Witness the burlesque of contestants glibly thanking India’s janata, especially the people of ‘their’ states, for voting to keep them in the contest. Remember how contestant Smita Nandy’s father suffered a heart attack when she was eliminated from the show? Recall the brazen declaration of a parent, Mr Doshi, that he had computers across cities dedicated to sending votes for his daughter and that he spent Rs 70,000 on SMS votes.

Watching the parents’ strained faces you wondered if they had ever told their children to give their best joyously and not treat the contest as a life and death matter. Would Mr Doshi’s daughter consider herself a gifted singer after losing out on instant stardom and wealth? Or would she call herself a ‘loser’ — a popular term these days — without even having discovered her individuality?

You see it everywhere. In ‘friendly’ sports matches, parents berate their children for not showing the killer instinct. A child drawing a purple sun is given a timely lesson in realism, as if it were a geography lesson, not an expression of her unique perception. We live in result-oriented times; if a child is not able to use her gift to compete and win, it is of no use. Competitiveness is not explained as doing one’s best, but as vanquishing the other. All this is done in the garb of encouraging potential.

In the process, we completely fail to understand the role of creativity in enabling a child’s first steps at socialisation. Spontaneously, she draws herself in the company of the sun, moon, trees and flowers. Her purple sun is not a mistake but a sign of her individualistic expression. As a doer, she discovers the harmonious rhythms of nature, creating them anew with lines and colour. Thus unfurls an aesthetic mindset characterised by openness, and so begins the evolution of human values in her psyche. This was the most profound lesson that veteran artist Devi Prasad learnt in his decade-and-a-half stint as art teacher in Gandhi’s Nayee Talim Institute at Sewagram. He articulated these ideas in his pioneering Art: The Basis of Education.

The child’s entry into formal education severs this creative learning process. She is seen as a little adult, whose instincts have to be moulded and corrected so she can grow into her ‘rightful’ place in society.

In the India of nine per cent growth, where a newly muscular middle class aggressively flashes its biceps of self-interest, creativity too must pay its way. No exploring the frontiers of individual expression in contests replicated on every TV channel; the child must perfect the art of imitating the original, sung by an adult. Often children attempt songs clearly beyond their voice range (as immature young bodies execute sexual pelvic thrusts and gyrations to adult claps in dance contests). But it makes for high adrenalin soap. Belligerent parents challenge judges for marks not given. Children carry the guilt of having destroyed their parents’ dreams (a luscious seven-figure prize, a brand new car). What happens to these youngsters after their two minutes of deftly marketed fame are over?

In such circumstances, a film like Taare Zameen Par is refreshing. A dyslexic boy with a painterly talent is trapped in a system that expects him to emulate his ‘topper’ brother and join the rat race like his father. Aamir Khan, as the art teacher, believes that adults must help each child discover the world his own way.

Yet this admirable film’s cathartic moment hinges on the boy winning a contest! The message gets more garbled when director Khan, in a bid to promote Taare.., graces a Li’l Champs contest espousing the very values his film tries to resist.

Not only that. What does one make of captivating Darsheel Safary, who was allegedly miffed that he got the best child artiste award for his role in Taare.. at a recent function, and not the best actor award a la Shah Rukh Khan? Has anyone got the message? Or perhaps, one should ask, what is the message?

The writer is editor of the children’s website www.pitara.com