Hitchki

Hitchki is another one of those refreshingly different movies targeted at the multiplex thronging multitudes. A progressive movie, it highlights several issues at different levels even as the movie too tries to break new grounds by projecting as its lead cast an actress who had quit the acting scene to get married and become a mother. Rani Mukherjee as a victim of the Tourette’s syndrome is ably supported by Sachin as her father, and Neeraj Kabi as her co-teacher in a school.

The movie begins with the scene where Rani Mukherjee, playing the role of Naina Mathur, is facing an interview board for the post of a teacher. Even as the interview board acknowledges Naina’s educational qualifications and other certifications, Naina begins to produce strange noises from her throat which evinces some kind of problem that Naina had. Naina is shown to be explaining that she has Tourette’s syndrome and that her condition and these involuntary noises emitted by her including the act of rubbing her throat were as a result of Tourette’s, it becomes abundantly clear that she was going to be rejected by the board. As one of the members advices her about not applying for teacher’s position as her condition would probably render the task of teaching difficult for her, she gives a befitting reply when she asks them if they had ever heard of Tourette’s syndrome and as was to be expected, none of the board members had. So, as she left the room, she told them that if she could during the course of an interview teach something to the board members, she could well imagine what she could do as a teacher. Despite, the don’t-give-up attitude that she abundantly displays, at one level the movie shows Naina struggling to get a teachers job due to her health condition.

At another level, the movie highlights the plight of parents of such children. The real-life husband and wife pair of Supriya Palgaonkar and Sachin play the role of Naina Mathur’s parents in the movie. So while the mother is shown to be sympathetic towards her daughter, empathizing with her condition, understanding the pain her daughter goes through at being rejected by peers, and yet being able to do little, the father is shown as someone who has problems accepting a daughter who is deviant from the normal. He is shown as someone who would get embarrassed at her condition. In fact, in one of the scenes where the young Naina Mathur is out dining with her parents at a restaurant, and Naina breaks into these involuntary noise-making and head shaking, her father is shown to get embarrassed and quickly places the order for food on behalf of Naina. Naturally, the bond between the father and daughter is strained. The father in fact, goes on to abandon his family, leaving them in a lurch. Hussain Dalal playing the role of an understanding and empathizing brother is almost portrayed as an epitome of acceptance, love and care – a character almost utopian yet believable. The brother plays the role of the mediator between the father and daughter every time the father is shown visiting them. Her insistence to become a teacher is explained well in one of the scenes. It is during one of her father’s visits to the family and he is shown telling her that he has got her a job  in a bank, and she refuses it saying that she is keen to become a teacher.  When her father ridicules her about this insistence of hers, we are shown a scene in flashback, when Naina is very small, and in her school’s auditorium. The principal in on the stage addressing a large crowd of assembled children, teachers and parents. He is shown asking the crowd about the noise that was being made when the programme was on – and he encourages the child who ever was making the noise to won up and come up on stage. Naina, prodded also by her mother, owns up and walks to the stage. The principal, very sensitively, and probably aware of her condition, makes her speak to the crowd about Tourette’s syndrome. By the end of this episode, the children of the school, the teachers and parents had all been sensitized to her condition and they had all become more accepting of her. Naina naturally went on to idolize her principal and also dreamt of being a teacher, just as good and sensitive as her principal.

The, at a different level, also deals with the divide in the society between the haves and the have-nots. Naina finally succeeds to get a job at a school – in fact her own school. When Naina, after five years of struggle to land herself a job of a teacher, finally gets a call from her own school, she is shown to be ecstatic, and why not. However, she gets far more than what she had probably bargained for. The school was offering her a class teacher’s job for Class XI F, a section that was not there when she was a student of the school. On probing she gets to understand that this class belonged to a motley group of children from the underprivileged society as part of the Rights to Education policy of the government. The children had become rebellious due to the divide in the school that they could perceive between them and the rest of the school. They had realised that they would be treated differently – that the rest of the school would never accept them as mainstream students. To the movie’s credit, within the less-than-2-hour-long length of the movie, it does do a credible job of portraying the divide to a great extent.

Neeraj Kabi, true to his repute of being a class actor, an actor of a different league, pulls off the role of a teacher who is good and yet not at all sympathetic to the cause of the children of XI F, with aplomb. He is shown forever belittling the efforts of Naina Mathur and trying to influence the principal of the no-worthwhileness of having the class of IX F.

Naina starts by constantly instilling in her children of class IX F a sense of purpose and a sense of achievement. In fact, the first few scenes of Naina with the students of class IX reminds one of the famous scenes of “Sound of Music” where the seven children of Captain von Trapp played by Christopher Plummer play out every trick in the book in order to shoo away Maria, their newly appointed home tutor, played ably by Julie Andrews. Neeraj Kabi never ceases to let go of an opportunity to highlight to Naina that she has on hand an impossible task and that she would be better off without this new responsibility bestowed on her.
 

Amidst all the trials and travails, including where acceptance is made even more difficult due to her Tourette’s syndrome, Naina, not one to give up, is finally able to win the trust of these children and to instill in them a sense of purpose and self-confidence. She is shown as a teacher who thinks out of the box and who uses teaching methodologies that are different and suited for the children whose care she has been entrusted with. There are scenes in the movie which look very outlandish as when the children do stuff that make you gape with wonderment whether any school, worth its salt would tolerate acts of such impunity by looking the other way. And yet, you would want to dismiss them as the Director’s prerogative and the writer’s creative license.
 

The movie is an ode to all those teachers including Anand Kumar of Super Thirty who do not give up on their students despite odds stacked against them and in the process making their own journey as well as that of their students a memorable one. From backbenchers and embarrassments to schools, these children are made the pride of the school by the efforts and the never-give-up attitudes of the teachers.
 

A dialogue of the movie where Rani Mukherjee says that there are no bad students, only bad teachers   succinctly describes the main thread of the movie.