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Comment by kailuowang | Hacker News Reader

If seeing how the poorest live is the purpose of this trip, I am not quite sure I understand why meeting Aamir Khan, the Bollywood star, is a highlight of it and the only one that has a picture in the beautiful poster. What I do sense there is a little bit heroism - he feels like a superhero(and justly so). It's just interesting that every time I hear about Gate's foundation and the wonderful stuff they did, there were also some other high profile name mentioned, be it Warren Buffet or Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe it feels even better to work with other people who also has super hero power?

PS: I have nothing against that mentality. It's just that now I realized it I am more curious about it.

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I was startled by the mention of Aamir Khan (who I first learned about by watching the movie Three Idiots) until I did some looking up. I see that Khan is now a social activist, and he has recently been designated a program "ambassador" by UNESCO. Khan apparently cares about his country and its problems, and is using his star power to promote change.

http://movies.ndtv.com/bollywood/aamir-khan-on-time-cover-as...

http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/aamir-khan...

http://www.hindustantimes.com/photos-news/Photos-Lifestyle/a...

> If seeing how the poorest live is the purpose of this trip, I am not quite sure I understand why meeting Aamir Khan, the Bollywood star, is a highlight of it and the only one that has a picture in the beautiful poster.

To understand this, you may want to look into Aamir's show titled "Satyamev Jayate" [0]. Each episode of the show picks up various issues from healthcare, female foeticide to manual scavenging. All episodes of the show are also available online on Youtube (I assume).

[0] http://www.satyamevjayate.in

For the benefit of people not from India: Aamir Khan is a super hero around here who is leveraging that popularity to spread a lot of influence on the society and predominantly accepted as the right thing. He has been part of many serious struggles here in India - He fought against raising a dam for River Narmada which would have displaced a lot of people and disturbed nature. - He supported an anti-corruption movement

His Satyameva Jayate was a very interesting TV show that brought to light many deep rooted flaws in our system - which were never discussed or taken seriously by the society. It would take many such runs to even get people to wake up and act.

Most of his recent movies (last 10 yrs) are strongly opinionated and have some social cause in them: national pride (lagaan, Rang de basanti), education & dyslexia (taare zameen par), corruption (sarfarosh)

So, here is a person who has been successful in waking up the Indian society and doing few things himself. I think Gates is meeting the right forces which are active here.

If I understand it correctly, Aamir Khan is one of the biggest stars of Indian Cinema and all of his movies have been hit with indian public. Another big thing is, he has been associated with a TV Show, which airs on NDTV (presumably a well known channel) and DD (India's BBC). This TV Show is about perverse social situations in Indian Society and how to make India aware of its evils at the grassroots and take eradication steps. The show has been very well received.

I presume it to be a very good step, tapping into mass appeal of Indian Cinema and collaborating with an actor who has already done work in the field and understand the nuisances. For these initiatives to be successful, you have to pull force behind it. India's polio eradication schemes were massively popular because of various celebrities endorsing it day in and day out. They were the source of major line-ups at vaccination centers.

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