DNA Mumbai Anniversary: Amol Gupte on how Taare Zameen Par changed mindset about education

Amole Gupte is well known for his children-centric work in cinema as a screenwriter, actor and director with films like Sniff and Stanley Ka Dabba. He shot to fame with his path-breaking work in the 2007 film Taare Zameen Par. The movie changed the mindsets of the common man in the way they viewed education, teaching and even parenting.

He says, “I spent years sitting with financially, mentally and physically differently-abled children to showcase art and make them interact with the form. Taare Zameen Par, mapped from their complaints and anguishes, is a 10-year process that I have riddled into the movie. There are about a hundred Ishaans that participated in making of Ishaan Awasthi.”

The message of the movie was that each child is unique because of which all children need to be nurtured differently. Post the movie, he addressed 140 nations on Dyslexia at a UNICEF event and his speech left the audience in tears. They had been trying to shout out the message for 10 years but nobody was listening to them, but this film turned that around. However, making this film was not a cakewalk for him. His synopsis on the film, called High Jump in the year 2000, got rejected by The Children’s Film Society India. Because of which, he worked extensively on the script for four more years. Post that too, the film had limited takers for production and direction.

When asked about the impact it created, Gupte narrates an incident when a rickshaw-wala from Lucknow called him, weeping hard on the phone while sharing his experience about how he misunderstood his child. People spoke out as someone identified with the teacher, someone with the father and someone else with Ishaan from the movie. “I didn’t change the system, but I succeeded in changing the people in the system,” he states.

He refutes popular belief that the movie is about Dyslexia, “It is not about an academic-learning disability. I was not creating a disease, if he can paint, he can paint. Is there, for instance, a dyslexia for football? If so, 90 per cent would be disabled, because only 10 per cent would be able to connect to the ball. So these are misnomers as we don’t ask an Amazon patriarch dying at the grand age of 125 who has climbed trees and hunted, do you know ‘a,b,c,d?’

He signs off, saying, “We are a challenged society if we are not thinking clearly and abusing the child by forcing to rote-learn when we ourselves don’t have 10 phone numbers in our memory system anymore.”

— Shronit Ladhani 
(In association with careerninja.in)