Director: Aamir Khan

Eight-year-old Ishaan Awasthi likes dipping into the mucky drain just outside his school to scoop up tiny tadpoles. He likes to sketch and paint and draw. Colours speak to him, alphabets and numbers don't. He flunks tests, and gets into trouble with his teachers. Slowly, his life starts to spiral out of control.

Taare Zameen Par takes us into the heart of Ishaan's world: his struggles with the three r's, his ambitious father who thinks Ishaan needs discipline, his caring-but-harried mother, his loving big brother who watches out for him. And his art teacher Ram Shankar Nikumbh, who saves Ishaan from sinking into a black hole. Taare Zameen Par, Aamir Khan's directorial debut, is a heartwarmer.

This has to be Hindi cinema's first attempt in recent times to get a child so right. Bollywood's blights — preciousness and artifice — are banished. Ishaan comes across as a real, breathing, living child who struggles to make sense of things which are so ridiculously simple for other kids: first-time actor Darsheel Safary, all buck teeth, expressive frowns, and wide smiles, lights up the screen.

It's also the first time we've seen the dark, traumatic side of childhood. Bullying, and constant haranguing by teachers and parents (Vipin Sharma and Tisca Chopra as mom and dad are both very good) and peers can be life-threatening: one of the most affecting scenes in the movie is when Ishaan's best friend finds him high on the railings of the terrace on his boarding school, looking down into the dizzying depths below with hollow, hopeless eyes.

The discovery that Ishaan is dyslexic, by fellow sufferer and empathetic teacher Nikumbh Sir (Aamir), comes after the half-way mark, coinciding with Aamir's first appearance. Smart move, because neither Aamir's superstarry presence nor all the talk of dyslexia (neurological disorders, the inversion of letters, the difficulty with numbers, and the tenets enshrined in the sarkari (Sarva Sikhsha Abhiyan) overwhelms the movie. The ‘specialness’ of Ishaan doesn't become a label: it just underlines the film's message, “every child is special”.

And that sentiment ,and Nikumbh Sir's spiffy Mohawk cut, carries the film through its sometimes stretched, overstated passages, as well as its repetitive sequences of teachers-leave-that-kid alone. The film glosses over the long, hard and sometimes endless grind that parents and care-givers of children with ‘special needs’ get locked into, in the rapid way Ishaan climbs out of the abyss. But we don't mind, because we need the happy optimism of this just-waiting-to-be-made film. Upbeat is a good place to be. You take away Darsheel's knock-out performance, and Aamir's restrained, spirited support: watch this one with your eight-year-olds. And up.