Aamir Khan's premier directorial venture “Tare Zameen Par” (TZP) is said to be a super-duper hit, and justifiably so. It's a flick that promises to have a long shelf life in the theaters, like movies of a bygone era. “Sholay” played in Bombay's Minerva Talkies for a full five years, from 1975 to 1980, while Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ), released in 1994, continues to run as a matinee show in Bombay's Maratha Mandir for the fourteenth consecutive year. That much time was enough to bring Lord Ram back to his kingdom from exile in the forest!

TZP is about a child with dyslexia, Ishaan Awasthi, who is rescued by a sensitive painter and art teacher, Ram Shankar Nikumbh (played by Aamir Khan), whom he meets at the New Era School in Panchgani, a hill station, where he's sent by his flabbergasted but insensitive parents against his will. Darsheel Safary, who plays Ishaan in the film, deservedly gets top billing in the credits, his name appearing even before Aamir Khan's in the titles. Darsheel has also gone on to win awards for his stellar performance in the film. But TZP has captured the imagination of the Indian public precisely because it's a movie. The medium here is the message.

Long before TZP came our way, another painter and art teacher in another residential school rescued not one but hundreds of children form a sort of literary dyslexia by making them aware that they could write poetry, just as Ram Shankar Nikumbh makes Ishaan realize that he can paint, beat his own guru at it, and win the first prize in a school competition that forms the climax of the film.

That painter and art teacher is Gieve Patel, and the school in question is Rishi Valley School, a four-hour drive from Bangalore, where Patel has indefatigably been conducting poetry workshops year after year for over a decade now. Arguably, his workshops have had the same effect on kids as Aamir Khan has in TZP: they’ve boosted the children's morale and restored their shattered confidence. Patel's basic assumptions were similar to Nikumbh's in the film. In his introduction to Poetry With Young People, edited by him and recently published by the Sahitya Akademi , which contains the best poems written by his students, he says:"I admit to feelings of guilt when I started out. Such clear, beautiful young faces, why was I subjecting them to this extra study? Many of them looked bewildered at the prospect, quietly resentful. There were sneering and defiant looks too. How could I blame them for it?"

It is to pre-empt this resentment, this defiance, universal to kids all over the world, that Ram Shankar Nikumbh, pied-piper as the English teacher calls him, enters class dressed like a clown (reminiscent of Raj Kapoor in Mera Naam Joker), performs acrobatics and sings his bum bum bole number. The resistance that Patel initially faced at the Rishi Valley School is no different from what Nikumbh experiences at the New Era School. Says Patel: "It was an uphill task. The average well-educated Indian school student does not know how to speak on a public platform. The mercurial, charming chatter, with implosions of words and running together of text is pleasurable to hear on a games field or at picnics, but it doesn't work as public speaking."

This not knowing how to speak (and read) was exactly what Ishaan Awasthi's problem was that Ram Shankar Nikumbh, like Gieve Patel, compassionately addresses. The result? Ishaan Awasthi, the poor child with dyslexia, is declared to be the best painter in the school and his work is reproduced on the cover of the school miscellany. Similarly, the Sahitya Akademi publishes the work of Patel's Rishi Valley children as an anthology of poems. We all know of the quality of Ishaan's work because all of us have seen TZP. But how many of us are even aware of a book like
Poetry With Young People?

Without going into the mechanics of how Patel cures his kids and brings out the poet in them, to understand which one has to buy and read the book (priced at just Rs.100, half the price of a TZP ticket at a multiplex), I reproduce here one of my favorite poems from the anthology.

Bottle of Honey Crack! Smash! It seems to happen in slow motion. Shards of glass fall to the ground. The golden-brown liquid, thick and viscous, Spills like a yellow waterfall
Over the edge of the table.

—Tanya Marwah

Kudos to Gieve Patel and to Aamir Khan!

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R. Raj Rao was appointed as Profesor in the Department of English, University of Pune last April. He has three new books scheduled for release later this year: Engineering College Hostel (novel); For Hire (poems); and Whistling in the Dark: Twenty One Queer Interviews, co-edited with Dibyajyoti Sarma. His novel The Boyfriend, translated into French earlier, will soon be translated into Italian, and is also being optioned for a movie by a well-known Canadian director based in Montreal. Rao is one of the first recipients of the newly-established Quebec-India awards, and will spend three months in Canada from April to July.