Real engineering life and life in 3 idiots

If you take an icky Indian novel like five point someone and micturate all over it, its hardly surprising that the end result is a piece of mangled trash we now know as 3 idiots. The movie was no doubt an unendurable trumpery with little entertainment and drama but rich in cheap internet downloaded humor. The movie is replete with infernal nonsense. Criticisms aside, did the movie portray a slice of the real college life? The answer is a plain NO.

Lets start with the characters. The prime protagonist is one we tag as a “fundoo”. One brush through the pages and the data is processed, stored and flexibly applied in real life. By real life scenarios I mean, sucking the crowning baby out of your sister in laws birth canal using a vacuum cleaner on a table tennis table and performing wizardry(aal iz well baloney) to bring back the dead. An engineering graduate degree taken anywhere in the world doesn’t prepare one for that.

We have Chatur, whom we can classify as “frustoo”. In the movie there is one each of the above and that too in one of the best colleges in the country. Are those numbers credible? We most definitely have a zilch count on former and dozens on the latter.

Then the hideously implausible caricature of the director with Vajpayee’s lips and Corleone’s pout behaving like the escapee form the local asylum, referred to by his acronym, walks around to dry you out of any interest in learning. . Where are the good guys? The ones who motive you to be a better engineer of tomorrow like every college doea without fail? To savor the bollywood masala, this small clan was comfortably forgotten.

Now we turn the spotlight onto the prime topic of the movie which got media bustling-Glorification of ragging. Portraying ragging as nothing more than a couple of acting tasks and adding a humorous twist to it doesn’t alleviate the grave situation. Ragging in a government college teeters on the border of BDSM. A synopsis of the actual college ragging goes something like this- slaps tolling to a few hundreds amounting to innumerable blood clots, vicious kicks to the glutious maximus which sends shocks up your spine pushing the human endurance to the limits, the forcible intoxication which does irreparable damage to ones future, stripping one off clothes and dignity, missing of multitudes of meals and sleep and et al. At times a prison holding for third degree murder is better off than the life of an engineering college student. The innumerable hours spent under pressure and dread of seniors was not captured even to the minimal extent. Instead it eclipsed the truth and shone light on the volatile topic as nothing more than a brief entertaining interaction. The message it sent was wrong. With the sky rocketing success of the movie, the idea propagated spread like wild fire. The movie shows the junior student electrocuting the senior. The climax of that episode in the movie- junior sleeps like a baby. In real life- junior is two feet in the air held by his throat while others whip him with belts. Then rushed to the emergency room where he conceals the cause of injury.

Positioned as a screed against the current system of Indian education that prizes rote cramming over creative thinking, the 3 Idiots script careens all over the place and is hopelessly inadequate. In the movie the unbearable pressure forces a student to end his life on the noose. The prior statement has two faults in itself. First, the unbearable pressure is infact bearable. The curriculum may not be designed to craft a scientist or an astronaut but it is not even in the vicinity of heavy. When every student can study for just a day and clear exams with flying colors and finish the pending project by surfing the net for an hour or two, the questions rises. To act as the ingredient of formula for success was a non existent situation introduced? Secondly, the suicides. There are much more students dying every year because of reckless activities, love failures and of course ragging. This goes a step further to prove that all that mattered was to weave a story which would bring in the big bucks and not to unmask a social evil. Though the movie shows that education system is very heavy, even the weakest student gets a job. Paradox or just downright gaga?

The future of a kid is in his/her own hands. Parents may have dreams but whatever those maybe be, in the India of today, the child is the thread puller. The kid may be stuck in a stream he may detest in the present days but its nothing but a consequence of his bad decisions. Limning parents as insensitive being who place their interest first is an insult to the entire parent community.

Self-seriousness in the times of Rakhee Sawant won’t fetch you even an art-house seat. The writers of the script know it. Ergo the movie is disproportionate mix of their softheaded imagination and tiny slices of real life, set in a college which is at the other end of the spectrum of truth. Not convinced yet? Just ask yourself. When was the last time a girl came drunk to your dorm room in inebriated condition leave alone the directors daughter? When was the last time you went to the directors den without being interrupted by even one security guard? Have you proved a professor wrong in front of the entire class and got away with it(trans: passed with a grade above P).And the grossest of all- When was the last time you had a soapy number on the bathroom floor?