After talking to Siddharth and his parents, and listening to what they went through in life, the strange coincidence in the lives of the Awasthis in Taare Zameen Par and the lives of the Chandrasekhars strike you hard. Perhaps it is the story of all families with children with dyslexia.
Siddarth also went through what Ishan went through in the film.
"We felt Aamir Khar Khan was narrating our son's story," was how his parents felt after watching the film.
It was but natural for a father who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in metallurgy, to expect his first born son to follow his path. But that was not to be.
The father D Chandrasekhar frankly admits, "Whatever you saw in the movie happened in our home too. When we found that our first son, the first grandchild in our family, was consistently getting poor marks, we attributed it to laziness. With my parents around, we thought he was being pampered. So, we decided to put him in a boarding school, we thought that was the solution to the problem. We didn't know it was learning disability; we thought he was just lazy."
Like Ishaan in the film, Siddharth also pleaded with his parents not to send him to the boarding school. His father remembers, "He said he would behave, we still sent him because we thought that was the solution to the problem. But he was thrown out of the school at the end of the academic session. I still remember what the school wrote us, 'Further continuance of your ward is detrimental to the academy'."
Image: A poster of Sivaji, designed by Siddharth's company.
Also read: A martyred hero and his extraordinary parents
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