Audience replay for TZP is an Sad Film.

Is it – really? Just a couple of questions to those who’ve been saying this and repeating it ever so often. Did you cry because it made you sad or because the film’s tender moments touched you? I am up to my ears with people saying Taare Zameen Par is a SAD film. “You cry throughout the film,” they wail. “The film is soooooo nice and the boy is sooooo wonderful but it’s succch a saaad film!”

But the film is about hope, it’s about giving and nurturing and laughing aloud with life, as it offers itself in all its myriad shades. A film which holds its own until the interval without the entry of the hero, who (when he enters) sprinkles sunshine all around him, a hero who makes you laugh and makes you cry (with joy) when he helps his ward realise his potential.

Did you cry because you fell in love with Ishaan Awasthi aka Darsheel Safary – the little dyslexic boy or because you felt happy with what he achieved? Or could it be that tears came unbidden because the film acted as a mirror of your insensitivity as an adult who failed to understand a special child? Why did you cry?

It is a very brave, courageous mainstream film which pulls you in, takes you head on, insists that you take a good hard look at yourselves as parents, guardians, teachers and individuals and not continue to view all the children with the same eye because ‘each child is special’.

TZP celebrates the achievements of these gifted children, who ‘we in all our wisdom’ fail to see as normal ’coz ‘we are more normal than them.’ Can there be a more twisted piece of logic than that? Now, that should make you cry.