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.
