All’s not well with Bollywood

Education is a bit like broccoli. We all know it is good for us, but most of us have resisted it, at some point or the other, in our lives. Broccoli has more takers if served with tomatoes and fine cheese than plain boiled. So with education. Dress it up differently, don’t force it down the throat, and it goes down better. Which brings me to Hollywood and healthcare. Most people don’t think the two words have much to do with each other. In real life, however, surgeons and the showbiz are coming together.

Dr Atul Gawande, the American physician of Indian origin, and author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, tellingly showcases the trend. His book hammers home a simple but vital message: no matter how “expert” you may be, pre-planning and following a well-designed checklist produces better outcomes in medicine as well as other spheres.The book made it to the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list in 2010. But Dr Gawande has not confined himself to being a surgeon and a best-selling writer. He has been talking about the the ideas underlining The Checklist Manifesto for some years now to fellow surgeons and other groups. In 2008, he met with writers and producers of ER, a popular American medical drama television series that aired on NBC. He made his point about the importance of the WHO Safer Surgical Care Initiative through dramatic stories from real life. The result: an hour-long episode. It was aired in March 2009, and was viewed by some 10 million people. The day after the episode was telecast, 150-odd surgeons of a medical centre in Brooklyn, New York, gathered to discuss adoption of the surgical safety checklist at their hospital. The clip from ER was also shown to delegates at the World Health Assembly in Geneva.
Not all doctors and surgeons are as eloquent as Dr Gawande, but the idea of bringing medical experts and entertainers
together for public good is one that is gathering steam not only in the United States but worldwide.
Last week, I met a woman who has been involved in catalysing this trend of providing entertainment industry professionals with accurate and timely information for health storylines. Sandra de Castro Buffington, one of the speakers at the 5th International Entertainment Education Conference, which just concluded in Delhi, is the director of Hollywood, Health & Society, a programme at Los Angeles’ University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Ms Buffington’s organisation helps screenwriters and producers to embed public health messages in Hollywood films and prime-time television serials in the United States. Now, Ms Buffington and Hollywood are looking beyond.
In May this year, Hollywood, Health & Society brought some of Hollywood’s noted storytellers to Mumbai to get a feel of how people in the city deal with key health challenges — tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS etc. The writers met Ramesh Sippy, chairman of the Film and TV Producers Guild of India and other showbiz stalwarts. They watched ragpickers at work in garbage dumps, talked to slum dwellers about water and sanitation problems, and interacted with NGOs working with sex workers. The idea was to understand the problems as well as possible low-cost, effective solutions. The team of writers also visited small health clinics serving rural and urban communities in South Africa. In both India and South Africa, the American screenwriters interacted with their counterparts in the local television and film industry.
When I heard Ms Buffington speak at the conference, I was intrigued. “Why?” I asked her during a coffee break. The average American is famously insular. Why should he or she care about the disease profile of Mumbai or Johannesburg’s slum dwellers or the challenges in implementing public health interventions among poor communities in distant places? Ms Buffington, who is of Brazilian origin, and has a masters degree in public health, broke into a big grin. “Simple,” she said. “Passion sells. Powerful ideas sell, no matter from where they originate. Diseases no longer respect boundaries. Malaria is not exotic. It is being reported even in the US. We can’t afford to remain insular. Such diseases may have originated elsewhere. But we can’t shut our eyes to them. We take American screenwriters to storytellers elsewhere. We let them see for themselves how other communities are dealing with health problems that are now global in nature. We are inspired by India. We do not ‘embed’ ideas into storylines ourselves. We simply offer the facts, the insight and the exposure to our screenwriters. A TV or a film viewer in the US is interested to see how someone is dealing with what appears to be an intractable problem.”
Bollywood’s Ramesh Sippy is one of those who has reportedly showed interest in the idea of having something similar to Hollywood, Health & Society in Mumbai. The time may be just right. Once, a regular Bollywood film plot consisted of a hero, a heroine, a vamp, a villain, the hero’s mother, assorted other cranky elders, a flotilla of friends, relatives, nosy neighbours, the comic artist, and the hangers-on. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. There were complications, songs, dances, and after numerous twists and turns, when the scriptwriter had exhausted his imagination, it all ended, enveloping the good and great in happiness. The bad plunged to fiery doom. Today, Bollywood’s protagonists don’t just have to deal with their human co-stars, they also have to factor in the dozens of products which are strategically embedded in the storyline. According to trade magazines, Bodyguard, the Salman Khan starrer not only played up the megastar and Kareena Kapoor, his romantic interest, but also a whole range of products — from luxury cars to Sony Vaio notebooks to mosquito repellants. The device, known as “product placement”, has been operational for many years. What about the next stage? What about embedding public health messages in the storyline of popular TV soaps and mainstream cinema?
You still need the doctor, the health worker, the medicines and functioning hospitals. But the all-powerful Bollywood could play a pivotal role in getting key health messages across if the surgeons (and other medical professionals) started hanging out with screenwriters a little more.

The writer, a senior journalist, writes on development issues in India and emerging economies.
She can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee@gmail.com