages of men. That the show dumbed down some of its messaging, or was not radical enough or skirted some uncomfortable issues. How would you respond to this? While constructing the show did you hold back at any time so you could connect with masses on what is essentially a general entertainment channel?
No, not at all. At no point did we do that. Every one of us in the team – and specially Satya Bhatkal, Svati Chakravarty and Lancy without whom this show would just not have been possible – have approached this with a great degree of integrity. We have not compromised on anything. What you see in the show is what we have felt. Never once have we felt, lets not say this because it’s not a popular thought. Why would we pick up issues of untouchability or dowry if we wanted to avoid disturbing topics that would alienate my audience base? As far as gender equality goes, there is no doubt in my mind that we are strongly recommending it in everything we have said. One of my favourite songs is the one that says Mujhe kya bechega rupaiya. If some people didn’t get that, I guess that’s there problem. Quite honestly, I don’t feel the need to spend my time responding to this criticism because there are some people who are very cynical and have a negative approach no matter what you do. Thankfully there are just a handful of them. So, to those who say I played safe or did this to earn money or build my image, my simple response is they should certainly convey what they want to in a programme when they make it. They are free to do that. As far as I am concerned, we left absolutely no stone unturned in following what we believe in.
‘I don’t give any value to the TRPs. Seven thousand boxes across the country can’t tell me what India watches’
Also, you know Shoma, we had almost 15 guests on each show. If even one of them had felt that we did not accord them enough dignity or felt disappointed or regretted coming on the show because they did not like the way we portrayed their issue, I would have felt we had failed. That is a criticism I would really have taken to heart.
Did you have to struggle with your stardom and how not to make the show end up being about you? Is that generally a riddle for you? That, on the one hand, you’re able to do certain things only because you’re a star with a certain brand value yet you don’t want to be the focus.
No, that was not a struggle for me at all. I’m really grateful that the entire Star Network just allowed me to do what I wanted and was extremely supportive. Initially I was a little worried that, being a general entertainment channel, their creative people might try to skew the show in a particular way, but Monica and Shubro were superb. They were as pure about the intent of the show as us. We were very clear from the start that here is an issue and we ourselves want to understand it in all its complexity and convey that to our audiences. I’m merely the via media, asking questions, listening, the medium through which the strength and expertise of survivors and experts or whoever is in front of me is reaching people. I couldn’t have known this but Satya told me that just as an exercise, because we spend so much time on the edit table, he had calculated how much time I talk on the show and how much others and it turns out I talked for less than 25 percent of the time.
So no, that was not the struggle. The struggle for me was, will I be able to have a meaningful conversation? I’m not a trained journalist; I have no experience in asking questions. For 25 years, I’ve always answered questions. And I’ve noticed that with some journalists I just clamp up, I don’t know why but I don’t feel like talking to them. And there are some journalists with whom I find I’m suddenly unloading and opening up and saying things I would have otherwise not thought of telling anyone. For SMJ, I needed to speak to people about very traumatic and personal experiences. I was frightened about this all the time. Would I be able to connect in a way that would make each of them feel like sharing their life story with me, would I be able to draw them out?
To make sure we broke the ice, I met all my guests for lunch a day before the shoot. Then in the studio, we shot for almost 8 hours for every episode that ultimately would last an hour. With many of the personal testimonies, we let the conversation run for hours because I did not want to hustle them or force their story down any preset agenda. We wanted them to tell it at their own pace. So with Vijay Simha in the episode on alcohol, for instance, his story in the show lasts for 18 minutes, but we spoke on camera for two hours. Then there was Rizwan’s mother and Kaushal Pawar in the untouchability episode. Their stories were like a rake through my heart. And with each story the challenge I felt was, how can I make sense of this? What sense do you make of it? How can you make things better for the person? How can I ask them questions when all you want to do is just hug them and somehow protect them. Those were my challenges, not how to deal with my stardom.
You have been critical of the media in the past. Do you think SMJ stepped into a vacuum left by the media, which should really be focusing on all these issues?
It’s not strictly true that the media doesn’t report these issues. A lot of our research, in fact, is based on media reports from the past. I guess the issue is there is not enough analysis in the media; you get surface facts but not the reasons why things are happening or how they affect people. Two, I think certain sections of the media are really disconnected from ordinary people and what they are concerned about. What do you I want to know when I’m reading a newspaper or turning on the TV? Do I only want to know about some political game that is happening? Or who will be the next President? For sure, that is news but I think too much of emphasis is placed on political gossip and fighting which feels very immaterial to people’s lives. That should only be the chutney on the side but it’s been turned into the main meal. People are interested in issues of water and pesticides and medicine and foeticide but the dots have to be joined for them. How does all this impact them? I think we were able to join the dots for our viewers. There are some media houses who do this – TEHELKA is one good example of that – but I think there is scope for many more.
One of the things I liked about SMJ was that the personal stories were handled with a lot of dignity and delicacy. The show could so easily have turned into a trauma fest, where you just juiced people for their stories. But this did not feel voyeuristic in any way.
I’m really glad you say that because you are right, SMJ could have just focused on personal stories. They were so engrossing each of them could have carried a whole show. But our intention was to take an issue and understand it from a 360 degree view – the personal, political, social and legal aspects. We also wanted to empower our viewers by telling them about their rights, where the law stood, get experts voices working in the field for 30-35 years and also bring you people who have found the way forward. In the water episode, for instance, we tried to present several examples of how to deal with the problem. If you are living in a village, this is what you need to do. If you’re living in a city, this is what you need to do. And here is Shanta Sheela Nayar who has done it on a large scale in Chennai. Yesterday, the Water Resource and Supply Minister of Maharashtra came to meet me and he wanted me to connect him to Shanta Nayar, so he could get her advice. Our basic point was that unless we start thinking of these issues collectively as a society, ultimately, it’s not going to be good for anyone either.
There were some reports that the show did not get the TRP rating Star was expecting. Is that true?
If it were true, why would Star want a second season? But either way, I don’t think that’s important. I don’t give any value to TRP ratings because my common sense tells me that seven thousand boxes across India is not going to tell me what India watches. I don’t know how people take this stuff seriously. It’s really daft. In all of Bihar, there are only three boxes. It’s a joke, that’s why I haven’t bothered to react to these media reports. My assessment of the show comes from other sources. I’ve already told you about our feedback from the internet and, mind you, internet penetration in India is just 15 percent but, given that there have been over a billions mentions of SMJ, it feels as if we had almost 100 percent engagement from that segment. Now with the 85 percent of our population who do not use the internet, how will I ever know how many of them watched the show? For that, I did several things. I went on every radio channel. Radio Mirchi, which covers 25 centres, Big FM which covers 45 centres, All India Radio which covers 174 centres, which means it reaches even where there is no TV. The feedback I have got through being on radio is absolutely unbelievable. Towns whose names I had not heard, villages which I didn’t know even existed. All sorts of people have called in and said their entire mohalla watches it. I’ve had calls from students, teachers, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, villagers, farmers, women across the country. So I have no doubt about the scale at which SMJ has connected with people.
Have there been a lot of real life impacts from the show? How has the political class responded?
All of it’s been really dynamic. We’ve had a lot of calls from farmers, for example, asking about organic farming, so my team made an all-India list of every farmer doing organic farming, with a state-wise break up and contact details and I read this out over All India Radio. After I met Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot, he consulted the Chief Justice and set up a fast track court on female foeticide within 48 hours. Then, already five or six states have announced that they would be providing generic medicines in their states like Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu have. There have been innumerable raids on illegal clinics and many people have lost their licenses. After the healthcare episode, Shanta Kumar, who is the Chairman of the Standing Parliamentary Committee on FDI in pharmaceuticals, asked us to share our findings with him, so we spent three hours with his committee in Parliament.
Just a couple of days ago, as I’ve already mentioned, the Maharashtra water minister came to my house at seven in the morning to discuss ways of combating the water crisis in the state. Chief Justice of India, Altamash Kabir told us he was going to take up the issue of the Vrindavan widows and I think the Supreme Court has already taken suo moto notice of it. So a lot has been happening off screen as well.
