April 2007

After a long time I saw a very good movie "Mozhi". I am not good at writing movie reviews, but I felt I should write about this movie since it has created a wave deep inside my heart. I have come across a lot of characters in my life, this movie made me to look back and take a review of these characters.

Long back when I was doing my seventh standard, myself along with three of my school mates did a project called "Care For the Uncared". I don't even have traces of the project report or the findings with me, but those memories still remain pleasant in my heart. We used to go to a lot of orphanges, spastic schools, old age homes, schools for the disabled, etc and even went to the roads interviewing the difficulties of the poor people. I did not know what is the cause for all these things but, I think at a later part of my life these experiences which I had with such people are going to help me. These things flashed my mind when I was watching that movie. Myself and Arun Ponniah (my room-mate and senior) watched this movie together. When they introduced Jothika, Arun was telling that she may be deaf and dumb, suddenly I remembered that the description deaf and dumb was inappropriate. When we were collecting information about such kind of people in one of the schools for disabled in a village near Trichy way back in 1996, we happen to meet the headmaster or the principal of that school. We had a chat with her regarding the difficulties these students face and things like that, during our conversation, we used "deaf and dumb" to describe these students. The headmaster of that school corrected us by saying not to call them "dumb", because usually a dumb person is the one who is foolish or stupid, but she told us these students are not fools, they have a sound knowledge and they have some disabilities. She asked us to call a person who has difficulty in speaking as "mute" and not as "dumb". So the correct term is "Deaf and Mute". These things rolled at the back of my mind when I saw the movie.