MUMBAI: When Master Alankar says "Main phenke huye paise nahin uthata" or Master Mayur talks of revenge, they sound like anything but kids. Children did have their time in the spotlight in the 50s and 60s (Boot Polish, Hum Pancchi Ek Daal Ke, Bhabhi and the like) but they hardly sounded their age. In the 70s, they played the hero in his childhood, mouthing revengeful dialogues. A fresh change came in the 80s with Masoom. But children have rarely been essential to mainstream Bollywood narrative, till Taare Zameen Par (2008).
Director Vishal Bhardwaj admits he loved dialogues like the one made famous by Master Alankar in Deewar, adding however that "those could hardly be a child's emotions.'' Vishal, who has made children's films like Makdee and Blue Umbrella, feels mainstream cinema has been very insensitive towards children. "All we do is make a child wear a pagdi like a sardar and make other children laugh at him," he says. "Even if there is a child in the film, the focus is on romance. Kids are natural actors, we need to write proper roles for them."
While Shekhar Kapur has maintained he didn't make Masoom for kids, Jugal Hansraj, who played the central child character in the film says, "Nobody really wrote dialogues for a child, but Masoom reflected a child's emotions." Agrees Sachin Pilgaonkar, once a child actor and now a film personality of many hats. "Earlier, films involving children were made for elders to watch. The character of the child was not necessarily the strongest one." But Master Mayur argues, "Tell me one dialogue in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar that sounded 'grown-up'. People say they love my dialogues like 'Aap rona mat memsahib, main aapko bilkul aisi gudia laa doonga (Don't cry memsahib, I'll get you a similar doll)."
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