Friday, January 25, 2008
Why I didn't like Taare Zameen Par
I posted some of these thoughts on the IMDB discussion board for this movie but was not all done. So here goes.
It's not often that I am completely at odds with the populace on a movie, but, boy, is this one of them! Sentimental claptrap, created with the intent of extracting every last tear drop from the audience, that is what I thought this was.
Not one cliche was spared- insensitive teachers, angry and abusive father, concerned mother, one caring teacher, documentary clips, spastic children enjoying...
The one cliche that was left out was the principal scolding Nikhum for taking the kids out of class, though it was amply offset by the scene where Nikhum feeds the boy at the roadside chai shop, tea and biscuits.
5 minutes into the movie I told my wife the kid was dyslexic. I knew about dyslexia more than 20 years ago (thanks to cartoon graffiti of the sort "Dyslexia lures KO" and "Lysdexia rules") and so found it difficult to believe that in 21st century India, in a private school, people were unaware of it.
Forget dyslexia specifically, I found it difficult to believe that the kid had spent 5 years in a private school (KG, 1st std, 2nd std, 2 years in 3rd std) and none of the teachers had figured out that he couldn't write his ABC's? How did he get to 3rd std anyway given that he must have been getting single digit marks in his exams all along?
Or that his mother supposedly spent time over his homework each night and still hadn't realised that her ladla couldn't string letters together to make a word (far less words to make a sentence)
The father character- he was fine while he was angry, once he started to cry, he was like the guy who played Himanshu Malik's dad in the Khwaahish movie!
Nikhum, being a dyslexic growing up was yet another avoidable cliche. And the whole deal where the teachers in the staff room take him to task because they heard singing and dancing in his classroom- haven't we seen that more than once (Dead Poet's society springs to mind, as does its Malayalam derivative with Mohanlal)
It was kind of gratifying to see that the review in Variety, the Hollywood magazine, picked on all these aspects.
OK, enough venting- time for lunch
It's not often that I am completely at odds with the populace on a movie, but, boy, is this one of them! Sentimental claptrap, created with the intent of extracting every last tear drop from the audience, that is what I thought this was.
Not one cliche was spared- insensitive teachers, angry and abusive father, concerned mother, one caring teacher, documentary clips, spastic children enjoying...
The one cliche that was left out was the principal scolding Nikhum for taking the kids out of class, though it was amply offset by the scene where Nikhum feeds the boy at the roadside chai shop, tea and biscuits.
5 minutes into the movie I told my wife the kid was dyslexic. I knew about dyslexia more than 20 years ago (thanks to cartoon graffiti of the sort "Dyslexia lures KO" and "Lysdexia rules") and so found it difficult to believe that in 21st century India, in a private school, people were unaware of it.
Forget dyslexia specifically, I found it difficult to believe that the kid had spent 5 years in a private school (KG, 1st std, 2nd std, 2 years in 3rd std) and none of the teachers had figured out that he couldn't write his ABC's? How did he get to 3rd std anyway given that he must have been getting single digit marks in his exams all along?
Or that his mother supposedly spent time over his homework each night and still hadn't realised that her ladla couldn't string letters together to make a word (far less words to make a sentence)
The father character- he was fine while he was angry, once he started to cry, he was like the guy who played Himanshu Malik's dad in the Khwaahish movie!
Nikhum, being a dyslexic growing up was yet another avoidable cliche. And the whole deal where the teachers in the staff room take him to task because they heard singing and dancing in his classroom- haven't we seen that more than once (Dead Poet's society springs to mind, as does its Malayalam derivative with Mohanlal)
It was kind of gratifying to see that the review in Variety, the Hollywood magazine, picked on all these aspects.
OK, enough venting- time for lunch
Monday, January 07, 2008
Overrated
A couple of things I think are overrated in schools
a) Reading
b) Teaching arts and music
Reading
When did reading become this all-consuming obsession? "Read to your children everyday" they tell you starting with like age 1. "Have your child read for at least 20 minutes each day". You have incentives to read, targets to meet, forms to fill out detailing what you read and how many minutes you read- there is no end to it.
While a lot of school and college drop-outs and prematurely toothless hillbillies obviously didn't do enough reading, there is no cause-effect relationship here.
Most of the successful people I know and have met read very little apart from what is necessary for their job. They might read a sports column or two. They don't spend any of their spare time reading meaningful literature or having meaningful discussions. These are people who make a good living, have flush 401(K)'s, whose children's college funds are, well, funded, drive nice cars- in short meet most of the requirements for success in today's world.
So what is the need to obsess about reading? Yeah, if you like enjoy reading and prefer it to watching re-runs of Seinfeld, more power to you. But you are no better than someone who watches Seinfeld re-runs, so there.
Music and arts
School is for the 3 R's, reading, writing and 'rithmetic. The public school system should have no business using tax money to teach kids to play the violin or draw landscapes. Interested parents can do this outside of school on their own coin. For a person to succeed in life (for the vast majority of them, anyway) s/he needs to have the right education to get a job that pays a decent salary so they don't have to fret about money all the time. This kind of education involves letters and numbers not musical notes or paint palettes.
Schools should focus on teaching their students what they can use in later life to go to college and find a job. Sure a minority of people get jobs in music and arts, but they can go to special schools for that.
Children get adequate exposure to music outside of school anyway, thru TV and radio and MP3 players. It is not as if they won't listen to music if they are not taught music in school. This is more than sufficient to spur their creativity.
All that guff about children in some inner-city schools who became better students because some violin teacher taught them- well if some maths teacher had come along and taught them addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, they would have been better equipped for later life. After all way more people need maths in their later life than violin classes.
a) Reading
b) Teaching arts and music
Reading
When did reading become this all-consuming obsession? "Read to your children everyday" they tell you starting with like age 1. "Have your child read for at least 20 minutes each day". You have incentives to read, targets to meet, forms to fill out detailing what you read and how many minutes you read- there is no end to it.
While a lot of school and college drop-outs and prematurely toothless hillbillies obviously didn't do enough reading, there is no cause-effect relationship here.
Most of the successful people I know and have met read very little apart from what is necessary for their job. They might read a sports column or two. They don't spend any of their spare time reading meaningful literature or having meaningful discussions. These are people who make a good living, have flush 401(K)'s, whose children's college funds are, well, funded, drive nice cars- in short meet most of the requirements for success in today's world.
So what is the need to obsess about reading? Yeah, if you like enjoy reading and prefer it to watching re-runs of Seinfeld, more power to you. But you are no better than someone who watches Seinfeld re-runs, so there.
Music and arts
School is for the 3 R's, reading, writing and 'rithmetic. The public school system should have no business using tax money to teach kids to play the violin or draw landscapes. Interested parents can do this outside of school on their own coin. For a person to succeed in life (for the vast majority of them, anyway) s/he needs to have the right education to get a job that pays a decent salary so they don't have to fret about money all the time. This kind of education involves letters and numbers not musical notes or paint palettes.
Schools should focus on teaching their students what they can use in later life to go to college and find a job. Sure a minority of people get jobs in music and arts, but they can go to special schools for that.
Children get adequate exposure to music outside of school anyway, thru TV and radio and MP3 players. It is not as if they won't listen to music if they are not taught music in school. This is more than sufficient to spur their creativity.
All that guff about children in some inner-city schools who became better students because some violin teacher taught them- well if some maths teacher had come along and taught them addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, they would have been better equipped for later life. After all way more people need maths in their later life than violin classes.
