Mallika Dutt Is Changing the Way We Think ... In an Entertaining Way
By Priya Bhayana

Breakthrough is one of the hippest desi non-profits around. Rallying everyone from rock band Junoon to MTV to Alice Walker around their captivating slogan, "Building Human Rights Culture,"' Breakthrough has addressed issues as serious as immigrant rights in the US and the spread of HIV/AIDS in India. Using media, education and pop culture, the organization is driving an unusual and entertaining vehicle to change our attitudes, perceptions and ability to be compassionate towards each other.

EGO Columnist Priya Bhayana sat with the charismatic founder Mallika Dutt [left] to discuss her motivation, inspiration and goals for Breakthrough.

	Breakthrough Website

How did you think of the concept of Breakthrough?
I’ve been doing the same work for the last twenty odd years, and have done that work in a lot of different capacities - as a student and as an activist. I began to feel like we had developed a vocabulary and a way of speaking about human rights that didn’t include people in the conversation. Either we were talking about human rights in spaces that were conferences or with the same 500 people you met over and over again.

I also became concerned was that we weren’t really reaching young people. We didn’t really have a language and a vocabulary that spoke to young people. At that point I was in India and the whole Bollywood, Indie pop world, was such an integral part of the cultural identity of people. So I started to explore how to bring the world of media/entertainment/popular culture together with the world of human rights.

The first thing I did was speak to a lot of people in the media world - music channels, music labels, Sony, Virgin, BNG etc. I decided to focus on women’s rights as a first issue because that was the thing that I’d been working on for the longest. Our first project was the release of Man ke Manjeere: An Album of a Woman’s Dream, and that music video ended up being a huge huge huge success. SO that was really the thinking behind Breakthrough.

Explain the slogan for Breakthrough ‘building human rights culture”.
We believe as an organization that human rights are not about violations, but about a vision and a set of values. If we articulate and understand human rights as values that are part of how we choose to live our lives, then we become more proactive in creating the circumstances that lead to those outcomes, rather than always intervening in human rights after violations have taken place.

So instead of always coming in after people have been killed, or raped, or discriminated against, experienced physical abuse in some fashion, or been denied the right to access education or property, if we can start thinking about building a culture of human rights, then we can maybe begin to see how all of us make these set of values by which we think about ourselves, and our workplace, and our families and our homes, and society, and our countries. We also talk about building human rights culture because we believe that art, music, theatre, comedy, pop culture, are all an integral part of how these values also get articulated.

It seems you've had a lot of support from people in the entertainment world.
What’s been really wonderful for us is that people in media have really stepped forward and done excellent work for us, for either no fee or extremely subsidized rates. For example, we’ve just done this huge campaign on women in Asia HIV/AIDS in India, which launched last month. It's called “What Kind of Man are You?” and it focuses on infections within marriage. McCann Erickson created that whole campaign for us for free. We had to cover some out of pocket expenses but they were wonderful in terms of their own time, in creating this campaign, and interfacing with the TV people. Those are the ways in which support manifests itself. All of the TV dissemination partners for the campaign came on board for free. All of our television ads are running in India, in seven languages, and we’re not paying for them. So if we have to spend 100,000 dollars on producing the campaign, we usually are able to leverage about 400,000 dollars more in support.

I think that that’s really been an important way in which we’ve created alliances between human rights and entertainment industry because buying media time is not very easy. We’ve also been privileged to work with some major artists, like Alice Walker, Sarah Jones, Junoon, and Talvin Singh.

What do you think has drawn people to the organization?
Historically people in the nonprofit world have seen the entertainment industry as a separate industry. And for very good reasons, if you think about women’s rights, the way in which MTV has really objectified women’s bodies isn’t exactly in sync with what we want to see happening. But I think there are enough spaces and people within that world who would like to use their skills and resources to talk about different kinds of issues.

I think we’re one of the few organizations that just goes to people and asks "will you, or can you, collaborate?". The other thing that we’ve maintained is an incredibly high production value. That reassures our media partners - they aren’t worried about putting their name on a Breakthrough product because it’s not going to be like badly lit, or the sound is not going to suck. The production values will never be compromised because we’re a non-profit.

Breakthrough has recently paid a lot of attention to HIV/AIDS in India.
We’re focusing on HIV/AIDS in India, and on immigrant rights in the US. In India, we’ve chosen to focus on HIV/AIDS, because when we started doing our work on violence against women, we really reached out about domestic violence and women’s rights. As we were doing that work, we began to get feedback from people about how, for a lot of women, violence against women now had a new face, and that was HIV/AIDS.

It had a new face in a couple of different ways. One was that more and more women were being infected by their husbands; in fact that’s the majority of the infections in the country. None of these men were willing to talk about or negotiate safe sex, or really take responsibility for what was going on. The second thing was that if the woman was discovered to be positive she was being thrown out, losing the kids, losing her home, losing her job, the kind of stigma and discrimination that women faced became another layer of the already existing discrimination that they faced. So it seemed to us that this was an issue that really needed to be talked about.

The conversation in India around HIV/AIDS was totally focused around sex workers, truck drivers and target groups, when in fact it had moved into the general population. It was affecting women in very large numbers, so it was kind of building on our work on women’s rights and violence and taking it to a new phase.

How you measure success of the organization?
In India, it’s easy for us to look at media reach. For example, if our stuff is playing on Sony at certain times of the day, we know what the general viewing population is at that time. In terms of the education work, at the end of every workshop we have an evaluation. We really look at the evaluations very seriously to see whether the objectives of the workshop have been communicated effectively.

In the United States, it’s been a little bit more difficult. We’re much smaller organizationally, and also our media reach in the US is not extensive, we’re not on national TV everyday. The way we measure our effectiveness is through the workshops - attendance, response, evaluation. In terms of having having infused our ideals within people, that isn’t something we can really measure. And, it isn’t something I’m even sure you can achieve with only one training session.

It must be difficult not to get discouraged at times.
When I first started with Man ke Manjeere, I was crying every night. But I try to look at the positive things. For example, if we want to publish something in many different languages, but we don’t have the resources to, we could think that there are so many people we aren’t reaching. But the fact is that we are still reaching many people, and we can get excited about that. It’s important to not look at what is going wrong, but what is going right for the organization.

What makes a successful campaign?
Pinpointing exactly what the goal is. You need to have a very specific target audience, a very specific goal. When we started the HIV/AIDS campaign, we were told it was much too broad. We needed to pick a more specific audience. So we decided to do HIV/AIDS within marriages. When you start on a campaign, you want to be able to do everything - but you have to realize that you won’t get anything done if you go about it that way.

Images courtesy Breakthrough website