Taare Zameen Pe

There he is, sitting under the tree, with two dogs. One has collapsed in his lap and is sleeping in the irresistibly cuddly way only dogs can manage to, while the other is enjoying a luxurious de-ticking session by hands that belong to someone who has the most beautifully toothy grin you have seen in a long time. It’s all calm and serene at the moment.

Then the camera delectably pans to another corner, where a group of more bright children, edged on by their parents ‘my-child-is-a-winner’ philosophy are competing in a game of gully cricket. When the viewfinder becomes still, both the boy with the dogs and cricket-playing children occupy either ends of the frame. Briefly.

Suddenly, all hell breaks loose. A shot is hit in the direction of the tree. The boy gets up and throws the ball back. It goes wide, into a different building. He gets taunted and jeered by the thoughtless cruelty kids have enormous access to, gets angry, gets in a tussle with an older boy, gets hurt, hurts him, runs away.

Now, now you have seen it before. In countless movies. Even in K-soaps. The kid is running away to his mother to complain and cry, right? But hang on! Not here, not as long as Aamir Khan wields the megaphone, not the dyslexic Ishaan Nandkishore Awasthi in Taare Zameen Pe (TZP).

What follows is what makes TZP perhaps the most sensitive, delicate peek inside a child’s mind in mainstream Hindi cinema.

Ishaan whizzes up the stairs, past the house of his tormentor, then suddenly turns, drops back a few stops and to vent his disgust, angst with the world that makes no effort to understand him, smashes the flower pots lying outside and gushes up straight to the terrace.

Once there, the boy to whom the world is the place where tadpoles swimming in muddy drains are fascinating, watching dogs playfully tear away exam papers a happy moment; gasps, sighs and starts crying.

It’s a cry of helplessness and for help, of cold anger, of betrayal; from the world, the school, parents, everything. Only the tadpoles and the dogs are exempt. And then an aimlessly meandering kite ambles into the terrace and rescues him. The kite catches his attention, the scuffle is forgotten, tears hurriedly wiped away and his mind starts painting new landscapes. And your eyes brim up and if you speak right then, you choke a little on the way.

It is no ordinary movie, TZP. Aamir paints it with just as confident a brushstroke with which Ishaan escapes the world, its contempt and finds himself in the drawing sheet. You also know why the Black infuriated him. None of those over-the-top, crude shenanigans for him. A child is a supremely precious being, gentle putty, and in TZP, Khan moulds him masterly.

The film is full of poignant moments of Ishaan’s childhood, our childhood and the childhood of that third grade classmate, who forever kept looking for rainbows outside the window, who did miserably in the tests and made friends with the crows by feeding them his lunch.

As Ishaan’s story moves on, he takes your heart along, his every failure evoking cobwebbed memories, his every timidly-smug smile eliciting an I-have-been-there-before smile from you.

There are two things that Aamir uses brilliantly in the film. One is silence. In the second half Ishaan, save for a single sentence never speaks. At one level this starkly succeeds in showing the character’s transformation from a somewhat angry-at-the-world-dyslexic boy to someone whom the world has crushed. At another it makes for compelling cinema. It is here that the director’s use of colour and music comes in.

The film is shot is bright resplendent hues. Lots of greens, reds, and blues. So even while the story becomes somber, the visuals lift you. In fact, gloomy scenes shot in bright hues with great background score and an overriding silence gives you shots and shots of unblinking cinema. It’s not easy on viewers, though. Next, time try not to blink while crying.

To give this rambling piece an air of authority and a semblance of a review I must dwell a little on the technical parts of the film. Coming to performances first, eight-year old Darsheel Safary as Ishaan is, well Ishaan. Was he made for the role, or the role written for him is all that you can ask.

Aamir as the Ram Shankar Nikumbh, the teacher who waves the magic wand of love and compassion is flawless. He hits the right notes at the right places and understatedly emotes superbly.

Tisca Chopra and Vipin Sharma as Ishaan’s parents are fine, with Sharma just a tad over the top at times. The only glitch is the teachers who are more caricatures than characters.

Amole Gupta and his script made the movie possible in the first place and TZP is as much his as Aamir’s. The music stand out, Shankar-Ehsan-Loy have found their refreshing grove again and of course, they had Prasoon Joshi’s touching lyrics to live up to.

A word about Joshi here. A few more films like this and with his unusual choice of words he can becomes Gulzar’s legitimate successor in the film industry

So, back to TZP we come again. The climax of the films where Ishaan’s wins the painting competition has been criticised by many reviewers as reinforcing the same achievement centric approach with kids that the film berates all along.

Frankly, the climax is pretty believable; Ishaan is show throughout as a child with dyslexia, who is exceptional in painting. The end justifies that. Also, the film has enough heart tugging moments that say, nothing really matters as long as we let kids be kids.

With TZP Khan has shown why he still sets the tone for the industry. He has shown why names don’t matter, scripts do, faith in the story does. For who were Ashutosh Gowrikar, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and John Mathew Mathan before they found him. He has shown that if you are honest to your craft nothing else matters; you can plough a lonely furrow and still set the agenda.

By the time the end credits roll and the lights come on, you get up, a little misty eyed, a little heavier in the heart and a little grateful for seeing the film.

Many years from now, if you wanted to see a film about childhood, lost childhood and parenthood, a film about the art of storytelling, of happy visuals and sad scenes in the same frame, a film about moments that make you smile and cry at the same time, you will nostalgically remember the boy with the toothy grin. And perhaps also the tadpoles, dogs and the kite.