Taare Zameen Par

“Art is nothing but the expression of your emotion” said Ram Shankar Nikumbh. And from the very beginning we are told to suppress our emotions and do our work. Don’t do what you like to do. Just do what is more fruitful. From the very childhood, we all are puzzled inside a rat race. A never ending competition… where only the first one wins. A kind of maze… parents, relatives, teacher show us the way in. but they themselves don’t know the way out. We all are told to follow a simple rule: study-exam-study-exam and perhaps no learning. “Everybody wants numero uno in their home. And at the end of the game you should be either a doctor or an engineer or else in management.” The core of the story is simple… you should do whatever it takes to be a money earning machine. You should do something that pays you buck. What you are doing is not important. What is important is how much it pays back.

And this game starts right from the childhood. We are told to suppress all those abilities just because the deciders think that they are not that much fruitful. And as we grow up, this idea is well inside our brain. We become a robot who does only those things which it is supposed to do. Other things are simply wastage of time. And when we ourselves become parents we do whatever it takes to enroll the names of our children in this same never ending rat race in which we, ourselves are running, running and running.

This is not a review kind of thing of TZP. But I would like to share the story in a very short way (rather copy pasted it from Wikipedia):

Ishaan Awasthi is an eight-year-old whose world is filled with wonders that no one else seems to appreciate; colours, fish, dogs and kites are just not important in the world of adults, who are much more interested in things like homework, marks and neatness. And Ishaan just cannot seem to get anything right in class.

When he gets into far more trouble than his parents can handle, he is packed off to a boarding school to ‘be disciplined’. Things are no different at his new school, and Ishaan has to contend with the added trauma of separation from his family.

One day a new art teacher bursts onto the scene, Ram Shankar Nikumbh, who infects the students with joy and optimism. He breaks all the rules of ‘how things are done’ by asking them to think, dream and imagine, and all the children respond with enthusiasm, all except Ishaan. Nikumbh soon realizes that Ishaan is very unhappy, and he sets out to discover why. He meets his parents and comes to know about Ishaan's problems of dyslexia and his wonderful world of imagination. He sets out to help Ishaan at any cost. Finally his dream comes true when Ishaan stands out as an Art Scholar and also passes out his annual exams in school. At last Ishaan thanks his teacher Ram for helping him out to create his own world.

We all suffer from more or less the same trouble in the childhood. We can not do as our heart says. Many of us liked drawing, singing or other stuffs. But they have been forced to suppress them to carry on works. And these things don’t stop when we grow up. The difference is when we are young we can fight with teachers or parents to pursue our own liking. But when we grow up, we can not fight anymore because in that case we have to fight with ourselves. We have become a robot who only works and earns and flagellates whenever he doesn’t seem to be working.

Taare Zameen Par is one film that not only entertains you but enlightens you.