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:
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Parcelebrates 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. TZPis 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 onherd 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.
