Sitaare Zameen Par

Talent, teamwork and tenacity are attributes that, as a rule, occupy centrestage in a sports drama. These qualities come to the aid of a team of hoopsters that fights to beat the odds stacked against it. Add to the proceedings a dash of feel-good, high-spirited humour and periodic tugs at the heartstrings and you have Sitaare Zameen Par, somewhat inconsistent in pace but always entertaining. The underdog story, scripted by Divy Nidhi Sharma and directed by R.S. Prasanna, pivots around ten neurodiverse basketball players placed under a reluctant coach, an angry not-so-young man in dire need of a course correction. The team does not get along with the coach. A judge assigns the job to the latter as punishment for ramming his car into a police vehicle in a drunk driving case. Although they find winning ways difficult to come by to begin with, each member of the outfit makes steady progress on and off the basketball court.

An insensitive, full-of-himself basketball coach, suspended from his job, finds himself doing community service: in three months he has to shape a group of young adults, largely with Down’s Syndrome, into a team that is capable of participating in tournaments. Based on the 2018 Spanish film Campeones, ‘Sitaare Zameen Par’ adopts the original’s determinedly cheery vein to win its matches; in the process, it also wins our hearts. Gulshan (Aamir Khan) is the guy with an attitude problem, and he uses it to make everyone around him unhappy. His wife Sunita (Genelia d’Souza) wants a baby. He doesn’t. His senior coach wants compliance. Gulshan behaves badly. A drunk driving incident leads him, reluctance and truculence firmly in place, to a vocational centre for people with special needs. Here he encounters a group of spirited youngsters who challenge his idea of ‘yeh bechaare bachche’: Satbir, Guddu, Bantu, Hargovind, Sharmaji, Lotus, Raju, Kareem, Sunil, Golu are all young people with specific personality quirks which go beyond their facial Down’s distinctiveness, often unclear vocalisation and other limitations which are part of the autism spectrum. These are young people who have a sense of self, and fun: slowly but surely, Gulshan finds himself being drawn into their circle, and what started as a punishment becomes pure affection.

There is a self-aware moment in Sitaare Zameen Par that nicely parodies the moral science cinema of Aamir Khan. A team of neurodivergent basketball players has won a precious free throw in a losing game. Their coach, Gulshan, can’t stop pep-talking the player about to take the shot. Satbir (Aroush Datta) loses his head and yells out. “Sir, pehle aap chup rahiye,” he thunders, telling Gulshan to shut up. Khan — one of the most didactic superstars India has ever produced — needs to surround himself with more Satbirs. In his directorial debut, Taare Zameen Par, a landmark film from 2007, Khan played Nikumbh, a sensitive art teacher who mentors a dyslexic child in a boarding school. The audience, too, felt mentored meaningfully by Khan, their hearts and minds broadened by a thoughtful, virtuous star. Khan spiked his hair and dressed up in a clown suit for the role. Yet, every so often, we spotted a halo behind his head.

What might Aamir Khan’s last decade-and-a-half have been like had he not done 3 Idiots? I’d imagine his fans, and maybe the man himself, would look at the 2009 film as a positive turning point. It was, after all, a wild success, one that set Khan up for other, even more successful films in the same vein. He was already gravitating towards morally instructive projects; Taare Zameen Par (2007), his first as director, was about a gifted dyslexic child. But 3 Idiots showed how happy audiences were to be lectured at if you made yourself look silly and made them feel smart. Always tagged as a ‘thinking actor’, Khan now seemed determined to make audiences think, even if his films often did the thinking for them.

बॉस्केट बॉल टीम का फ्रस्टेटिड जूनियर कोच शराब पीकर गाड़ी चलाते हुए पुलिस की गाड़ी को ठोक देता है। अदालत उसे सज़ा सुनाती है कि वह बौद्धिक रूप से अक्षम लोगों की एक बॉस्केट बॉल टीम को तीन महीने तक प्रशिक्षित करेगा। कोच भरी अदालत में पूछ बैठता है-तीन महीने तक पागलों को सिखाऊंगा मैं…? सिखाने जाता है तो वह पूछता है-मैं टीम कैसे बनाऊं, टीम तो नॉर्मल लोगों की बनती है न…? इतनी कहानी तो आपको इस फिल्म का ट्रेलर भी बता देता है। ट्रेलर तो यह भी बताता है कि इन ‘पागलों’ को कोचिंग देते हुए यह कोच अपने बाल नोच रहा है। लेकिन ट्रेलर से आगे बढ़ कर यह फिल्म दिखाती है कि ज़माना जिन्हें ‘नॉर्मल’ तक नहीं मानता वे लोग न सिर्फ हमसे कहीं ज़्यादा नॉर्मल हैं बल्कि कुछ मायने में तो बेहतर भी हैं। फिल्म यह भी बताती है कि हर किसी का अपना-अपना नॉर्मल होता है, हमें उसे पहचानने और स्वीकारने को राज़ी होना चाहिए।

Sitaare Zameen Par is also refreshing in terms of how a Bollywood superstar — an almost deified being for most of our audiences — isn’t afraid to poke fun at himself. Aamir’s height (or rather, the lack of it) is mined for laughs, and there is also a reference to his age. The man has always led the way, and with Sitaare Zameen Par, he gives us the vintage Aamir that we have always loved watching. Honest, emotional, fun and meaningful. There isn’t anything in Sitaare Zameen Par, however, that we hadn’t seen in its trailer. Aamir plays Gulshan Arora, the assistant coach of the Delhi basketball team, who after a physical altercation with his boss and a run-in with cops, is sent to do community service for three months. That means heading to the city’s Sarvodaya Centre to train a bunch of neurodivergent players for an upcoming tournament. While most of us tend to group those with physical or mental disabilities under a generic umbrella, this film presents them as people with individual quirks and personalities who operate within their ‘own normal’.