Up until now I have commented only on the film industry. I have berated it and the movies coming out of it at a pretty harsh degree. But this time, for the first time I feel compelled to write about a movie I have seen. The name of this movie is “Taare Zameen Par” which loosely translates into “Stars on the Ground”. This movie was produced and directed by Aamir Khan, he also acted in it. The lead character is a eight to nine year old dyslexic boy who has been in the notorious Indian system of education which shuns everything except the robotic pursuit of “perfection” that is displayed by the majority of the masses. In short, it is a system that ignores genius and harbors mediocrity.
Darsheel Safary plays a young boy by the name of Ishan Awasthi who suffers from the rare and often misunderstood disability known as dyslexia. Dyslexia is characterized by an abject impairment in the ability of a person to read or write as a result of not being able to identify the characters of the alphabet. As a result of this condition, the boy is ridiculed, insulted by almost everyone except his parents and sibling and labeled as an unintelligent, lethargic, good-for-nothing boy. The father is in fact so vexed by what he sees as his son’s unruliness that he packs him off to a boarding school. There too, the teachers treat him in the same way that the teachers treated him in his previous day-school. But then, a chance encounter with a substitute art teacher (played by Aamir Khan) changes his life and brings out the genius in him when he ends up winning a painting competition.
The acting in this movie was superb. Each emotion and feeling, so clearly and lucidly portrayed that anyone in the audience could feel the most subtle emotional undertone. But by far the best thing about this movie was the way in which the subject of dyslexia and the mystery surrounding it has been dealt with; mystery in the sense that not many know of the existence of such a disability. Most people in India recognize only two types of people: normal and retarded. The idea that an intelligent person and a possible genius could suffer due to a debilitating disability is virtually unheard of. I applaud the maturity, subtlety, artfullness and sensitivity with which this was portrayed in the movie.
Two of the more laudable sections of the movie were the two parts where the art teacher confronts the parents. The first part being where the teacher tells both the parents about dyslexia and how it doesn’t imply unintelligence; the second part is where he tells the father the difference between mechanically bring up a child and making the child feel loved and cared for without hurting his ego or treading on his toes.
If it were up to me, I would hail this movie as a masterpiece of Indian cinema.
Darsheel Safary plays a young boy by the name of Ishan Awasthi who suffers from the rare and often misunderstood disability known as dyslexia. Dyslexia is characterized by an abject impairment in the ability of a person to read or write as a result of not being able to identify the characters of the alphabet. As a result of this condition, the boy is ridiculed, insulted by almost everyone except his parents and sibling and labeled as an unintelligent, lethargic, good-for-nothing boy. The father is in fact so vexed by what he sees as his son’s unruliness that he packs him off to a boarding school. There too, the teachers treat him in the same way that the teachers treated him in his previous day-school. But then, a chance encounter with a substitute art teacher (played by Aamir Khan) changes his life and brings out the genius in him when he ends up winning a painting competition.
The acting in this movie was superb. Each emotion and feeling, so clearly and lucidly portrayed that anyone in the audience could feel the most subtle emotional undertone. But by far the best thing about this movie was the way in which the subject of dyslexia and the mystery surrounding it has been dealt with; mystery in the sense that not many know of the existence of such a disability. Most people in India recognize only two types of people: normal and retarded. The idea that an intelligent person and a possible genius could suffer due to a debilitating disability is virtually unheard of. I applaud the maturity, subtlety, artfullness and sensitivity with which this was portrayed in the movie.
Two of the more laudable sections of the movie were the two parts where the art teacher confronts the parents. The first part being where the teacher tells both the parents about dyslexia and how it doesn’t imply unintelligence; the second part is where he tells the father the difference between mechanically bring up a child and making the child feel loved and cared for without hurting his ego or treading on his toes.
If it were up to me, I would hail this movie as a masterpiece of Indian cinema.
Posts
