The next time you shop at Wal-Mart or Best Buy, you’ll be able to pick up a Bollywood DVD with your milk, potato chips or your electronics. And for those of us having to wait to get to an Indian store to pick up our DVD masala, it will be fun to just order it from Amazon.
Although Disney already has a presence in India, this is the first time the company is distributing a Hindi film on DVD in the US. The movie is ‘Like Stars on Earth’ – better known to Bollywood fans as ‘Taare Zameen Par’ – Aamir Khan’s award winning film which has moved audiences everywhere and was India’s official selection for the Academy Awards 2008 in The Best Foreign Language Film category.
Although there are Indian-American audiences all over the US for this movie, Disney is also targeting the mainstream. The press release from Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment announcing the 3 disc DVD/CD set which releases on January 12 mentions the movie’s “seven infectious Bollywood dance numbers, vividly imagined animated interludes and a brand new English language track for a cross-cultural celebration of creativity and individuality.”
One can certainly see the film having appeal for mainstream audiences for at its heart it’s a very universal film, with a plea for inclusion and compassion that is really relevant to our brusque, rat race times. The film, which was one of the top grossing films in India in 2007, is produced and directed by Aamir Khan who also stars in it. Aamir, as usual, really gets under the skin of his character, but it is Darsheel Safary as Ishaan Awasthy, the young misfit who cannot seem to conform to the real dog-eat-dog world, who really steals the show. Ishaan is dyslexic, numbers and alphabets dance before his eyes, and nothing is aligned or makes sense to him, as he struggles to cope with a brutal world that is completely foreign to him.
This touching film shows the power of even one caring adult to change a child’s life dramatically, freeing him to dream and live the life he wants. Fun and entertaining, it doesn’t beat you over the head with any messages, but it does get you thinking and seeing things in a whole different way. With its beautiful, soft lyrics and its emotional core, ‘Like Stars on Earth’ retains its Bollywood heart but with Aamir Khan, who always moves to the beat of his own drummer, you travel a different, less-traveled path.
