J Sri Raman

‘Black’ was based partly on the life of Helen Keller, and she certainly did not represent a vast majority of the visually disabled. ‘3 Idiots’ deals with the distress of students forced into educational grooves, but they do not make a majority of their age group either

Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘Paa’ and Aamir Khan’s ‘3 Idiots’ rank as the two top Bollywood blockbusters to be released last month. The box-office figures — running into billions of rupees by now — are of far more than financial interest.

The big hits of India’s Hindi film industry have often served as social barometers as well. The two current mega grossers confirm a new, if ill-noticed trend, and illustrate the Indian commercial cinema’s attempt to win a target audience that never counted in its traditional market.

The tradition expressed itself in predictable, perennial themes. For a long time, until the 50s, ‘family dramas’ constituted the main formula fare. Advancing film technology was accompanied by extravaganzas for the entertainment-starved millions. Light romances of largely song-and-dance sequences — with sobbing specialists providing brief crying-bout relief — supplied escapism for the viewers of the 60s. Then came the sagas of vengeance and vendetta, with sharpening community struggles for survival and speeded-up rat races for individual rodents.

Of a more recent origin is the genre of films made for non-resident Indians or NRIs as India began to glory itself over its place in the globalised world. From Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge’, we have been treated to a steady stream of semi-nostalgic fare involving either amusing or agonising interactions between familiar native characters and either the foreign-settled or phoren-returned.

From Dilwale, which took an Indian-origin student from Britain on a continental holiday and then back to his real home in the land of bhangra, the journey has continued to ‘Dostasna’ (with two ‘gay’ Indian heroes abroad who turn out to be ‘normal’ to their fans’ great relief) and beyond.

We can discuss what this will mean for Bollywood, which the Indian diaspora has freed from dependence on the stay-at-home masses. But we will be digressing. The point is about how entirely different categories ‘Paa’ and ‘3 Idiots’ fall in, along with similar other films. All of them deal with very specific problems of the very young, from childhood to pre-adulthood, and the problems are mostly of the medical kind.

‘Paa’ is about a 12-year-old boy, Auro, who suffers from a genetic condition called progeria, also known as the Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome. Under this condition, symptoms resembling aspects of aging are manifested at an early age. The victim rarely survives beyond the age of 13. Aamir’s film is about the social malaise that forces students into monstrously ill-fitting courses of education.

‘Paa’ hit the screen three years after ‘Black’, where Amitabh plays an untiring teacher to a blind, deaf-and-mute girl. The film deals with her volatile growth to young womanhood and Amitabh’s strange victory when he falls victim to Alzheimer’s disease and she becomes his teacher. ‘3 Idiots’ was released two years after Aamir’s ‘Tare Zameen Par’ (Stars on the Earth), about eight-year-old Ishaan who suffers dreadfully from a learning disorder called dyslexia until his saviour arrives in the form of an enlightened teacher.

These educative and edifying films, of overall excellence (despite some preachy scenes that do disservice to ‘Paa’), on challenged children do mark a departure from the traditional Bollywood offerings on the under-aged. To judge by the earlier films, orphanhood and step-motherly oppression were almost the only problems that juveniles could possibly face. This, however, does not mean that the new clutch of films deal with the common problems of the country’s children.

About 10 percent of the children in a regular classroom are estimated to suffer from dyslexia. Nearly 30 million children are known to be dyslexic in India. Amitabh, the Big B, plays a child suffering from a much rarer medical condition: progeria occurs only in one per eight million live births. ‘Black’ was based partly on the life of Helen Keller, and she certainly did not represent a vast majority of the visually disabled. ‘3 Idiots’ deals with the distress of students forced into educational grooves, but they do not make a majority of their age group either.

A more common problem concerning children, for example, is malnutrition. Every second child under three in the country is malnourished, even according to official figures. The number for under-five children is 55 million. Fifty percent of the total number of child deaths take place due to malnutrition.

Child labour is another common malaise, which offers no medical mystery. According to official figures, again, nearly 90 million out of 179 million children in the 6-14 age group do not go to school and are engaged in some occupation or other. This means that about 50 percent of children are deprived of their right to a free and normal childhood. Unofficial statistics puts the figure at over 100 million. These include children working without wages in fields and cottages under their parents, with no official survey taking note of them.

Both these problems have their health dimensions as well. In the case of malnutrition, this is obvious. Child labour, for its part, exposes children engaged in hazardous work, as in match or fireworks factories, to occupational risks and diseases.

Bollywood’s body of child-centred films has its exceptions as well. Two spring to the mind of a long-time film-lover. The first was ‘Boot Polish’ of 1954, about a boy and a girl forced into beggary. The second is ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ of 2008, the story of Mumbai’s shanty-town children.

Both the films are about children in a similar predicament, but many would see them as sending out contrasting messages. To them, the most popular songs of the two would seem to present a contrast of the conspicuous kind.

‘Jai Ho’ (May Victory be Yours), the climactic song in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, says: “Iota by iota, I have lost my life, in faith, I have passed this night dancing on coals, I blew away the sleep that was in my eyes, I counted the stars till my finger burned…Taste it, taste it, this night is honey, Taste it, and keep it, It’s the heart, the heart is the final limit…Come, come my life, under the canopy, Come under the blue brocade sky!” The lines make up the magical, last lingering moment of the film.

In ‘Boot Polish’, an avuncular friend of child workers asks them: “Hum se na chhupao bachho humein bhi batao, Aane wali duniya kaise hogi samjhao” (Don’t hide it from me, kids; tell me, too, what the coming world will be like). And, in a rousing chorus, they reply: “Aane wali duniya mein sab ke sar pe taaj hoga…badlega zamanaa ye sitaron mein likha hai” (In the coming world, every head will wear a crown…The times will change, this is written in the stars).

There is all the difference, of course, between revolutionary hope from social change and the rags-to-riches hope of a fairytale romance. But the songs do not make the stories so very different. The shanty boy in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ finds transformation of his condition in a big-buck television quiz contest. The two children in ‘Boot Polish’ find the salvation not in any revolutionary change but in an anti-climactic adoption by a rich family.

Someday, maybe, Bollywood filmmakers will come along and tell us a story of children — in India and elsewhere — without a fairytale ending.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint