100 Crore Club Member Badge No. 2: 3 Idiots

Draw a crazy picture,

Write a nutty poem,

Sing a mumble-gumble song,

Whistle through your comb.

Do a loony-goony dance

‘Cross the kitchen floor,

Put something silly in the world

That ain’t been there before.

-Shel Silverstein, “Put Something In,” A Light in the Attic, 1981

3 Idiots (2009)

[For the introduction to the 100 Crore Club click here and part one is located here.]

I had successfully managed to avoid 3 Idiots until this past Friday. It was all for your sake, dear readers, that I swallowed my extremely negative reaction to Aamir Khan’s 40-going-on-18 act and ponied up $3.99 to watch the film on Amazon Video. To my complete surprise, I ended up enjoying the film quite a bit. 3 Idiots is based on a novel I only got five pages into before throwing it down in disgust; it has a terrible soundtrack; the film is sentimental, crass, preachy, full of actors too old for their roles, and overly long. Yet, despite all of this, I ended up coming away completely charmed by the titular idiots and their message. I finally understood why 3 Idiots was the second member of the 100 Crore Club.

When I was born, my parents were very young—just barely out of college, actually—and, in America, the countercultural push for social change had been de-radicalized and turned into positive messages for children. “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor”* became Free to Be... You and Me. Though the album has long since become a punchline of earnest liberalism, I have strong and very fond memories of Free to Be You and Me. The skits and songs about how we should follow our hearts and not give into cultural stereotypes about what girls or boys or black people or white people or yellow people or red people or brown people are supposed to be left a powerful impression on me. I grew up with the firm belief that we’re all equal as human beings** and that it was the individual, not society, who knew best what was best for him or herself. Although America falls far short of these values in practice, we’ve absorbed them completely as one of the pillars of mainstream culture, you have to look no further than the rhetoric of “personal choice” that flows through both the political right and left here.

One of the performers on Free To Be You and Me was a poet/musician/friend of Hugh Hefner named Shel Silverstein. Silverstein is best remembered as the author of a couple of best-selling books of verse for children.** I read these, too, as a child and delighted in the mixture of earthy humor, philosophy, and nonsense they delivered to me. Silverstein never talked down to his young readers but neither did he shy away from making a butt joke. And it was that freedom-loving combination of earthy humor, philosophy, and nonsense which permeates 3 Idiots.

3 Idiots was inspired by, though not based on***, Chetan Bhagat’s novel Five Point Someone – What not to do at IIT!. The film opens with Farhan Quereshi (R. Madhavan) and Raju Rastogi (Sharman Joshi) being lured into a meeting with their former classmate/enemy the “Silencer” (Omi Vaidya), so called for his lethal silent-but-deadly farts. The Silencer claims to have information about their long, lost friend Rancho (Aamir Khan). The film then flips between the three reunited classmates on the hunt for Rancho and lengthy flashback sequences where we see exactly how much Rancho touched their lives. Along the way we meet the Dean of the College, Dr. Viru Sahastrabudhhe (Boman Irani), called Virus behind his back, Virus’s moped-riding doctor-in-training daughter Pia (Kareena Kapoor), and “Millimeter” (Rahul Kumar), the kid who works as a porter for the idiots’ section of the dorm.

Much of the serious discussion that surrounded 3 Idiots centered on the takedown of India’s high educational system, perhaps most concisely put in a piece by Sudhakar Ram titled The 3 Idiots of the Education System, in which he lays the blame for poor education on idiots 1) the educational system 2) teachers and 3) parents.**** The educational system depicted in 3 Idiots is one in which test scores and rote learning form the basis of education and things like creative problem solving, philosophical debate, and the humanities are considered harmful distractions.

Though I can’t identify completely with the Idiots (not being a guy, Indian, or in Engineering college), I think I got where they were coming from (having been ill served by the education system in America) and I can certainly understand how the pull of this message would hit home with a lot of people. But a message alone isn’t going to sell tickets. The genius of 3 Idiots (and, indeed, the oeuvre of Rajkumar Hirani) is that it weaves the message into an entertaining story. We travel willingly with the characters as they learn their life lessons, instead of being dragged along through a turgid morality tale. In the best tradition of socially aware pop filmmakers like Raj Kapoor, Hirani packages his message with razzle-dazzle and a pair of star-spangled speedo underwear and expects us to enjoy everything equally.

Hirani himself was as an Engineering college dropout who went into filmmaking because he loved film and I think it’s that combination of smarts and love of popular film which allows him to connect with both the multiplex and single screen audiences. Though he is known for mixing social messages into his films, one never gets the sense in a Hirani film that he looks down on the delights of popular film like song picturizations and slapstick humor. Like Shel Silverstein, he lets us indulge our inner child by making fools out of authority figures and giggling at flatulence—two universal human impulses that stretch across class, creed, and nationality. I can only assume that a large percentage of the audience of 3 Idiots could never run away and become wildlife photographers but, for those 3 hours that we’re watching the film, Hirani gives us a taste of that freedom. And that is no small accomplishment.

The characters of Farhan and Raju have been the focus of much of the discussion around 3 Idiots, as their stories relate directly to the critique of the educational system that people found so empowering. I’m going to talk about the two characters who struck me as the most interesting: Rancho and Pia. I’m on record—probably even on this blog, though I’m not about to go back to find the quotes—as being very against casting Aamir as a college student and it’s true that he is too old for the role. However, Aamir handles the part so masterfully that (here is where I eat my words) I can’t imagine anybody else playing it. Rancho is a tough role to make appealing; he’s within spitting distance of Manic Pixie Dream Boy (a la Ranbir in the dire Saawariya) and an inexperienced performer could easily have sunk the whole film by playing up that angle. But Aamir... Aamir the Hero comes with a bit of wisdom and authority. I never once believed that he was “18” or “22” but I did believe that he was Rancho and I believed that he had learned for himself everything he was telling the idiots. As played by Aamir, Rancho wasn’t a smart-ass teenager and he wasn’t smarmy plot device; as played by Aamir, Rancho was somebody you wanted to listen to.

One of the more interesting wiggles to Rancho was that he was from a lower economic class than anybody else at the college and he was essentially self-educated. Neither of these angles is dwelt on but they are there. Farhan and Raju reflect back the part of the audience who is like me, with the luxury to worry about whether or not we’re taking the right direction in life. It may not seem like that to a young person but even being able to ask yourself—Should I get a practical degree or go into the arts? Do I please my parents or voice my own opinions?—that is a luxury. Some people don’t have that choice. They need to earn whatever money they can to eat. Today. Rancho speaks to that audience when he tells Millimeter to buy a school uniform and sneak into school if they don’t have the money for fees. Rancho speaks to that audience when he builds a successful career without the piece of paper.
Let me tell you something. My great-grandfather Bobby had an 8th grade education. He was a plumber. (A damn fine one. He fixed Jackie O.’s toilet one time. True story.) And in his spare time he tinkered with electronics and did things like make his own microphones and recording equipment. He was a Rancho. For all that people have said that 3 Idiots is a critique of the education system and a rebuke to parents who push their unhappy kids into engineering degrees, I think it says something more to the kids who will never be able to afford an engineering degree. 3 Idiots says: Fuck that shit, yaar; your mind is worth more than some rich kid with a piece of paper; you’re worth more than some rich kid with a piece of paper. And that is a revolutionary message.

Pia is a lot less revolutionary, though still quite charming, as played by Bebo. If there was one thing I found less than satisfactory about 3 Idiots it was that there was only one major female character and that her function was “love interest.” Kareena being Kareena, she added a lot of spark to Pia but that didn’t change the fact that the freedom put forth in 3 Idiots seemed to be aimed exclusively at young men. I did appreciate that Pia was no helpless heroine—she had a career and was a competent professional—but it did kind of frustrate me that there seemed to be no place for a woman to be an idiot. With more and more films making sure to include at least one or two girls as part of a hero’s gang of friends, the male-only enclave of 3 Idiots felt exclusionary at times. I know that wasn’t the intention and maybe that is one of the things that carried over from the “inspiration” of Five Point Someone but I would hope that Hirani gets on board with the Woman Power storm that is blowing through Bollywood at the moment and makes a more conscious effort to add female characters to his next film.

I’m not sure if I’ll feel the need to revisit 3 Idiots again but I’m very glad I finally saw the film. The horrible soundtrack was still horrible; Aamir was still too old; and I found some of the humor to be really nasty but all that faded away before Rajkumar Hirani’s message of freedom. It’s only appropriate that the picturization of “Zoobi Doobi” (a song I still loathe) used imagery from those early Raj Kapoor films because at its heart 3 Idiots is closer to a film like Sree 420 than anything that’s come out of Mumbai recently. Heartfelt, crass, socially aware, and utterly catholic in its appeal, 3 Idiots is a film like no other.

To quote Rancho: “Aal izz well.”

* Martin Luther King, Jr.

** So best-selling, in fact, that his publisher keeps on releasing posthumous volumes of his work like a literary Tupac.

*** I can’t comment on the similarities and differences between the two since I threw down the novel in disgust during the opening “ragging” scene. I have a low tolerance for boys-will-be-boys depictions of bullying, having been on the receiving end during my own school days, and the opening incident of the novel is really awful.

**** A message that is translating very well all across East Asia I might add.

(Originally posted July 19, 2012)