Letter to Aamir Khan..

After watching Taare Zameen Par, I couldn't stop myself from writing this letter to Aamir Khan. If you like some senti stuff then go ahead otherwise like typical blogpost of mine, it's long, boring and full of grammatical errors. And it doesn't even have the movie review.

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Dear Aamir Khan,

I really want to thank you for the masterpiece directed by you. As you haven’t directed too many movies, I hope you know it’s Taare Zameen Par which I am talking about. To start with, its one of the finest movies I have ever seen in my life and also one of the selected few I can relate to. Part of the reason is that I myself am dyslexic. Earlier, I thought I will write a review but now I have changed my mind as most of the people who read my blog have already seen the movie. So I thought to do something different and have decided to share my story with you.

The letters use to dance before me too and though over the years I can pick up their dancing pattern now, but still, I keep on repeating the same mistakes. Grammar makes no sense to me (even till now), I use to flounder with simple mathematics till I found one teacher like your character in the movie, who taught me how to solve geometry and trigonometry. He always use to say “that the fun is not in actually solving them, the real fun is in looking at these pictures and finding out what’s so different about them”. He has remained an important part of my life forever.

The last pages of my notebooks use to be filled with the different spellings of my name like Rajneesh, Rajnees, Rajnish, Rajnis, Rejnish etc. I use to mistake the ‘a’ sound with ‘e’ sound (well now I realize that that is the problem with whole of Germany). And the worse part was to confuse between the ‘sh’ sound with the ‘s’ sound and ‘we’ sound with ‘be’ sound (this continues even till now). My handwriting was something that I only could read. My cousins and sisters were really fed up of my ‘imaginative’ lies. I remember how I was sent to hospital from school for a sharp pain in stomach (I was of-course acting) but I am glad that my parents always encouraged my imagination. This helped me a lot in countering my fear for errors. Well, things improved without any external help. I slowly learnt how to paint letters, how to form the patterns and how to write within the margins. My strength was my imaginative and creative thinking which continues till now. And this gave me the confidence which later helped me improve.

However my parents finally decided me to put into a boarding school not because they were sick of complains from neighbours (they were proud instead) but because they wanted me to live away from some family problems. Well the boarding was really a good place to grow up. No, not because I had ‘Ram Shankar Nikumbh to take care of my dyslexic traits but yeah I had some really good teachers who taught me how to sing words. Suddenly all the words around me became beautiful. Though I didn’t get rid of my dyslexia completely, but I learnt how to do things on my own and how to enjoy life alone (Loneliness is something that I still enjoy). I was ‘the dreamer’ for my friends.

I went to a very competitive higher secondary school and I have around 60 -70 schoolmates who passed out of IIT and more than 100 went to IIMs but it was okay because I am still ‘the dreamer’ among my old friends. I was really lucky to have friends who always supported, encouraged and partnered with me in creating some small success stories (some were themselves having minor problems which they overcame so well).

I have been lucky to have parents who never pressed me to do anything. They never wanted me to excel in anything and were happy to see me doing just good My father was a bit surprised when he tried to teach me swimming and I failed to pick up. Despite being a champion swimmer himself, he never pushed me into swimming again. Frustrated and unhappy with my progress, I quit learning after a couple of days only to realize after 15 years that it’s not very difficult to learn swimming. The same thing was with driving. I never was able to comprehend the road signs properly; brakes and accelerator always confused me.

Having graduated from engineering college (without even spending 24 hours on a single subject) and now doing well with management education, I feel that it’s not very difficult to compete. Dyslexia is not a problem if you get the right support I still find it difficult to multitask between things and even three-four assignments together can give me sleepless nights (I can’t stand more than 2 windows open on my computer) but over the years I have learnt to cope up. People do point out my silly spelling and pronunciation errors all the while (which are of-course embarrassing).

The confusion between sounds ‘s’ and ‘sh’ and ‘b’ and ‘we’ still prevails but I have pushed myself much beyond ‘two dozen’ miss-spelt and wrongly pronounced words in my vocabulary. People always tell me that knowing your limitations and turning them into strengths is the key to success. As it is not always possible to convert weaknesses into strengths, I think that just being aware of them is enough. People have other strengths as well. In the words of Oscar Wilde – “Who wants a cynic who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing?”

I can never thank my parents enough for their support and encouragement. I know that when everyone around me are happy with my new job, my parent’s only fear is that this will take me away from them. The same thing goes about my friends. They realized my problems and were happy to live with it. Thanks to Piali (She is a major in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT and spent a summer at our college) who told me about Dyslexia and thanks to you Mr. Khan to have researched on the subject and not to make a mockery of a touching subject like this. I stand behind you in spreading the message that Dyslexia is not a problem at all.

I am an example.