Just when you thought that the news media was dissipating itself in the purposeless eddies of irrelevance, trying to keep people excited without engaging them here comes Aamir Khan with an exquisite piece of journalism. Satyamev Jayate is a television program which is ambition in scope, thorough in research, unrelenting in questioning, singular in focus, simple in presentation and yet searing in its indictment – of much of journalism as it is currently practiced, of the medical profession, of the keepers of law, the deliverers of justice and the political leadership. Khan has shown that there is not dearth of issues, only of imagination and that the television rating points game can be played without social regression or dumbing down.

Who would have thought that an issue like female foeticide could be the stuff of prime time television and keep the country riveted? Khan is dramatic without being theatrical. He is understated but the facts are not. (Thirty million girl-children killed the womb in the past six decades – as many as were killed by starvation during Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s as China tried to catch up with the west in steel production). Khan does not let those figures be mere statistics as he drives home the terrible implications of mass murder committed within the oppressive confines of domesticity or the sterile walls of the operation theatre.

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