Life's worth living with 3 Idiots

Indeed, by now Aamir has hit so many sixers in his career, we can only wonder what this maestro of marketing intends to do next. For sure, 3 Idiots is yet another vehicle to showcase Aamir’s sparkling ability to be part of a cinema that creates a colloquial yet classy language of deeply thought provoking punctuations syntaxes and exclamations.3 Idiots is first andforemost a tremendously entertaining piece of cinema. The boys-will-have-funatmosphere on an engineering campus is shot with the devious humour and warmthof a joke that has not lost its punch even after years of re-telling.Some things never change in a straitjacketed society like ours. Andreally, when Hirani with enormous help from his co-writer Abhijat Joshi, setsdown to criticise the glaring anomalies in our education system we are compelledto wonder for a few seconds—and just for that bit of cynicaltime-freeze—if flogging the sacred cows of our institutionalised system ofgovernance in cinema is not just an excuse to pull out all stops and let theyoung heroes have all the fun that their more disciplined counterparts inschedule-driven colleges deny themselves.The British rock bank PinkFloyd said it first. “We don’t need no education, we don’tneed no thought control/no dark sarcasm in the classroom/teacher leave thosekids alone.”So if Raj Kumar Hirani wants those‘kids’ to be left alone where does our education system go? Into afree-wheeling zone of self-chosen vocation for every child? But then not everychild is a Mangeshkar, Tendulkar, Khan or even Farhan Qureshi (Madhavan) fromthis film, who craves to be a photographer but ends up living his father’sdream at an engineering institution.The thought processesunderlining the film’s super-vibrant but calm surface are never allowed toseep out and bubble to the exterior of the narrative. If at heart 3 Idiots is aserious indictment of our education system at the surface it’s acharacter-driven film played out at an observant and opulent but always-feistyoctave. The sounds of protest against the curbs, checks and downers in oureducation reach out to us in a cascade of crisply-written lines spoken bycharacters who have lived out the nightmare that precedes that long journey intothe realisation of our dreams.At times, the narrative is savagelyfunny. Note the sequence where Rancho and his girl take the critically ill oldman to the hospital on a scooter. Hirani has always seen humour of mortality. Hehas a potent style of storytelling, a mix of street wisdom and cinematicsensitivities that come together in a noiseless tango of social comment andentertainment. The director is strangely shy of displaying emotions. So hecounters the melodrama of his third hero Raju Rastongi (Sharma Joshi)’slife with a black-and-white 1960s’ self-mocking background music.Ironically, Hirani’s unconventional hero Rancho (Aamir Khan) often goesthe other way and sheds manly tears for colleagues, friends and tormented youngcitizens of modern India who are crippled by a despotic disregard for theirnatural creativity.Aamir Khan undertakes his character’sjourney through the paradoxical labyrinth of ambition-driven education system(incidentally, the loopholes in our education was also the theme ofAamir’s Taare Zameen Par and Hirani’s Munnabhai MBBS) with agut-level understanding of what pains today’s average 20-something.Aamir’s transformation into a 22-year old collegian is so completeand so non-impersonified you end up wondering if he has been lying about being40-plus in real life! Like most Aamir starrers, 3 Idiots too is predominantlyhis vehicle. Most of the funniest lines and inspiring situations in the scriptcome from Aamir. And boy, does he play the boy-man with restrained relish!Sharman Joshi, as the poor middleclass boy driven to near-suicide by hisparents’ ambitions, gets two meaty sequences. He chews on them withcareful sensitivity leaving a lasting impression. Madhavan, as the third‘idiot’, expresses his smothered dreams through a series ofhalf-expressed thoughts and a fear of unhappiness that reach his eyes withouttransit.Kareena Kapoor, as the girl engaged to the tycoon with apenchant for putting a price tag on all his gifts, brings a dollop of sunshineand feminine grace to an otherwise masculine tale. She is so spunky andspontaneous you wish there was room for more of her. There’s even less ofMona Singh who’s again a spirited free soul.The two ladiesare fortunately part of the climax where our three heroes deliverKareena’s sister (Mona Singh)’s baby on the office table ... A clearindication that even an all-boys tale has no qualms about embracing maternalresponsibilities if the situation arises.But did 3 Idiots reallyneed a manufactured child-delivered-in-crisis climax? Did it need those endlesstoilet-and-bum jokes? Couldn’t Boman Irani (doing a variation on hisDean’s part from Hirani’s Munnabhai MBBS) and the new actor OmiVaidya (who plays the stuffy Silencer) have been delineated less hammily?It’s not that 3 Idiots is a flawless work of art. But it is a vital,inspiring and and life-revising work of contemporary art with some heart imbuedinto every part. In a country where students are driven to suicide by theirimpossible curriculum, 3 Idiots provides hope. Maybe cinema can’t savelives. But cinema sure as hell can make you feel life is worth living. 3 Idiotsdoes just that, and much more. The director takes the definition ofentertainment into directions of social comment without assuming that he knowsbest. Here’s V Shantaram happily and effortlessly jogging into ManmohanDesai’s territory.