REPORTER:  Amos Roberts
 
BRIJ KOTHARI:  We love to escape our reality through fantasy movies. We like to express our romantic self sometimes through song. Sometimes I ask myself, what is it that you like, India? I think there are two things. One of them is cricket, and the other is Bollywood.
 
Brij Kothari believes Bollywood has the potential to transform as well as unite India. It's not simply the films, it's the subtitles he adds to them. This isn't karaoke. It turns out that subtitling popular songs is an enormously effective tool for teaching people how to read.
 
BRIJ KOTHARI:  Essentially what we've created is a context in which reading becomes an automatic process and you don't have to even think about it. Your brain will do the matching of sound and text.
 
It's Gujarati villages like this that make up Brij Kothari's laboratory. He's now spent 15 years studying the impact of same-language subtitling on literacy. For most of his life, Mahotji Motiji Thakor was illiterate.

MAHOTJI MOTIJI THAKOR (Translation):  I only studied until Grade 3, then I started doing farming work. I did want to go back to study but I couldn’t stop farming.  If I got a letter, I would not understand, so I had to take it to someone else to read. Someone who was literate.
 
The years of singing along to subtitles have made up for the missing years of school.
 
MAHOTJI MOTIJI THAKOR (Translation):  Now I can read “aajthi”, I didn’t know how to read that before. I could only read “a”, “j”, “th”, and that is all. “Aajthi sharu thay chhe”.  Now I know the whole thing.
 
Brij Kothari first had the idea for same-language subtitling when he was working on his PHD at Cornell University and studying Spanish.

BRIJ KOTHARI:   So I was studying in the US and I happened to be watching a movie, a Spanish movie, called ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ by Pedro Almodovar and it had English subtitles. The thought I had is, why don't they put Spanish subtitles on Spanish films and that way we would learn the language better. Then it was an extension, why don't they put Hindi subtitles on Hindi film songs, and perhaps India would become literate.

But would people want to watch songs with subtitles? Or would they be a distraction? Back in 1997, Kothari conducted an experiment in order to find out. At a busy railway station, he found a captive audience.
 
BRIJ KOTHARI (Translation):  Can you read that? Please look here, too. Move back, everyone please move back.

BRIJ KOTHARI:  At the railway station, what we did was have a TV showing Bollywood film songs with no subtitles and another TV with the same language subtitles and we asked people, can you compare the two and say which one do you like more.

BRIJ KOTHARI (Translation):  Can you please say something? Greetings.  Greetings.

WOMAN (Translation):  I like the things written underneath.

BRIJ KOTHARI (Translation):  Why do you like it?

WOMAN (Translation):  I like the song.

BRIJ KOTHARI (Translation):   So you like the song.  Can you sing along? Sing, please. Can you sing a little bit?  Please look there and sing that.

WOMAN (Translation):  I don’t know how to read!

BRIJ KOTHARI (Translation):  Oh, so you can’t read, but you still like it?

WOMAN (Translation):  Yes, I still like it.

BRIJ KOTHARI:  What we found overwhelmingly is that people said we like the song with the subtitles.

BRIJ KOTHARI (Translation):  Does anyone like it without the written words?  No one?  If you like it written, raise your hands. Everyone wants it written.

TEACHER (Translation):  Who likes songs?  And who watches songs?  All of you?
 
Then the experiment moved to the classroom to find out whether or not the subtitles actually improved literacy. Some children watched songs with subtitles. Some watched songs without and the control group weren't shown any movies. The conclusion? After six months, the children exposed to subtitles were reading much better than the others.

BRIJ KOTHARI:  Most of the people, children and adults, who watch our programs, if you ask them, what do you think is happening with the subtitles? They will say, oh I like it and it's fun, it's entertaining, but they will probably not tell you, oh, it's good for my reading skills. They don't know that, that it's actually good for their reading skills. Their reading skills are being practised subconsciously and almost by stealth.

It takes about three to five years' exposure to subtitles to turn someone who's virtually illiterate into a confident reader. Kothari's idea has now caught on. There are ten different subtitled song programs on regional broadcasters across India each week, reaching around 200 million people. The videos are subtitled in a small office in Mumbai, by Kothari's NGO, PlanetRead. He says ratings for song programs on television are around 15% higher when they have subtitles and PlanetRead is on the brink of a watershed deal.

BRIJ KOTHARI:  So we've got the Broadcasting Corporation of India to agree this is a good idea in principle and should be scaled up nationally. What we've asked for is at least 50 programs a week in all of India's languages to have same-language subtitles every week.
 
ANJALI PATIL:  When I got to know about it, I was…. it's something which makes you feel good about being a celebrity.
 
Rising star Anjali Patil had her big Bollywood break in this film - Chakravyu. She's pleased that her song and dance routine will do more than merely entertain.
 
ANJALI PATIL:  It was the very same reaction whenever I would read a brilliant script. It's simple, but it's very effective and you were like, wow, I could never think about songs being so helpful or being so effective and I was really, you know, I was really thrilled to see it.
 
For the villagers who've been watching the subtitled songs the longest, the difference is plain to see. Farmer Mahotji Motiji Thakor knows he won't get ripped off at the market now that he can read commodity prices in the newspaper.
 
MAHOTJI MOTIJI THAKOR (Translation):  If I have to find out the price of raw rice grains, 295 or 298, I can read it.  When I sell cotton, I can check the price in the newspaper, and if the price is right, we would take it, otherwise not.  That’s the advantage I have.

BRIJ KOTHARI:  So, for me it's been hugely satisfying to know that you can actually bring reading to a billion people just with an idea and I've now gotten even more ambitious, actually. I feel that, well, it's only a billion people in India we're making read, but imagine if this goes to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh. They all watch Bollywood-style music videos. They could be subtitled in their own language. So to know it's a billion people today, I think I have ten more years to get at least two more billion people reading in their everyday lives.
 
ANJALI RAO:  The man with the plan for global literacy, and more power to him. You can find out more about that PlanetRead project on our website.
 
Reporter/Camera
AMOS ROBERTS

Producer
ALLAN HOGAN
 
Translations/Subtitling
DIPAK MANKODI
NITAL DESAI
SUJITH NAIR

Editor
WAYNE LOVE

22nd April 2014