CULTURE WARRIOR: (From top) Mallika Dutt, a poster of ICED, and a Badmash comic strip which also spoofs racial profiling in the US

Mallika Dutt was once a successful corporate lawyer with her name on the door of her office. Now she’s producing a video game and she couldn’t be more excited. I Too Can End Deportation, or ICED, is slated for launch in February and Mallika can barely keep up with the media buzz. “I never thought I would see the day when CNN would call and I would say to someone, can you take a message,” she laughs.

Immigration is a red-hot topic in American politics these days. ICED’s very name is a play on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement department whose job is to enforce immigration law and deport people staying in the country illegally. “The game lets you get into the skin of someone going through the deportation system,” says Dutt, 45.

Among the characters is an Indian-American high school student, a Haitian asylum seeker, a man without documents from Latin America, a Japanese student and a European woman who thinks she is legal. The characters try to win a green card, gaining and losing points as they confront simple choices — should I jump that turnstile, did I remember to send in a change of address form to the government, and so on. “It shows how the system is stacked against you,” says Dutt.

ICED came about when Dutt’s organisation, Breakthrough, was approached by students in New York to do a multimedia project on deportation. “I’ve never played a video game in my life,” admits Dutt with a chuckle. But that didn’t stop her. After all, she’d never started a women’s organisation before she helped co-found Sakhi in New York. She had not produced a music video either before she roped in composer Shantanu Moitra, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and singer Shubha Mudgal for the award-winning album Mann ke Manjeerey in 2000. “Mallika spoke with such confidence and conviction about the project I didn’t doubt her ability as a producer for a minute,” recalls Shubha Mudgal.

Others did. Dutt remembers she had plenty of “Who the hell is Mallika” moments. The music industry was sceptical. Activists in the women’s movement wondered why she was using a male composer and a male lyricist for an album about women’s rights.

Dutt was unfazed. In 2000, when she started Breakthrough, which deals with issues such as violence against women, her aim was to spread awareness about human rights. Her music video did just that; it reached out to 30 million people.

“Part of the problem of the progressive movement is that you tend to speak to your own allies,” says Dutt. “I could recite chapter and verse of international legal conventions and no one in my family understands a word of what I say. But Mann ke Manjeerey came out and they immediately got it.

“Growing up in Calcutta as the only female grandchild in her joint family (her father was in the carpet business), Dutt remembers bristling when her grandmother would set different rules for her because she was a girl. Her friend Micky Bhatia, a Mumbai psychoanalyst who met her first at Modern High School in Calcutta, remembers Dutt was always different. “She asked questions that others didn’t, like ‘Have you had sex’ at the first meeting,” she says. She also got two double promotions in school, and, says Bhatia, never let her forget it. “Choti mirchi badi jhaal hai (the little chilli is very spicy),” says Bhatia. Dutt is 4 feet 10 inches.

Dutt later left for the United States and joined Mount Holyoke College on a scholarship to study international affairs. She then went to Columbia University and NYU Law School. Before founding Breakthrough she was with the Human Rights and Social Justice Program at the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi office.

Not all projects have been as successful as Mann ke Manjeerey and generated as much buzz as ICED. Breakthrough, which has offices in India and the US, has taken on other hot button social issues. Its HIV campaign, What Kind of Man Are You, tackled the uncomfortable truth that “80 per cent of married women are infected by their husbands or partners.” Dutt says focus groups showed the reaction to that campaign was mixed. Men in Karnataka thought the campaign was fair. “Men in New Delhi were really pissed off,” she recalls. “They said you should also ask what kind of a woman I am married to.”

Using popular culture, whether it’s music albums or video games, to build a “culture of human rights” has its limitations. “Pop culture is a one-day wonder kind of place,” admits Dutt. “The hope is to challenge and subvert popular culture — take a Kajol and Shah Rukh scene and deconstruct it.”

The music video cost about $40,000, a fraction of what they usually cost, says Dutt, and has been a collaborative effort with schools, programmers and designers. “ICED will be downloadable through its own website www.icedgame.com and will launch on President’s Day in the US, February 18, to remind Americans about the importance of human rights for all who live in the US,” says Dutt.

These days Dutt has her hands full. Breakthrough India is working on educating women about how to use the recently passed Prevention of Domestic Violence Act. In January and February it is bringing a Tri-Continental film festival to Indian cities (it will be in Calcutta on February 8, 9 and 10) to “reach out to young people on human rights issues and engage audiences in discussions that are common across the global South.” And of course, there is ICED. The common thread, as always, is culture.

“Culture is what we swim in,” says Dutt. “I want to build a human rights culture, as opposed to ending human rights violations.”