Amol Gupte has a way with kids. He has shown that through his invaluable writing contribution in Taare Zameen Par, where Aamir Khan had stepped in as the director at his expense after the film went on the floor. In Stanley Ka Dabba, Gupte decides that he won’t let that mistake happen again. So not only does he write the film, but he also firmly keeps the directorial baton in his own hand and plays a major role as an actor. He almost pulls off a classic but if his ploy does not fully succeed, it is only due to this self-centric approach and a rather stretched plot that could have been better-written.

Stanley Ka Dabba is a story of Stanley (Partho), a smart, imaginative kid, who always reaches early to school, invents tall tales and is quite a hit amongst his classmates. The bruises on his face and his quiet exits from the class-room in the tiffin-recess time tell us that there is something wrong behind this happy-go-lucky exterior. When Stanley’s friends realize that he isn’t bringing his Dabba (tiffin), they make sure to share theirs with him. But this well-oiled routine hits a roadblock when a tyrant Hindi teacher banishes Stanley from school for not bringing any dabba. This teacher is himself scavenging on other people’s dabbas without ever bringing one of his! Now how do Stanley and his gang tackle this problem? What’s the dark secret behind Stanley’s smiling exterior?

Writer-director Gupte is spot-on in showing us the school’s day-to-day happenings. Partho, the kid playing the role of Stanley and the rest of the kids playing his school-mates are straight out of life. The sweet-&-popular English teacher (Divya Datta), the always frowning- &-complaining Science teacher (Divya Jagdale) and the perpetually hungry-&-irritable Hindi teacher (Amol Gupte) are well-etched and well-played characters.

Where Gupte goes wrong is in over-emphasizing the Hindi teacher’s gluttony and also in leaving his villainy totally unexplained. Now how often have you seen a Hindi teacher, or for that matter any teacher running all over the school to eat a student’s well-stacked dabba?

Stanley’s background could also have been better utilized in the script to lift the film into a meaningful classic.

Despite all these avoidable shortcomings, Stanley Ka Dabba turns out to be an engaging, endearing portrayal of school-kids and their small different world, thanks to some wonderful performances and some insightful observations!