Parents Zameen Par

Manjula Lal — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:53:52 +0000

How Indians loved the movie Taare Zameen Par, and how little kids hate it! I made this surprising discovery at a remote school for hill children run by an NGO in Naini Tal district. When we were visiting, the school was screening the film on its brand new audio-visual equipment. The auditorium had no chairs, so the kids were squatting on the floor. The medium of instruction is Hindi, as in all government-run schools in these parts, whereas the one and only thing the kids would benefit from to enable them to get jobs in the cities is a command over English. No chairs, no English: there is something heart-rendingly about the way the NGOs and the government, both, go about promoting social welfare, but that’s not the story here.
The story is about a little boy who was also visiting the school with his well-to-do parents. Vaibhav, let’s call him that, was about six years old, and showing signs of being slow in class. We asked him how he liked the film, and he said it was ‘daravani’ (scary). I thought the clown sequence would have scared him – that’s what would have scared me as a kid, especially with Dolby surround sound – but it wasn’t that at all. He started relating the whole story, and clearly clappered the scene when the boy is taken to boarding school as scary. No brickbats for Aamir Khan here: when we talked to his parents we discovered that the scene was only scary because Vaibhav’s father had already been telling him that he would have to go to boarding school by class VI. This, on top of his struggles to cope up with his classwork, must have been quite traumatic for the child. We tried to tell the father that even if this was so, in light of how the boy reacted to the film, couldn’t he avoid telling the child that he would be sent off one day? The father, I had already discovered, was dreaming of a business venture, opening a hotel in the hills, free of family responsibilities, and sending the child off was probably not just for Vaibhav’s good but to fit in with his own career goals. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when we unnecessarily a child conceive!
Back in the city, I discussed children’s reaction to the film with colleagues, and had another mother telling me that now, when she uses the usual admonition, “Learn some discipline or you will be sent off to boarding,” her children do get scared and beg not to be subjected to that fate. Her four-year-old even started crying at one point. So the central message of Taare Zameen Par, which was to tell parents not to push kids beyond their capacity, and to watch out for dyslexia, is being trampled by parents overzealous for a ‘good life’ for their children. Which is to be achieved by hook or by crook, no stops left unpulled out.
We all think we’re thinking, sensitive parents. But then we qualify that, and say there is so much competition, what to do? This argument was okay in the last century, when a competitive exam could be your ticket to El Dorado. But in today’s world of exploding opportunities, modern-day parents are too busy smelling the pollution on their way to work to stop and smell the roses. Which is why, when I went to congratulate my cousin on being free of board exams forever, as both her sons had cleared them, I got only a worried frown in reply. “But we can’t relax, we have to make sure he enrolls for some course.” She was convinced her son was not going to qualify for Delhi University, and was not even receptive to my suggestion that she wait for the board exam results and then take it from there.
What are parents: some kind of angels who have turned into devils?

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Parents Zameen Par