TOI Article - 24/12/2007 - The brilliant couple behind 'Taare Zamen Par'

A couple inspired by lives of little stars

Anahita Mukherji I TNN

Mumbai: In 1999, Amole Gupte and his wife Deepa Bhatia wrote a one-page story about a boy who does badly at studies and is sent to boarding-school as punishment, where he meets his saviour, a teacher who turns his life around. Over the next nine years, they dived into the lives of hundreds of children in order to explore their world first hand. Almost a decade of research and adventure went into Taare Zameen Par (TZP), a film on childhood.
Amole’s connection with children has been almost umbilical. “I started taking care of my neighbour’s children while growing up. Later, when my friends got married, I would babysit their children when they were out partying,’’ he says. In fact, the lead character in TZP, Ishaan, is named after his best friend’s son.
He does not believe in talking down to children. There’s no “Sir’’ or “Uncle’’ for Amole. The children call him ‘Mendhak Chacha’ or ‘Amole frog’, a character he created.
After writing the story, the duo began what has now become a lifelong association with several city schools, including Tulip and Saraswati Mandir that are meant for children with multiple disabilities. It’s at these special schools that they witnessed miracles.
Once, at Tulips, they saw a seven-year-old with her head between her legs, shrieking continuously for an hour. They were a little sceptical when the school’s principal and trustee, Medha Lotlikar, said that all children were ‘normal’ and should study together. To their astonishment, a year later, they found the same girl holding the railing and walking down the staircase with the other children. Though the girl had initially been diagnosed with a number of disabilities, visual impairment turned out to be the only one she had.
Amole-himself an actor, writer, painter and directorhas conducted countless workshops in numerous schools, where children were exposed to just about everything from Tagore’s poetry to Renaissance paintings and theatre. It’s here that he chose the actors for the film. He never called children to the studio or asked them to audition for him. “I would tell them bits and pieces from the story and all of us (the children and Amole) would take turns acting the scenes out. The children never knew they were rehearsing for the film,’’ he says.
Although the film revolves around a dyslexic child, the incidents could be about any child. A scene where Ishaan bunks school and gets his brother to write a note saying he was sick, is similar to the time Amole himself bunked in Class III and got a neighbourhood ‘auntie’ to write the note for him.
Another scene, where Ishaan gets a stray dog to eat his report card is inspired by a number of children who hide their report cards from their parents. The art teacher in the film—Nikumbh Sir—is named after Amole’s own art teacher at school “who was like a breathe of fresh air in an otherwise structured system of education’’. For Amole and Deepa, inclusive education is not about adding “four bad mangoes to ten good ones, but realising that all the mangoes are from the same tree’’.
Says Amole, “Inclusion is not an act of charity towards the ‘slow ones’ but an attempt at creating a more caring society. After all, the speed of a herd of animals is determined, not by the fastest in the pack, but by the slowest. They don’t create a separate division for the ‘slow ones’.’’
anahita.mukherji@timesgroup.com

HAPPY FAMILY: Deepa Bhatia and Amole Gupte, who spent a decade researching for TZP, with son Partho at their Khar home