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Till Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the child character was everything but a child. So, when did the situation change to present the child as a child and not as an adult-in-miniature? One might perhaps point out Taare Zameen Par, an eye-opener packaged in entertainment format. It marked a turning point in the evolution of the character of the child in Hindi cinema. Can one really believe that the Children’s Film Society has a meagre collection of only 450 films in its 55-year-old history in the archives? Many films followed
showing the director and the script treating children naturally,
teaching them to act with spontaneity and presenting them as children.
Films centered on children targeted at a universal audience where
parents could also take a tip or two has now come into being.
Many of
them have either walked away with National Awards in different
departments of filmmaking or have made it to international film
festivals. I am Kalam, Chillar Party, Gattu and Stanley Ka
Dabba are good examples. Others are Anurag Kashyap’s Hanuman,
Vishal Bharadwaj’s Makdee and The Blue Umbrella, based
on a story by Ruskin Bond, and Priyadarshan’s Bumm Bumm Bole,
the authorised adaptation of the Iranian film Children of Heaven.
Nila Madhab Panda, director of I Am Kalam, says, "I found that apart from pointing out the need to educate every child in India and to take them out of paid labour, this film provided the opportunity to show how, even after six decades of Independence from the British, we are still fragmented by traditional divisions of caste, class, strata and culture. The Rajasa has been forced due to financial constraints, to convert half of his palace into a hotel. But his pride in his aristocratic birth and his slighting of people he considers lower than him remains unhampered." I Am Kalam is optimistic, happy and full of cheer. Chhotu is a spirited, cheerful boy, who has a spring in his walk and has the ability to bond equally with Bhatti Mama’s female camel Lakshmi and the French tourist Lucie Aunty, who wants to take him to Delhi and put him in a school. The cheerful smile on Chhotu’s face touches the hearts of the audience. The little boy who played Kalam walked away with the National Award for Best Child Actor. Chillar Party (2011), directed by Nitesh Tiwari and Vikas Behl, stars a batch of boys who are brats in different guises who unite to teach a lesson to all adults about equality between and among children, never mind if one is poor and illiterate and the other is not. It won the National Award for the Best Children’s Film and the batch of boys bagged the Best Child Actor Award in a group! It is hilarious, entertaining with meaningful messages woven into the script mainly directed at adults. The film has a wonderful scene depicting a procession by the boys of a housing complex, who wear only chaddis to protest the giving away of a stray dog owned by their ‘friend’ Fatka to the dog pound because the dog is considered a menace to the residents. Fatka cleans some of the cars in the same complex and becomes a close friend of the brat pack with time. The boys are given funny nicknames after names of films like Silence, Shaolin, Second Hand, Aflatoon, Encyclopaedia, Toothpaste, Silencer, and so on. Salman Khan was so enamoured by the script that he joined in as co-producer with UTV Motion Pictures. Stanley Ka Dabba, written, directed and produced by Amol Gupte, who has a wonderful way with children. His son Partha Gupte plays Stanley, the protagonist in the film. It takes one back to one’s school days where the daily dabba the boys bring from home becomes a focal point in childhood gluttony during tiffin time. Stanley is the only boy, who does not bring his dabba and is roundly rebuked by the Hindi teacher who himself laps up the children’s dabbas. Why does this loveable, friendly and cheerful boy come to school everyday without his dabba? There lies the interesting twist in the tale that unveils one more positive and very interesting message everyone can learn from. Gupte himself plays the miserly Hindi sir who quits school around the middle of the film. It is such a warm film filled with hope and cheer that one tends to sidetrack the melodramatic twists. "Children are very pure, very candid and honest. It is how you work and interact with them that matters. They are a powerhouse of performance. If someone says the child does not know how to act, he is wrong," says Amol Gupte, who turned the tables on children’s cinema, with his story of Taare Zameen Par.
Honour
for Sharmila
Following this, Sharmila
made a foray into Hindi cinema with Shakti Samanta’s Kashmir Ki
Kali (1964) opposite Shammi Kapoor. While her performance in the
debut film won her a lukewarm response, but it was her next film An
Evening in Paris (1967), with which she took Hindi cinema to an
era of gloss and glamour. Prior to this, many heroines had worn a
swimsuit but Sharmila gave sex appeal a modern definition. She exuded
a stylised ‘come on’ that dragged Hindi cinema into a new age.
Her bikini act in An Evening in Paris became one of the most talked about subject of the times. People thronged cinema halls in droves to see her bikini more than watching the film. However, after the film
Sharmila wanted to change her image. This opportunity she got with Anupma
(1967), which was the story of beautiful Uma, whose father hates
her as her birth had caused the death of his wife. When Hrishikesh
Mukherjee cast Sharmila as the introvert Uma, it raised several
eyebrows since at that time Sharmila was considered too glamorous for
the role. Nutan was an obvious favourite but Hrishida insisted on
Sharmila because of her expressive eyes. Hrishida’s Satyakam
is Sharmila’s most ideal work but it was Aradhana that
changed Sharmila’s career graph. In Aradhana if her ‘Roop
Tera Mastana’ song with Rajesh Khanna gave off a real erotic
charge — as an unwed mother facing the trials and turmoil of destiny
— Sharmila was quite convincing in her down-to-earth portrayal.
In the midst of the success of superhit Aradhana, Sharmila took off to give birth to her son Saif. She returned to the studios soon and expertly juggled her steam queen image with soul-in-the-eyes histrionics in Safar and Daag. Her twin turn as two variedly different prostitutes in Amar Prem and Mausam defined the transition in the portrayal of the fallen woman. After easing out of films from the mid-1970s, Sharmila has done only the occasional character roles or come out to endorse products that reflect an elitist lifestyle. At an age when other actresses have requiems written for their career, Sharmila (67), who is a leading exponents of style, has directors writing author-backed roles for her.
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