Taare Zameen Par by Aamir Khan

Taare Zameen Par, Aamir Khan’s directorial debut, is about a challenged, misunderstood child, and how empathy and care finally redeem him.


Ishan (Darsheel Safary) is a mildly dyslexic child who is unable to perform well at school. His parents and teachers berate him without even a whiff of compassion (though the mother does shed a few tears). When Ishan bunks school one day and roams around the city, heedless of the danger and enjoying the sights and sounds, it proves to be too much for everybody. He is packed off to a boarding school. The boarding school looks like a juvenile institution out of The 400 Blows, where maladjusted kids are sent to be disciplined. Lonely, misunderstood and feeling let down by his family, Ishan slips into depression.

Then suddenly, the arrival of a new teacher, Ram Shankar (Aamir Khan), changes everything.

Ram immediately perceives the problem in the alienated and depressed Ishan. And with a friendly zeal, he brings Ishan back to his smiling, expressive self.

Films about compassion are difficult to dislike, or one is in danger of being politically incorrect. The recent films starring Aamir Khan have mostly been "message movies": Lagaan, Mangal Pandey, Fanaa, Rang de Basanti, and now Taare Zameen Par. Coupled with his known sympathy for the socially disadvantaged, his films showcase his persona as a caring, aware individual, having few faults. He is someone who confidently proclaims what is right and wrong, an angel of understanding and heart-warming sensitivity. Such roles in successive films, especially in TZP which is produced and directed by himself, are therefore open to the criticism of being expressions of a hardly subtle moral narcissism.

Sentimentality is a dish best served soppy. There are quite a few sequences in the film which make one’s eyes well up. One of the better ones comes in the ending, when Ishan is spectacularly redeemed. But one can’t fail to notice the flatness of the characters, and the too easy way in which Ram Kishan overcomes all obstacles.

Everyone in the film is shown so callous and cruel (except perhaps the mother) that the friendly bonhomie and the almost angelic understanding shown by Ram Shankar is a contrast which is too stark to be comfortable and realistic. The contrast doesn’t end there, however. While other teachers are crude, crass and dressed like bus drivers, Ram Shankar is shown wearing trendy, smart casuals, living in an amazingly chic home, having an ultra-high-maintenance haircut and having a comely partner in his evangelical pursuit to save the lost souls. One wonders if his ilk would be able to find fulfilment in the absence of suffering people around them.

The message of the film is probably fine, though simplistic. Isn’t it also true that care and individual attention in Indian schools is a luxury affordable only to the well-heeled? There are the KFI Schools, for example, but almost invariably the teachers in these schools are prosperous and highly literate and are there by choice (as Ram Shankar is in this film). Most teachers in Indian schools are paid a pittance. They are generally frustrated and hostile, burdened with the additional responsibilities of mid-day meals and election duties. One also wonders whether the film should have at least made a passing reference to wilfully precocious children. To its credit, the film is vocal about the appalling student-teacher ratios prevailing in Indian schools.

The editing in the film could definitely be better as some of the cuts seem too abrupt. There are too many songs, only a few of which are good. The performance of Darsheel is indeed noteworthy, though his tears and crying look artificial. Of others, the mother’s acting is perhaps the most natural.

I wondered whether the film was made for kids or for adults. It has elements for both, but is ultimately a moral tale for harsh parents.

The saga of getting a new mobile phone

I have had a Samsung C230 for around 30 months now. Its battery was becoming less and less reliable, so I decided to go in for a new mobile phone. Not an easy chore. Too many choices, too few good ones.

I like simple things with a clean, pure design. How does it reflect in my choice of mobile phones? Let us go through the cell phones that I have owned.

In the beginning I bought mobile phones based on their simplicity and low cost.

My first mobile phone was a Samsung R210.


It had very basic features, a monochrome screen, monophonic ringtones, a jutting antenna, a log having last 10 calls, it stored 10 SMS messages and had a 100 entry phone book. It worked well, its screen was very legible and a pleasure to look at.

For my second phone, I wanted a device which could act as a modem. All phones below Rs 5000 were either GPRS class 4 or their data cable slot was the same as their power slot. That wouldn't do as I wanted to do overnight downloads. My choice finally was a class 10 GPRS Benq device, the tiny M550, which cost me Rs 3500 or so.


It had all the features but it had a terrible interface. One had to pass through hoops to be able to send a simple text message. It had polyphonic ring tones, one could connect it to the computer using a cable and it worked well as a GSM modem. It had a really ugly screen and a menu system from some other planet, had mushy keys, but it did the job and I derived a perverse pleasure from owning such an unknown and arcanely small phone.

For my third phone I wanted a tri-band device. The simplest tri-band I was able to find at that time (June 2005) was the Samsung C230.


Unfortunately it had FM radio too, which I have never used. But there was no phone on the market which was tri-band, had computer connectivity and nothing else. I bought it. It had infrared connectivity which never worked, and by never I mean never. I could never connect it to any other device. It had a lot of latency, and it took almost 3-4 seconds to unlock its keyboard.

I used it for a while, and I had gotten used to it. It did have multi-entry phone book (used to store the many phone numbers for a single person) but had no group SMS (only rarely useful). But what was becoming increasingly unacceptable, I couldn't backup my information to a computer.

Then my firm gave me a Blackberry 6230, as I needed to have access to email at all times (or so they thought). It had very small keys and was very ugly to look at.


I soon exchanged it for a Blackberry 7100g, which had a clunky interface and I never grew used to it. It used to hang and require frequent reboots. But it did have email, a web browser, a large screen and the works. It was very hard to use it as a simple phone, to retrieve the call log etc...


I gave it up in May 2007, and continued using my Samsung C230. As I said, its battery was becoming weak, so I looked around the market for something which would catch my finicky eye.

Out were the Blackberrys with their clunkiness, Nokia N Series with their heavy design and overpriced featurism, the HTC Touch'es, the iPhones which are illegal, and other such show-offs, which do anything but act as a phone.

A phone should act like a phone, and should have features designed to make the messaging (voice and text) easier. I don't want to use a phone to send emails or to edit word documents because the keyboards are small and it takes a long time to type a long message. I don't want to use a phone to click 3-megapixel impromptu pictures of my friends. If I need a camera, I will use a device explicitly made for that purpose. If I need to listen to music, or to watch a film, I can wait till I get home to my projector and my surround sound system.

My requirements were simple: A no-frills candybar phone with good speed (nice keyboard, no latency in operation), good voice (good reception, handsfree), SMS (group sms, delivery reports) and phonebook (multi-entry phonebook, computer sync) functionality. I didn't want anything extravagant like an FM radio, a camera, an MP3 player, WLAN connectivity, etc. If it was to be a flip phone, it should display the calling party on the outside. It shouldn't cost more than Rs 5000.

You will be happy to know that there is no phone on the market which satisfies the above requirements.

Sony Ericsson candybar phones don't look good to me, they are too small.

Motorola phones have funky keyboard styles and have no delivery reports. Their new phone, W180, is good but it has neither PC-sync nor a multi-entry address book.


Motorola W375 also has a clean look, but it doesn't show the caller ID on the outside.


Samsung C180 is sleek and clean but it doesn't have a multi-entry phonebook, nor group SMS.



One of Nokia's higher-end models, 6300, has a very clean design but has too many features and is overpriced for my needs.


Nokia's entry level model, 1200, has one of the best looks: a very clean, minimalist design, but doesn't offer even a handsfree cable and has a real paucity of some much-needed features.


So after looking at umpteen models and rejecting them on one ground or another, my wife finally made me buy the Nokia 2630, which has everything I want (and also, unfortunately, FM radio and a low-res camera) and which costs Rs 4000.


It is a thin, sleek phone and I am actually quite happy with it, despite it having a few designer curves. It is one of the very few phones in this range to have Bluetooth connectivity, and it is very easy to transfer data to/from it. It has a very good keyboard, has a clean interface and has good battery life. It has multi-entry phonebook, group SMS, delivery reports, handsfree cable, etc.

The moral of the story is: It is getting tougher and tougher to find things in the market which are simple, do what they are supposed to do, and don't have features which you don't need and are not forced to pay for.

Samsara by Pan Nalin

Samsara is a 2001 film by the Indian director Pan Nalin. This review will contain spoilers.


The plot is sweeping but minimalist. A Buddhist monk is awakened from his deep trance after years of meditative solitude. After coming back to his monastery, stirrings of lust and desire begin to make him restless. He sets eyes upon a woman, whose family he and his fellow monks visit for a ritual, and ends up giving up his monkhood and marrying her. They have a son together, the husband gets immersed in the agricultural life and the trading decisions. There are fights, disasters and he has an adulterous interlude with one of the migrant workers. Unable to come to terms with his present state, one night he leaves his sleeping family to again become a monk. Just as he is reaching his old monastery, he is confronted by his wife and asked some hard questions.

I want to address a few complex issues explored in this film.

The first theme is that of renunciation as an involuntary path, especially for a child. I completely agree with the writer/director that it is foolish to make a child a renunciate, only to have him struggle with his instincts and his code of monkhood in his later life. The simple living of a renunciate must be a conscious choice born of experience and maturity.

The second theme is that of making choices in life to follow one's desires.

The monk decides to spend three years in solitary meditation, then he decides to give up his robes altogether for the life of a householder, and then, troubled by the increasing complexity and uncontrollable urges of worldly life, he decides to turn back and again become a monk. Certainly, that is what freedom is.

But due to a complete lack of self-awareness and understanding of oneself, the monk lives his life like a leaf in the wind, blown here and there by the passing storms of his desires. He has no foresight as to the consequences of his actions. For a monk who has spent a dozen years studying scriptures, living in the company of other monks who have spent a lifetime doing the same, who has spent many years in deep solitary meditation over impermanence, egolessness and suffering (the three insights of Buddhist meditations), he seems peculiarly unevolved and immature. He doesn't understand sexual desire and social conventions even to the extent of a normal human being. He picks up fights, gets seduced almost too easily by another woman, is impetuous and vengeful, graceless (observe the way he sheds snow from his clothes after coming in from the storm, versus the grace of his wife) and ill at ease with letting others see the instinctual side of him.

His choices are not born of an understanding of the limitations of a certain set of circumstances. Rather, he escapes just as the circumstances are becoming forceful enough to make him ponder over the nature of desire and conflict. He is escaping conflict, both inwardly as well as outwardly, and his crying and wishing to come back with his wife towards the end brings home the pathetic truth that he is unable to face a crisis head on. All seekers go through wavering, doubt and scepticism, but not in such an ignorant and unaware a manner.

Hermann Hesse's works (also those by Nikos Kazantzakis) engage with this theme in far deeper manner, as befitting a written work. Three novels by Hesse: Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Steppenwolf, singularly address the dichotomy between hedonism and asceticism. In Steppenwolf, there is a divided mind. In Siddartha, the life is divided into asceticism, hedonism and understanding. In Narcissus and Goldmund, two monks lead divergent paths, one towards solitude and the other towards a wild, gushing engagement with life. In Kazantzakis' flagship work, The Last Temptation of Christ (adapted into a film by the American director Martin Scorsese), a figure as revered as Christ suffers the temptation of a householder's life when nailed to the cross.

The film is remarkable for its cinematography, its music and its depiction of the life of a monastery and in the hills of the Ladakh-Zanskar region. The director has chosen a complex theme for his film, and a more self-aware protagonist would probably have been able to do justice to it.

There are a few conundrums in the film which are left open to interpretation. One is the aphorism by the old monk, "Which is better? To satisfy one thousand desires or to conquer just one?" According to me, the one desire (for religions affirming transmigration and reincarnation, i.e. Samsara, the cycle of birth and death) is the sexual instinct, the desire which leads to further and further entanglements. Sex is the primary instinct, the central act in the propagation of life.

The second is the question and the answer written on the rock by the roadside. The question is: "How does one prevent a drop of water from drying up?" And the answer, on the back of the rock, is: "By throwing it into the sea." One possible interpretation of the analogy is: The drop of water is the individual soul. Its "drying up" is its death as a separate entity. The "sea" is the worldly life, in which it finds sustenance and mixes up with other selves.

Since this Q&A is the last frame of the film, it is hard to ignore the stance of the director that the step taken by Tashi, the monk, to enter the life of a householder was a disaster. Despite the misgivings expressed earlier in the film about renunciation only being valid after ownership, and despite the feminist polemic at the end of the film by Tashi's wife about how Gautama the Buddha, and men like him, care only about their own enlightenment without bothering about the consequences of their desertion, the director seems to have a slight bias towards the monastic life (evidenced in the compassion of the old monk, the graceful smile of the child head lama, the playfulness of the young lama, the angry snort of Tashi's dog when Tashi changes into the clothes of a householder, the unrepentant way in which Tashi's wife gives up her engagement to her suitor, the noise and corruption and the superficial entertainments of the city life, and so on).

According to me, the prime mistake Tashi makes is of his passing through life unmindfully, which is surprising given that mindfulness is a central theme in Buddhism. He doesn't seem to examine anything. He doesn't reflect upon how his actions and thoughts are shaping. The faculty of self-reflection in completely absent in him. And without reflection and self-enquiry, actions, choices, consequences, suffering, pleasures, anything, will not lead to evolution.

So for me, the aphoristic Q&A has another interpretation: The outer shape that one's life takes is mostly accidental. In the flow of life, one can struggle against circumstances, or one can flow with them and evolve inwardly, by an insightful examination of all that is happening within and around oneself. The drying up of a drop, the shriveling up of the self, is therefore a consequence of the desire to escape the flow of life and to become an isolated and walled self. The process being a psychopathic defense mechanism blocking a revelation of one's own darker aspects. If one flows without needless restlessness, life provides enough opportunities to grow, and to reach the natural destination, the understanding of one's existence as a self-aware drop in the infinite material ocean that is this universe.

In life, one must make choices, but the choices should be out of understanding and maturity. Even if that means a rejection of outdated or silly rituals or social conventions, even if that means rejecting the prevailing goals of human endeavor around oneself. Choices based upon uncontrollable urges to satisfy oneself heedless of the results will only result in guilt, regret and resentment. Urges are not extinguished by indulgence. Once temporarily satisfied, they demand higher, novel stimulations to sustain themselves.

They are extinguished by understanding and attentive enquiry, each moment, into one's state of mind.

Supposedly great films I don't like

The Barbarian Invasions: It is hard to relate to a group of spoiled intellectuals and to a rude professor having little depth who demands our sympathy for living a meaningless promiscuous life.

Dancer in the Dark: I genuinely liked Breaking the Waves, but DITD (A Cannes Golden Palm winner) is sophomoric in comparison, ludicrous in its sentimentality, Bjork is childlike but little else, and the film is overly ambitious and paranoid in its depiction of injustice in the US.

The Element of Crime: Stylistic homage, but too boring to be of interest to anyone but die-hard fans of Lars von Trier.

Jerry Maguire: Couldn't see what the hype was all about.

Rainman: As a reviewer says, this is Dustin Hoffman playing a single note on the piano for two hours.

Blanc: One can ascribe deep meanings to anything, especially tears, but I found it hard to learn anything from this film, about cinema or about life.

Donnie Darko: Quite inexplicable till one surfs the internet and finds all sort of hidden codes one is supposed to know to understand the film. I am a reasonably intelligent guy (I think) who has read more than his fair share of science fiction, and I think the film appeals to geeks having problems with authority.

A Fish called Wanda: Yes I can understand why it must have been funny, but I didn't find it especially so. It has gags, but they are contrived.

Wild at Heart: This is a Golden Palm winner at Cannes. Hardly the director's best work and I find Lost Highway to be his best, which most people think is pure tosh.

I Heart Huckabees: Walked out after twenty minutes.

Miami Vice: Michael Mann knows how to direct dramatic action more than perhaps any other director, but this film had nothing but false notes.

Unagi (The Eel): Interesting premise, but flawed execution.

Fear and Trembling: Caricatures, not characters.

Two Films by Sidney Lumet

Recently watching two films by the American director, Sidney Lumet, has whet my appetite for more. He is not really an avant garde director, but he is certainly a master of his craft. As much as I enjoy visionary films, with something incisive to say about human nature, I do get entertained by an intelligent story and flawless execution.


His most recent film, Before the Devil knows You're Dead is a taut study of a heist gone wrong. Taut, edgy and technically flawless.


The other film that I saw yesterday, the courtroom drama Find Me Guilty, was thoroughly enjoyable, even though, like others, I don't think it is his best work. But it is based on true events, and I was genuinely surprised by the bittersweet ending.