The kids of Delhi have lapped up Aamir Khan’s maiden directorial venture, Taare Zameen Par, as they become more aware of their own friends suffering with learning disorders, who otherwise would have gone unnoticed. They are making their parents sit up and take notice of dyslexia and children suffering from it, which has resulted in renewed interest in the subject and related problems.
A Delhi University Professor, Ashum Gupta, who has been working on the subject of dyslexia for the last 15 years, has evolved and created a programme package of assessment and intervention for children with dyslexia in Delhi. Funded by the University Grants Commission, her research project is designed to discover dyslexic children, assess their language abilities and address the special needs of the suffering children. She has been holding workshops in some schools and NGOs to sensitize people and spread awareness about dyslexia. According to Professor Gupta, parents need to be involved in the process, since they often tend to call their children dyslexic even when they are not due to certain symptoms. The intervention programme gathers momentum in the later stages when the kids themselves begin to devise methods to grow their abilities. The process, however, is an arduous one and takes a lot of time.
As far as the film is concerned, it has brought a noticeable change in the attitude of viewers at large despite some of the insignificant technical errors as pointed out by the critics. The film rightly paints us as part of a consumerist society, which is insensitive and unkind at the same time about the special needs of our very own. The film takes up the case of one such special child and projects the plight of so many special children like him, who are discriminated against in public places just because their abilities differ from the run of the mill talents.