Taare Zameen Par, Amir Khan & Simplicity

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Amir Khan has arrived as a Director, the perfectionist director.

Saw Taare Zameen Par yesterday, I was quite happy to see a simple and nice movie. Darsheel shines in full glory and Amir does that with full honesty and taking the back seat and focus more on a dyslexic child, his problem, his world and his self discovery. The last movie that I had seen was Sawariya, it just seem to be a showreel launch vehicle for Ranbir Kapoor with lots of blue-ish art-direction. Same was with Black - whenever it came on Television I had to lower down the volume - as it was shoutcasting affair from Amitabh or Rani.

Indian movies, back in 70s and 80s had a simple storyline and characters but as we started getting influenced and as everybody started becoming an ‘angry young man’ in their 40s - we lost touch with the reality and all our characters became so abnormal that we would put even Mr. Mask to shame.

If you see the good movies in last couple of years - Lagaan, Dil Chahta Hai, Omkara, Munnabhai, Rang De Basanti and many others - all of them had a simple non-masala formula - they had a original story and very humane characters - who talked, walked and behaved like we all do.

It’s about Story

I was happy as an audience and a film buff that Amir made this attempt and even audiences are giving him a good response - sensible cinema was appreciated and will be appreciated. There is nothing like - "because people expect crap, we produce crap" logic given by Indian film producers. Otherwise, Munnabhai wouldn’t have been such a great hit - a movie which talks about Gandhi, his principles and our values in the society (which sounds very boring and completely non-commerical hindi cinema material)

It’s about the way you tell it

Munnabhai & TZP are actually serious movies, but tell their story quite interestingly. They are not like boring art movies of 80s which had to be boring to prove that they were intellectual movies. They used to be about social exploits, funded by government body and their makers dying to receive awards from the very corrupt politicians whom they criticised in their movies.

Masala - no more

I have heard this somewhere from a film critic that "we put so much masala in our movies, that it ends up being masala bullshit". And Naseeruddin Shan once said that "In future, if our kids asks us what was India like in the past, we won’t have any movie to show that - how we were, how we lived and how India was in reality". How true these two statements are, and unfortunately still valid. Pick up any recent movie and would you be able to cite it as an example of our current times or culture.

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