Released 21 December worldwide, TZP vividly portrays the manner in which an eight-year-old boy, disinterested in studies, is humiliated and punished by all his teachers at school.

At his home, too, with utter disregard to the boy's special talent for painting, his parents pack him off to a boarding school as a disciplinary measure. The boy faces virtually living hell and yet again fares badly in studies until an exceptional art teacher (played by Aamir) 'discovers' the hidden talents of the child.

Attempting to drive home the point that every child is special, the essence is every parent and teacher ought to understand and respects a child's ability. That it is every one's responsibility to show some care and concern towards such special children and make them feel important.

Dyslexia, a learning disability that affects an individual's ability to read, write and spell, has been defined by the World Federation of Neurology as "a disorder manifested by difficulties in learning to read, despite conventional instruction, adequate intelligence and socio cultural opportunity."

Worldwide, one in ten, every child is reportedly dyslexic and the disorder is estimated to occur in about 15 per cent of all school-going children. In India, about 30 million children are known to be dyslexic.

Even as dyslexia may not affect an individual's intelligence, the disorder comes with one or more learning difficulties, including auditory processing, organisational skills or memory.

Dyslexic children thus experience several difficulties to read or write. They have problem with words, learning sentences is equally tough and writing properly is simply nightmarish.

Individuals with this disability have trouble distinguishing between letters that rhyme, for instance such as "B" and "D".

They to reverse words, letters and numbers or write letters back to front as also forget the sequence of letters in a word, or sometimes even read from right to left.

Believed initially to be caused by vision problems when the disorder was first detected in late 19th century, early treatments for dyslexia involved eye exercises or glasses with tinted lenses. Later research concluded that dyslexia was caused by neurological factors as well as by inheritance due to the brain's inability to process written words normally.

While factors believed to trigger dyslexia include prematurity at birth, developmental language impairment and attention deficits, about 40 per cent of individuals with dyslexia are known to inherit it genetically. Often running in the family and affecting all kinds of people irrespective of intelligence, race, or social class, in 1994, US scientists linked its occurrence in families to a region on chromosome number 6.

Dyslexia undoubtedly may be a learning disability but certainly it does not affect the mental faculties of such individuals.

On the flip side, besides being intuitive, dyslexic people have been found to be highly intelligent and creative individuals. Many have special gifts - they could be musically inclined, possess spatial skills or mechanical ability. When their special talents have been recognised, praised and encouraged, such individuals often excelled in their field of interest.

History is replete with examples of dyslexics succeeding. Ann Bancroft, the world's first woman to cross the ice to both the North and South Poles, Leonardo da Vinci, renowned for his masterpiece Mona Lisa, Thomas Edison, the brain behind the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell, who gave the world telephony, Walt Disney, who brought technicolor imagination to life or Agatha Christie, considered the queen of crime were all dyslexics.

Recent research by Professor Julie Logan, Cass Business School, London, found that rejection along with a penchant for creativity was responsible for many dyslexics to become entrepreneurs. Notably, 20 per cent and 35 per cent of entrepreneurs in the UK and US respectively showed signs of dyslexia!

Even as dyslexic children can develop excellent use of visual thinking skills at an early age as also recognise real life objects, more often, the situation gets compounded when such children are treated like stupid and dumb-wit. This in turn makes them more undermined, further hampering their development and ability.

Coming to the aid of a class XII dyslexic student who was denied admission under the disability quota and asked to compete with general category students, the Delhi High Court in June 2004 directed the Delhi University to grant admission to dyslexic students under a three-percent quota for people with disabilities. It noted that though dyslexia was not specifically mentioned in the Persons with Disability Act, 1995, it could be included in the definition of disability. The Court held that dyslexic students should be granted provisional admission on an understanding they were entitled to be treated differently.