Thursday, December 24, 2009

Don't miss the Idiots

There used to be a time when we used to see Govinda's fims on the first day!! Perhaps Govinda had the highest standard deviation among his fans - at one side there are all of us in all the engineering and medical and management schools and at the other end there are the auto-walas!! After a very long time I again managed to see a film on the first day... well not even the first day but the premier show. No points for guessing, it's indeed another movie which would be liked by all IITians (I doubt though if the autowallas would like this that much).
It's just awesome. It will surely fill everyone with nostalgia - with all the typical legendary engineer jokes (like how does a DC machine start and many more). Though very loosely based on 5 Point Someone, but the essence is same. Few weeks back I read in a column, where Chetan Bhagat had mentioned about the screwed up education system of India with all the unreasonable pressures it puts on the students, the flimsy parameters to measure success and the total lack of any importance to creativity. This movie has just expressed each of these points so nicely!! You can call it a documentary on Indian education system, but at no point it bores you at all. It conveys some very good messages but never it sounds like Gyan!! And above all.... Amir Khan is just too good!!

Again Raju Hirani has proved that Indian cinemas can be serious stuff and not just hundred people with designer dresses dancing on the streets of New York or the exotic locales of Ladakh. Munnabhai MBBS and Lage Raho Munnabhai were also very made movies with every character well researched. I've read somewhere that the medical terms used in Munnabhai MBBS were all very authentic and truly depicted. Same here with the engineering terms and the various other things shown in the movie. I hope more and more people come forward and make meaningful and well researched movies like this.

Each and every character in 3 Idiots appear so real. Roughly the story line follows 5 Point Someone. Here also there are three friends who start feeling a spark between them from the very first day in engineering college. The ragging scenes are little different from what's there in the book. Nevertheless Raju Hirani has captured many of the common ragging practices across various engineering colleges - like dancing with undies, being asked to pee on an electric heater and getting electrified etc. IIT Delhi has become Imperial College of Engineering, which we all know is actually the IIMB. The director of the engineering college could have been no one other than Boman Irani. He has been given an Einsteinish look and he is just fabulous in the role of a ruthless and heartless professor who just judges one by the grades and nothing else. Amitabh Bachchan in Mohabbatein was also supposed to be a similar type of person, but you need to really see the difference in the way these two characters with similar shade have been treated. Mohabbatein was just a crap making a caricature of the principal, and here the director so neatly represents a typical crude face of the Indian education system which is nothing but a ghost of the clerk making system started by the British more than hundred years back. Amir Khan represents what the education should have been in reality - s0me thing that Rabindranath would have aspired of creating in his Shantiniketan or any educationist anywhere on earth would have talked about. Vivekananda defined education so simply as the manifestation of perfection already in man. The role of a school is to just bring out the perfection. The role of school is something like a gardener who nurtures a sapling to grow into a big tree. The gardener never makes a pine out of a rose plant. A rose plant will always grow into rose tree whatever you feed. The basic fault in our education system is, as mentioned in the movie, to force a Lata Mangeshkar to become a fast bowler and a Sachin a singer. Some of the dialogues are so nice. Like "don't go after success, just learn whatever you can and success will come running after you". In fact the last scene of the movie is exactly an enactment of this.

Those who have read 5 Point Someone will any way know the story. So there's no suspense. But still the creators of the movie have created some extra suspense and parallel story lines just to make sure that not everyone predicts everything that's happening. One major difference is that the main character of the movie is shown as the topper, who doesn't believe in the education system, but still manages to score high grades because he actually loves to learn engineering and doesn't always run after grades. Whatever he does, he does with passion. Apart from that there's not much of difference in the characterization of the three 'idiots'. Amir falls in love with Boman Irani's daughter, Samran Joshi's father is paralyzed and Madhavan's father has forced him to study engineering against his wishes to become a wild life photographer. Finally there's also the suicide attempt of Samran and stealing the question papers by the trio. The rooftop escapades are also retained so nicely in the movie. This is one of the very few cases where a successful book is converted into even a better movie.

The most entertaining thing about the movie is undoubtedly the dialogues - they are so humorous. Raju Hirani and his team has kept their signature prominently in this movie also with all the witty scenes and dialogues. Even the underlining pathos in some of the scenes have been given such a wonderful touch of humor!!

Overall - too good a movie!! Go and watch!!


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