Grounded Stars

Gentlemen, keep your wet hankies aside. Ladies please swipe your nose on the sleeve.

I’m attempting to do something which no human or banker has done before: an unfavourable review of taare zameen par (tzp)

Please lift your jaw and put the eyeballs back into their socket. No, I’m not an insensitive freak, nor was I born in a lovely teachers-supportive family-encouraging system utopia. I fail to understand why are people going ga ga or in this case waaah waaah over tzp.

I went to see tzp with my flatmate Nik, and you couldn’t find two more sensitive guys than us in Bangalore. I mean Nik once helped a blind man cross the road, forcibly, thirteen years back. So, naturally we were hoping for a moving, touching experience. Like we usually do.

Aamir Khan, who obviously had made up his mind to make everyone cry, had us at the ticket window only. At 300 bucks a ticket, the two of us were left tearjerked. But then God gently reminded us that getting tickets for a new release on the first weekend without booking at PVR in Bangalore is the kind of miracle that would have given Mother Teresa sainthood.

Now, as two broke, shaken and faith-in-god-restored men sat in the cinema hall, AK unleashed his first weapon. He took soo loong ,over one and half hours, to establish an important, but obvious-in-five-minutes-of-the-movie, fact: ‘dyslexic child’, that by the end of the first half I was dyspeptic.

Thankfully the film picked up very well in the second half with some good songs and performances to match. But soon AK was at it again. He had already given us the exaggerated stereotype of the pushing father and wailing mother. And further reinforced them with the hairy Hindi teacher, accented English teacher and brawny sports teacher to it. The scene where AK tries to convince the Principal of the child’s special abilities by quoting Oscar Wilde is so corny, you have to see it to believe it.

Be that as it may, people were busy sniffling whimpering and sobbing all over. Now, I believe there’s a simple explanation for that. I mean how hard can it be to make moms, moms-to-be, wives, girlfriends and metrosexual men to cry. Just put a struggling child up there and make him cry in every conceivable pain and position. So, the kid cries in his bedroom then a quick sob in the school, one kneeling down on the bed and even while running on the basketball ground. One of these is bound to tickle your ancestral monkey instincts and soon you follow suit.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for crying in movies. When Rajesh Khanna sang a song heaving up and down on his dying elephant’s belly in Haathi Mere Saathi, I cried my eyeballs out. Or when in ‘Kishan Kanhaiya’, Shilpa Sharodkar did that….No wait, that was a different.

Ahem…well. Now that this post has firmly established me as a sexist insensitive imbecile. I would urge you to watch Polish film director Kuzwipo Polsjki’s ‘Ustyer jOkrma de childe’ before forming your opinion. Chances are you will not be able to sit through the movie, simply because it does'nt exist. You are also requested to not take my opinion seriously as I suffer from film-dyslexia. But more on that later.