Taare Zameen Par

Four days after I first watched TZP, I went to PVR and watched it

again by default. Here is what I felt during the course of the film:

1. I cried on three occasions, exactly when Aamir’s cries on screen.

And this was exactly how it went when I watched the film for the first

time, too!

1. I thought Aamir had lessened the impact of the first half by

concentrating on dyslexia, and not on how some children just don’t like

to study the usual subjects. Upon second viewing, I don’t think it

lessened the impact at all. In fact, because of dyslexia, Aamir could

romp home the point that children suffering from this can be brought

into the mainstream. Also, Aamir was able to tear down his

protagonist’s’duffer’ image with the ammunition of dyslexia.

Otherwise, he would have landed in a moral dilemma: are schools good or

bad for children.

1. I felt the first half was quite long and engagingly painful the

first time round. But this time, I felt it was short and someone had

done some very crisp editing where all the boring bits are taken out.

And where some seemed to be separate sequences, he’s done a mosaic and

inserted them in the song sequences itself. Succinct thinking.

1. Though I wasn’t a duffer at school, I could still relate to the

protagonist because Aamir the director takes us inside the mind of

9-year-old Ishaan Awasthi. Close-ups of the poodle in front of his

classroom window, swinging on the gate, seeing numbers and alphabets

dance in his book. they all make you feel one with him. There’s so

much empathy created in his every naughty act, be it bringing his eyes

together to the middle of his forehead when his mother says, ’Ishaan,

concentrate!’ to scowling at his father when his mother calls off his

dad’s bluff that he’s leaving home because of his bad showing at school.

1. I thought there is room for improvement. But on second viewing, I

felt the film was good as it was, because I felt the film was viewed,

reviewed and revised a million times by the perfectionist Aamir, before

it made the final cut.

1. Aamir’s idea of getting Ram Madhvani to direct the song’Bheja

Kum’ which scored on photography and sophistication that you come to

expect from TV commercials, was a great way of infusing some excitement

into Ishaan’s life. Similarly, showing Pandey’s documentary on children

when the credits roll at the end was a masterstroke. By this, Aamir is

saying that Ishaan could be anyone, a Chinese, a Nepali, a rich or a

poor child because Ishaan belongs to just one age: Innocence.

1. On a working day, I saw several people dragging themselves out of

bed to watch the 10am show at PVR. Some collegegoers were heard saying,

"I know many guys like Ishaan who had the same problem man, and I

thought they were just dumb!" If the film was an eye-opener to them,

their comments were an eye-opener to me.

1. The distributors problem with multiplex owners over TZP and

Welcome has helped TZP atleast at all the PVRs in the country at the

expense of Welcome. Take my case. I had gone to see Welcome at PVR in

the morning, but at the ticket window, I realised there was only one

show of Welcome at 10pm. So the man behind the counter handed me a

ticket of TZP instead saying, ’I have only one ticket left.’ Left with

no option, I bought it. and didn’t regret!

AND THIS IS HOW MY FIRST REVIEW WENT.

It tugs at your heartstrings. It makes you reach for the tissues.

It makes you laugh. It makes you happy. And you go back home with a lesson for

life. That’s the remarkable effect of Aamir Khan’s new film.

Taare Zameen Par celebrates good cinema and at the same

time, takes joy in rebelling against every prevailing idiom in the film

industry. No flashy sets, no out-of-context songs, no item girls, no distracting

side actors who come in to provide comic relief. TZP is a no-nonsense film that

makes its way straight to your heart and also stimulates the mind.

Taare Zameen Par isn’t loud and melodramatic. And yet, it manages

to keep your tear glands working all through the film, during happy times and poignant

moments. It’s a film that tries to take measured steps to make a fervent call

for individualism in a society that trips on herd mentality. For a college student,

this translates to opting for careers in engineering, medicine or management. For

a primary school student, it’s about obtaining A+ grades in all the subjects,

except art&craft, sports and other ‘extra curricular’ activities. The

problem is precisely this. Streams like Art & Craft and sports are treated

as ‘extra curricular’ when they are just as alive and kicking as any other career.

In fact, there are more unemployed engineers, doctors and MBA-grads because of

this herd mentality leading to a problem of plenty - too many professional

graduates and too few jobs. If only, they had followed their heart and did what

they do best, then they would have either pioneered a new idiom in employment

or taken a job that’s least sought after but most fulfilling to them.

This is the beauty of TZP. The film might be about a

dyslexic child who sees mirror images of alphabets and thereby not distinguish an

‘L’ from a ‘7’. But what it teaches you is a lot more. It teaches the teachers

that they she should stop treating their students as ‘kids’ and drown out the creativity

lying un-used within them by refusing to recognise their individuality. Conformism

is killing ‘free’ society. And it is this that is brought out oh-so-beautifully

by art teacher Nikumbh(Aamir) and his third standard student Ishaan(**Darsheel

Safary**) who has a face off with his incompetent father and an equally inept

school of teachers. It takes a refined teacher like Nikumbh to recognise the

inadequacies of Ishaan and help him fit into mainstream society. If not for Nikumbh,

Ishaan would have been sent to a special school because of his dyslexia(something

that the teachers misconstrued as a sign of him being a duffer and a no good

wastrel). And that would mean the end of him and his fantasy world.

Thank you, Aamir for taking us back into our childhood and

making us aware of the child within us. Hopefully, this should prevent us from

viewing the young ones as ‘just kids’ and actually try to understand them

better and usher in a new brave world where individuality becomes the essence

of living. Where every job gets equal importance, and where every creativity is

given proper encouragement. These are indeed the real signs of human progress.

Thankfully,

with Taare Zameen Par, it has already begun.