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While cinema remains a powerful medium to reflect the happenings in society, it has also been a medium which is caught between the real and the surreal. And therefore, fact and fiction, reality and imagination or real life and reel life move about in films as characters entertaining people, educating them or transporting them to a different world altogether. While there are people who believe in the power of cinema to change the world, there are others who say that its chief purpose is to entertain people.

And so, the disability experience too has been twisted and distorted to suit the dynamics of entertainment by many film-makers across the globe. And there have been some who have used films to highlight the reality of the disability experience and the diversity it brings to the world, how coping-up mechanisms highlight the triumph of spirit over the body and so on.

The imagery surrounding disability in films swings between these two extremes – pity, fun, carcicaturing, sympathy, lampooning and awesome heroism are at one end of the spectrum while discrimination, coping-up, emotional swings and aspirations of the human soul are at the other end. And the world over, cinema has either been charitable towards people with disabilities, pitying or laughing at them or portraying their concerns with real sensitivity.

Whether Hollywood or Bollywood, the trend is very much the same. In films that revolve around disability as a theme, there are efforts to portray the problem and potential of persons with disability but in countless other films, disability is a tool to enhance the appeal of the script, to dramatise it and to build up the heroic image of the lead character of the film. And therefore, the hero becomes a champion of the downtrodden.

India too has been part and parcel of this film-making extreme that disability is subject to. In some films like "Guide" made in the sixties, a blind man is portrayed as a saint reflecting a worldwide trend of equating blindness with sainthood, a person on a wheel-chair attracts sympathy for a variety of reasons including the fact that he is more human than the others in society.

However, the portrayal of disability in such films is hardly realistic. For example, a lady wearing a saree and seated on a wheel-chair is shown in such a manner that the sari hardly looks crumpled – the daily struggle of a lady sitting on a wheel-chair and wearing a saree is different. And then there are films where the wheel-chair is actually a pretense on part of the hero. In fact, a physically challenged person is shown as getting cured using natural medicine in a Hindi film made in the eighties.

Enhancing the appeal of the film by over-dramatizing the disabled character is a flaw that almost all film-makers seem to have perfected. And so, in a film like "Shaan", there is Abdul in a heroic role moving about on the streets singing a song or for that matter, a film like "Aankhen" actually revolved around three blind men robbing a bank.

And then there is an attempt on the part of the script writer and the film-maker to build up the heroism of the lead character in the film by portraying him as a champion of the downtrodden. So, in almost all of the films in which Amitabh Bachchan played a central role, there is a person with a disability who is intimately associated with him, whether it is Rakhee in "Great Gambler" or Nirupa Roy as mother in "Amar, Akbar Anthony". In fact, the trend began much earlier – witness the young orthopaedically challenged boy in "Dream Girl" or Rajesh Khanna’s handicapped sister in "Saccha Jhoota".