Iwould like to start this by saying this is not a traditional review. I’m not a critic and I’m sure if a critic were writing this, they would analyse script, stars performances, directing and other factors and those are done by folks much better than I, who are full- time critics. This therefore is not just another movie reviewed on a Friday because 3 Idiots isn’t just another movie. It is much more than that. It is a story whose importance and urgency needs talking about which I’ll attempt to do.My first day of college, after 12 years of an education system where we learnt Shakespeare by heart, a professor asked me what my favorite Shakespeare play was and I replied Hamlet. The professor asked, "Why?" and I gave him a long answer repeating something a dead academic had said which my ICSE text books told me to say. The professor stopped me and asked, "That’s rubbish. I didn’t ask what so-and-so thought of Hamlet, I asked what you thought." I was stumped. I had known education to mean repeating what old people with beards had said. This professor was asking me something no one had ever asked me before, to think on my own. "I have no idea why Hamlet is my favorite play sir but I’ll think about it" I replied. And that’s the day I learnt that the difference between learning and getting a degree is vast. And I realized that a mind was not just to remember, it was to create, to ask, to be curious, to unlearn all the rubbish that was forced into our heads without context or understanding, That day taught me that to really understand anything, you had to have an open mind and be an idiot.
Very simply, 3 Idiots is a story of 3 people who come to an engineering college. Two with certainties of the career they wanted (Sharman Joshi and Madhavan) and one (Aamir Khan) with curiosity that anything is possible. And the film captures the journey of how he transforms not so much their lives but their ideas and many years later, they go in search of him. What Mr. Khan’s character does in college is to introduce the idea that a simple question lies at the heart of every greatx problem (Einstein, Newton, would agree) and if you ask it, and keep an open mind, you have begun an education. And if one really learns by asking, then marks and jobs and careers and stability, sort itself out.In a nation of double digit suicide rates and cut-off percentages of 97 per cent and engineering entrance exams considered brutally difficult globally, this is not just a message that needs to be heard, this is a fundamental shift in how we need to think as a society. And this big budget Bollywood movie has beaten policy-makers, think tanks and pundits in asking that question. We talk of beating China’s growth, we talk of being the new world power over the US and Europe and we consider the fuel in our fire to be educated young people and yet the education we give them is to memorise and compete endlessly, first as students, then as the middle class for salaries to buy material consumer things. Yet, in everything, we don’t create new ideas, we just follow western processes. As Mr. Aamir Khan’s character says in the movie (and I paraphrase), "If you really want to do something to become someone in the world, don’t run after money, create ideas that change the world, money comes". Bill Gates dropped out of college, Shakespeare never finished school and the Wright brothers who invented the airplane couldn’t afford school.As Warren Buffet once said, "Anything of any value in this world came from someone considered a mad man in his time". If we want to create the next Google or revolutionise clean technology, if we want the next generation of MF Husseins and Nandan Nilekanis, if we really strive to make a better India (not one of catch phrases but taken seriously in the world for new ways of thinking), I’d listen carefully to what the creators of 3 Idiots are saying.
Rajkumar Hirani, working off a script he wrote with Abhijat Joshi in a Vidhu Vinod Chopra production (loosely based on a Chetan Bhagat novel), creates a motion picture that does much more than entertain and educate – it makes you think about the way you think – while making you laugh and cry and be taken on a cinematic journey as any film would.Mr. Chopra, Mr. Hirani and Aamir Khan are a great combination, not just for showbiz power (arguably the biggest combination in Bollywood today) but for their intelligence and their thoughts on India. In 3 Idiots and the Munnabhai franchise and in Mr. Khan’s own productions, one can see that the effort is more than just to make a movie - it is to effect change for a better India while being hugely entertaining. Whether it’s tackling corruption, religious, class, caste barriers, the way we treat our elderly, handicapped, the way we teach, fall into backward thinking, illiterate beliefs, their movies always pass on a progressive message subtly that ours is a cosmopolitan, free, secular, possible society and great freedoms used responsibly build a great nation. Rather than use our diversity to divide that factions do in our country, their stories use that diversity as a strength for all that has come before making us able to build what we will. Like Infosys, liberalisation, the new India of the movies of these 3 wise men is the one I want to live in.I hope this movie is made compulsory viewing for anyone under 30 with a dream (that’s about 70 per cent of a billion) because when our Prime Minister referred to the potential of our young population, he said (quoting Victor Hugo), "You cannot stop an idea whose time has come". The time for young India to think for themselves has come. And this movie is not challenging the system of education, it is saying if you’ve ever had a dream and a passion, follow it because your instincts teach you more than any text book can- don’t be a machine, be an idiot
Being an idiot, I’m giving this 4 stars because I think this is much bigger than just a film, it’s a cultural phenomenon. Just like the Velvet Revolution affected change in Czech Republic with rock music, maybe this movie will affect societal change about how we learn. Yet one of the film’s arguments is that rankings don’t matter; only what you think does. So you must go see it. Whether you like or dislike it, whether it bores you or elates you, as long as you’ve thought for yourselves, and allowed the idiot in you to awake for a bit, I think the creators are happy. All is indeed, well.
Resources:
http://www.mumbaimirror.com/index.aspx?page=article§id=30&contentid=2009122520091225024101366f3c5d2d
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