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Some questions about microfinance and self-help groups
The editorial examines how self-help groups and microfinance may not be what they were once intended to be - the silver bullet to eliminate poverty - and this could soon become a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
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Responses to the Editorial in Phalanx 4
Why Does the Anglophone Indian want to be a Novelist?
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Films: |
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Avatar
by James Cameron
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3 Idiots
by Rajkumar Hirani Read |
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| Home > MK Raghavendra |
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Review: |
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3 Idiotsby Rajkumar Hirani
M.K. Raghavendra
The way in which the Nation chooses to bestow awards and honors upon its citizens is a useful way to understand the priorities of the State at any given moment. The Padma Bhushan, for instance, is a coveted award and comparative lists of awardees in the earlier decades and today reveals that where in the earlier period the people were rewarded for working in fields where material success might be elusive, the State today rewards the wealthy (in 'trade and industry') much more readily even if it has to accommodate them in some other way - perhaps 'social service' when the wealthy indulge in charity. An explanation is that pursuing wealth has become a legitimate - and even noble - pursuit today with 'trickle down' economics being most favored as the answer to the problem of inequity. In the arts, film personalities from 'Bollywood' waited a virtual lifetime before they were rewarded. Actor Dilip Kumar received Padma Bhushan when he was 69 and Dev Anand when he was 78. If Raj Kapoor received the award much earlier (he was 47) it was perhaps because of the 'socialist' messages his films were believed to propagate. It is in this context that the Padma Bhushan to Aamir Khan in 2010 - when a more phenomenal star Shahrukh Khan has had to be content with a Padma Shri - deserves interpretation. Aamir Khan made a film about primary education (Taare Zameen Par) in 2007 and is associated with one about higher education - Rajkumar Hirani's 3 Idiots in 2009. Aamir Khan is so closely identified with 'education' that visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even shared a platform with him on the subject last year - and this could not have happened without some consultation with the Indian State. Even if the Padma Bhushan has not been awarded to Aamir Khan for his 'efforts in education' there is still the likelihood that they have contributed. 3 Idiots has been eulogized in the media as an 'assault on our apathetic education system' (1). Rajkumar Hirani's Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), also in the public eye for bringing 'Gandhian values' back into focus, was screened at the UN and its message apparently heartened the Prime Minister (2). Both Hirani and Aamir Khan are therefore involved in entertainment considered 'meaningful' by the State. This essay proceeds from the proposition that since the State has conspicuously approved of these 'messages' from Bollywood , the films and their viewpoints perhaps share an ideology with the Government of India in some way. 3 Idiots being a film about higher education may therefore lead us to understand something about the State's attitude towards education, or at least provide us with a broad ideological perspective.
3 Idiots begins with two former classmates Raju Rastogi (Sharman Joshi) and Farhan Qureshi (R Madhavan) going in search of Rancho whom they lost touch with after graduating as engineers from the 'Imperial College of Engineering'. The college is an elite institution which admits only the brightest students. Although its ownership is not specified, Raju comes from a poor family and is also not doing well enough for a scholarship and this suggests a government-run institution, perhaps modeled on the IITs (3). The film alternates between the present and the past. Rancho comes from a wealthy business family in Shimla and was the non-conformist while the other two were inspired by him. Another classmate was Chatur Ramalingam - less inventive but openly ambitious - and the three friends often clashed with him. When their course concluded Chatur openly challenged them on the success of their future careers. When Farhan and Raju return to their alma mater after ten years Chatur joins them, fresh from the US and full of his achievements and possessions. He is now concluding a business arrangement with a fabulous inventor named Phunsukh Wangdu, which will make him successful beyond their wildest dreams. It is Chatur who now reminds the two of his challenge ten years back.
Many of the flashbacks in the film deal with the figure of authority in the Imperial College - Professor Viru Sahastrabudhhe (Boman Irani), whom the boys have nicknamed ViruS. The Professor was a hard task master who believed in competition and success at any cost. Virus had been so unsparing that his implacability led to a boy's suicide. ViruS, nonetheless, remained unmoved and cited his continued application to work after his own son's death. Particularly galling to ViruS was the fact that while Rancho was always playful it was still he who stood first while Chatur came only second. Because of Rancho's influence Farhan eventually abandoned engineering as a career and became an international wildlife photographer while Raju, despite his poor showing in the final examination, impressed potential employers with his confidence - and found employment.
Raju, Farhan and Chatur now set off for Shimla to meet Rancho. Rancho's name is actually Ranchoddas Shamaldas Chanchad and they find the enormous Chanchad mansion without much difficulty. When they find Ranchoddas, however, they discover that he is not their Rancho at all but someone else. Their graduation photograph hangs on the wall - with this man's face on it instead of Rancho's. Who was Rancho really, they wonder, and it comes out that 'Rancho' was a servant's child in the Chanchad household who showed an aptitude for learning. Since the boy wanted 'learning' and the actual Ranchoddas only a degree, the boy was admitted to the Imperial College as 'Rancho'. When they finally locate 'Rancho' he is teaching local children in Ladakh's wilderness, bringing creativity to his 'model school'. The crowning bit of information is that 'Rancho' is actually Phunsukh Wangdu - with hundreds of patents in the US - and Chatur is thus humbled.
The fact that 3 Idiots has a large number of comic moments does not detract from its being a film with a serious message on education. The message pertains to higher learning in India being rendered painful because of the emphasis placed on competition and the rat-race. Creativity is the casualty, the film says, because of people having to submit to a straight-jacketed notion of education. This is the apparent message but 3 Idiots nevertheless relies on Rancho coming first to fully convince us of his abilities. His doing so effortlessly has a parallel in the dyslexic boy in Taare Zameen Par demonstrating his prowess in the subjects he was hopeless at - without us knowing how he achieves it so easily. 'Dog-eat-dog' and 'rat-race' are disparaging terms for market-induced competitiveness but the films show little faith in the possibility of bypassing the market in any circumstance. For all his affinity to the poor children of Ladakh, the former servant's boy Phunsukh Wangdu can only be judged on the basis of his American patents.
Films like 3 Idiots are strangely positioned in as much as while they endeavor to deal with the 'real issues' of today, they still depend on the elements of the Bollywood fantasy. Since they conveniently shift from the one mode to the other, it is difficult to say what aspects should be taken seriously. For instance Rancho/Wangdu has established a school in Ladakh. Anyone who has seen Ladakh and knows its terrain understands the difficulty that finding drinking water - let alone establishing a 'model school' - represents. The film shows the protagonists driving from Manali to Leh as easily as one might from Churchgate to Chowpatty, perhaps taking its notion of the Manali-Leh highway from an automobile advertisement. If 3 Idiots is a film with social concern it can be criticized for not being adequately concerned with the actual circumstances. If it is a 'fantasy' it shows itself incapable of imagining existence in a far flung corner - except as extensions of upper-class city life.
It is perhaps in its failure to imagine that 3 Idiots reveals its hidden self, eventually. Most of the protagonists in the film are given families and pasts that help us to understand and locate them. Farhan is a middle-class boy and Raju Rastogi's father is a lowly paid white-collar worker trying to put his son through college. Even Pia, as the daughter of a professor in an elite institution, is a credible figure. But there is an evident 'absence' in the way Phunsukh Wangdu is imagined because the film does not give him any kind of recognizable past. He is simply a 'servant's child' and we get to see nothing of his background. Even when Phunsukh Wangdu (as 'Rancho') arrives in college he has a confidence far beyond that of someone accustomed to the life of a servant's child entering an elite institution in India. Also, Phunsukh Wangdu has 'hundreds of patents' to his credit but there is not even a hint about how he acquired them. Bollywood abounds in fantasy but in this inability to imagine Wangdu is an uncomfortable truth - that such a person is unimaginable. It is unimaginable that a servant's child in India will become a celebrated inventor. Elite educational institutions are not for his kind even when the institutions are publicly owned.
3 Idiots proposes that servants and their children can become inventors without being able to imagine their journey from their origins. It supposes higher education without considering the level of primary education made available to their kind. Still, the film does not stand alone and is from a milieu in which 'education' is synonymous with elite education. The 'rat-race' in education is the preoccupation of only a small segment but it gets the attention of the State. If one is unconvinced one needs only to look at the reported statements of the HRD Ministry. Here are some of them: in June 2009 the Minister suggested foreign direct investment in education to make it easier for those intending to go to Harvard or Yale to avoid visa problems. "India has the potential to be a global provider of quality graduates," Kapil Sibal reportedly added (4). In August 2009 his proposed plan to introduce grades instead of marks at the 10th board exam level in CBSE schools caused consternation and some wondered what would happen if 90% and 99% were bunched together. How would the schools differentiate merit (5) because higher education depended on it? In February 2010 Kapil Sibal discussed a plan for an Education Finance Corporation which would extend loans for higher education (6). By Kapil Sibal's own admission only around 2.5% of schoolchildren pursue higher education in India (7) but the HRD Ministry appears to be giving a substantially larger proportion of its attention to it. Primary education is nonetheless still being attended to because a report says that with the passage of the Right to Education Act, the expenditure on primary education is estimated at Rs 70,000 crores per year (8). But the dissimilarity in the attitude towards higher and primary education is significant. This appears to be that while attention is given to issues in higher education, primary education is regarded generally in terms of outlay. "As long as money is spent, will a difference not be made?" the government seems to be asking. This is perhaps like assuming that servants' children can become inventors only through a love of learning, without even imagining the kind of system this would call for.
If the recipients of the concern in 3 Idiots are mainly those who have scraped together enough finance for their children to get into higher education, many of the HRD Minister's statements address the same issue. One of the most recent was the decision to put IIT fees on hold until the government put in a mechanism that would provide students with access to funds (9). Considering that Kapil Sibal has also been appealing to parents stop pressurizing children (10), it would appear that the Government of India and Bollywood have virtually the same concerns. This is strange because a commercial venture like a film addresses a chosen clientele but an elected government must serve the public at large. In addressing its clientele, 3 Idiots is not obliged to imagine servants' children like Phunsukh Wangdu but that is not an exemption available to the Government of India. An explanation for the HRD Ministry's preoccupation with higher - rather than primary - education may be that with the GOI's commitment to the market economy, it regards the public increasingly as a clientele, attending disproportionately to segments which can be served 'viably'. This is perhaps the outcome of attending overly to the notions of profitability and sustainability.
It has been necessary to dwell at such length on state interventions in education in a film review because Bollywood, in its newly found avatar of concern, is a more insidious entity than when it was merely escapist. Where popular cinema was once treated with contempt, its success as a form of global entertainment has seen it being received with great respect by the State. The Indian State is becoming more and more attentive to discourse in the business world to guide it on matters of policy and it is here that the attitude of 3 Idiots can be influential. Well-intentioned influence from cinema might have been acceptable - in some sense - when the popular film had a broader mass base but its preoccupation with the lives of a more affluent class makes its concerns narrow and suspect. It is not enough for the State to imagine a fully made servant's-child-as-inventor but must also contribute to his making. It cannot adopt an attitude of indifference to the actual process by which children from the lower strata may be made capable of reaching higher levels of excellence. The fact that it does suggests that the Indian State today is ideologically close to mainstream cinema and that its social concerns are as asymmetrical as those of Bollywood.
Notes
| 1. |
Baradwaj Rangan in The New Indian Express 27th December 2009. |
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| 3. |
The film was shot at IIM, Bangalore, which is as glamorous a government-run educational institution as any. |
| 4. |
Times of India, 25th June, 2009. |
| 5. |
Mansi Sharma, CNN/IBN, 31st August 2009. |
| 6. |
DNA, 1st February 2010. |
| 7. |
Ibid. |
| 8. |
Mint, 9th February 2010. |
| 9. |
The Hindu, 5th February 2010. |
| 10. |
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MK Raghavendra is the Founder-Editor of Phalanx
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