Portrayal of Dyslexia in Taare Zameen Par

For this segment, I will be analysing specific scenes from the movie which portray Dyslexia and compare it to reality.

Scene 1: Ishaan and the Fishes

This scenes shows how Ishaan is engrossed in to fishes in the school pond, and he gets so fascinated by them that he almost forgets to board his school bus.

VS Reality:

Dyslexics tend to have poor time management, much like Ishaan. It has been listed in many online sites such as Dyslexia Victoria Online (2011) that "time management is difficult, if not impossible for many ", and that being distracted is listed in many sites as one of the signs of a Dyslexic person.

This scene portrays the traits of Dyslexic Ishaan accurately as it corresponds to the reality that Dyslexics are easily distracted and might lose their sense of time.

Scene 2: Ishaan in the math test

In this scene, Ishaan and his classmates are given a surprise maths test, which he does not know how to do. He stares at the questions in boredom, and starts to enter the stage of his own imagination.

VS Reality

This is fairly accurate because Dyslexics are known to be "right-brain dominant" (BDA, 2007), thus are stronger in terms of creativity. According to Sally.S (2013) Dyslexics have "vivid imaginations. They are disoriented in time and space. They daydream excessively”, and many other websites also list daydreaming or "switching off" as symptoms of Dyslexia.

Scene 3: Ishaan's Tremendous Improvement in grades

This scene happens at the Resolution portion of the Syd Field Narrative Structure of this film. Ishaan met Mr Nikumbh, an inspiring art teacher who used specialized teaching methods to help Ishaan to learn better, and eventually Ishaan goes on to score high grades in all his tests.

VS Reality

While this might seem to be a perfect happy ending, where the disadvantaged Ishaan overcomes the learning obstacles in his way to attain academic success, this might not be a totally accurate portrayal of Dyslexia.

BDA (2007) “With proper teaching methods, Dyslexics could cope with daily life and in school. However, it is important to note that Dyslexia is permanent and cannot be outgrown.”

Siddiqui, A. (2015) “The only issue that could be shown as inaccurate is that towards the end of the film, they show such tremendous progress for the student that he[Ishaan] is getting 90s in every subject, which could give a sense of "miracles happening overnight" to some viewers.”

From this we can see that Dyslexia is after all still a learning disability, so the movie tries to create an "ideological cinema" (Hayward, 1996), where the main characters goes through a lot of struggles, but eventually succeeds and there is a happy resolution, even though in reality it is not very accurate.

General Conclusion:

Taare Zameen Par features a fairly accurate overall portrayal of Dyslexia in Ishaan, the main character. The Baudry Apparatus Theory may still be proven correct at the ending of the film where Ishaan undergoes an idealistic transformation.