Expectations and Fullfillment

Two things happened in the last couple of days which really made me wonder about the word PERFORMANCE. Simple enough is it? An act of doing, do you say? I dont quite agree, in fact nothing could be more misleading. I believe the word Performance always has that angle of being evaluated attached to it. We'd never say someone has performed unless we've evaluated her actions against some standards. Just to corroborate this with examples, would any of us describe Roger Federer's efforts at Wimbledon as his Performance if he say loses to Mahesh Boppanna one day?Or do we say Shoiab Akhtar delivered a performance if say he returns back to the pavilion with figures of 10-0-0-80? We wont, right?

Having made my buildup, let me come straight to the issue at hand. The two things i was talking about was the Lead India campaign and Aaamir's new movie, Taare Zameen Pe. Both for me started off by promising amazing things. While Taare..was Aaamir's once in a year movie and made doubly special this time because he was also directing it, Lead India promised to evaluate and select a leader to whom not only would we look upto but who would also perhaps inspire a new generation of educated politicians in India.

Unfortunately while Taare Zameen Pe performed, Lead India symbolised all that you could do wrong with such an inherently brilliant a campaign. Let's start with the failure first.

The idea was big. I can almost imagine some editorial meeting in TOI's office where some editor-subeditor would have said, " Let's try and capitalize on this mood of the new Indian who wants to give something back to the country now that he is economically comfortable. What better way can there be but to first identify grassroot leaders across the country and then one stalwart amongst them. This stalwart will inspire other educated new Indian's around to to do what they have been doing for the community, maybe even get into national politics." Nice thoughts, but watching the last two episodes of the national finals, it seems to have got reduced to just one more farcical reality show with an evaluation process as flawed as a midday mass on christmus. Why for sanity's sake would you evaluate a primary school educational activist from the hilly streets Uttaranchal based on his knowledge about Filmfare awards? Or a water conservationist from the jungles of Sunderbans based on his understanding of either Shah Rukh Khan or Amitabh Bacchan being the more popular star. Given the kind of work that he has devoted his life to and the type of people he's chosen to be surrounded with, its commendable that he even knows who Amitabh Bacchan is.

Anyways, the idea should have been to get these people to come together and articulate their opinions about immediate national issues rather than reduce it to a KBC format with janta ke vote et. al. But then what else could you expect from TOI. I just hope some of the participants decide to walk away from this humiliation and blatant SMS money spinner based on false hopes.


Now Taare... was such a standard of performance and excellence that really lives upto expectations of cinema being a powerful medium of mass change. Apart from the moist eyes that one would definitely be left with at the end of those 3 hrs, is the larger impact would be about a small change that all of us would have towards children, both normal and dyslexic. The loss of a child's potential under the crush of parents worldly expectations was put across very blatantly in the movie, but this blatancy is needed and does create an amazing impact with the audience. The music by Shankar, Ehsan, Loy is superlative and some songs such as Tujhe Sab Hai Pata Hai Na Maa are guaranteed to tug guy's heart strings for long. Cinematography, particularly the setting around the sequence where the little kid sees his portrait drawn by his teacher for the first time, is built up really well.

Do watch this performance!