TAARE ZAMEEN PAR

Very rarely do I feel really touched by a Hindi Movie.Perhaps I am the biggest critic of the Hindi Movies, I love to hate them, criticize them , rip them apart and finally bury them.
The genre of so called comedies that are being churned out dime a dozen are just a rehash and concoction of an attempt to insult the intelligence of the "esteemed" audience.

Anyway, this is not what I am writing about.Au contraire, I am here to rave about a sensible Hindi Movie I have seen in recent times which gives me some hope that the Hindi Movie Industry is still capable of making sensible cinema.

Last week I saw this extremely sensitive movie called Taare Zameen Par.I havent seen such cinema in Hindi for a very long time.It stayed in my mind long after I left the Theatre, and I am still waiting to get over it.It sure is like an infatuation,(who says you cannot be infatuated by a movie or fall in love with a movie).

Most of my friends came out of the Theatre secretly identifying themselves with the protagonist, Ishan Awasthi, a dyslexic kid. I say secretly, because there still exists a stigma about being identified as abnormal.But how can it be abnormal when most of us confessed to have had learing disorders when were young.We were just normal creatures.The perfect ones( if any) were abnormal.

Most of us were weak in at least one particular subject when at school. Either we couldnt understand what was being taught or failed to see the logic in the subject.Be it English or Maths, we would commit the same mistake over and over, inspite of being corrected at least ten times before.Some kids luckily got over it and devised a new method or trick that would help them stop comitting the mistake but some of the not so lucky ones stuck with the flaws for long.

All of us will have these little skeletons coming out of our little kiddie closets, wherein there would be confessions about difficulty in reading, writing or grasping certain things, which we might have eventually gotten rid of.

What we dont realize we still look down upon or feel sorry about any kid that might have major learning disabilities, when we could have been that kid.We have been there and done that, so instead of looking down upon a dyslexic child , why not for a change instill in him the confidence to move on with the disorder.

These kids are only normal, hyperactive, their brains work very fast and they are intelligent. It is just that they find difficulty is recoganizing alphabets , hence cannot read well, as their memory is not very good.Morover, English is such an illogical language that even normal people cannot understand the logic behind the spellings, how does one expect Dyslexic kids to appriciate the meaningless spellings.

Getting back to the movie, it really is an eye opener to all those people who always heckled slow learners and parents who pressurised their childern or teachers who were rude.

These children can teach you a thing or two about Humanity.