In India, you don’t complete an education. You survive it. Learning here is an intensely academic exercise. It is also used as a yardstick of character. As a high ranker in the 1990s, I remember wondering if my classmates who flunked were probably bad kids with loose morals. Did they also smoke, drink, bunk lectures and stare at girls like Sanju and his aimless pals from Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar ? Because that’s what school-life in mainstream Hindi cinema was — a reaction to reality and rarely ever a reflection of it.
Classrooms have traditionally been boring and unsympathetic spaces, but in films they became happy, adventurous and places full of love, friendships, promise and possibilities. Songs were sung in them, mischief made, races won and relationships established. Teachers were playful caricatures, and older college-going boys and girls walked around in “free dress” with cover-less books in their hands.
Basically, campus life was about everything but studies. Campuses were a decorative foil for characters — unimportant environments whose psychological effects would never alter their graphs (or the plot). Protagonists were unaffected by life’s scholarly pursuits.
Bleak classrooms
I understand why. Nobody would really want to see bleak classrooms full of fear, incomplete homework and exam tension — least of all cinema-going adults who were under pressure to force their children through an unreasonably successful education. Nobody would want to watch the ugliness of it all: kids obsessing about a syllabus during cricket matches and youngsters cracking under the weight of extra classes.
Because that’s how it really was. Peer pressure is a huge part of every Indian student’s personality. A young adult doesn’t go through a day without fretting about grades, expectations, elders and higher learning. Cinema ignored it, or skimmed over it by way of classic duffer-underdog sagas. By the turn of the millennium, academics had turned into a cottage industry. Yet, commercial Bollywood employed it as a trend, a backdrop in big-budget productions.
Mohabbatein was based entirely within (fictional) university walls, without so much as touching upon its machinations. Crucial scenes from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai , Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham , Koi Mil Gaya , Main Hoon Na and Rang De Basanti unfurled on eclectic designer campuses — but had little to do with real campuses or the mental politics of Indian schooling.
Taare Zameen Par came close to acknowledging the brain-drain epidemic by using dyslexia as a device, but circumvented it by committing to the child’s condition over his education. Aarakshan inadvertently ended up glorifying the coaching-class explosion by accommodating it within the social confines of classism and Amitabh Bachchan’s star power. Nil Battey Sannata invaded municipal classrooms, but evaded the muggy monotony of textbook mathematics to focus on an unconventional mother-daughter dynamic.
Still from Nil Battey Sannata.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Hindi cinema’s most successful contemporary director, Rajkumar Hirani, is the only brand synonymous with addressing — if not extensively exploring — this culture. He did it the movie way, though, by providing idealistic solutions where there were none. Yet, he directed a nation’s attention towards the lack of “compassion” in professional courses. Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. and 3 Idiots took us inside the corridors, but stopped short of going inside the conflicted minds that occupied them. They eschewed detail to highlight the unorthodoxy of the heroes and their establishment-curing attitudes. Hirani simplified the landscape to humanise it. Storytelling occurred at the cost of texture.
Despite what he kick-started, there was Karan Johar’s Student of the Year and the Chetan Bhagat film adaptations. Two of them ( 2 States , Half Girlfriend ) starred Arjun Kapoor breezing through IIM-level business schools. Not to mention his overbearing Ki & Ka role — of a highly qualified semi-genius who prefers progressive domestic drudgery to the corporate rat race. This suggestion of dumbed-down intelligence without once decoding its procedural mechanics remained Bollywood’s trademark.
Dropout genius
Maybe that’s why mainstream cinema and the education system are perfectly superficial fits for each other. Both, movies and modern-day institutes, sell dreams instead of creating them. They sell hope to those desperate to be seduced by it. The consequences, as they say in posters and brochures, aren’t their responsibility.
However, there is now an entire generation of disillusioned kids, who were fooled by these movies, survived an unforgiving education, and deflected into creative fields. The joke goes thus: an MBA or engineering degree is the only qualification required to become a competent writer. Every third journalist and filmmaker has escaped a high-salaried job to pursue a low-paying passion.
But these are the raging minds who, I believe, are destined to change the grammar of the industry.
After already quitting a life that might have required them to sell their souls, they are obligated to explore their new crafts with uncompromising honesty. They are obligated to tell their stories bravely, through mediums not belying their voices.
Fragile campuses
This is why the web, ‘indie’, non-fiction and other alternative platforms are now populated with storytellers determined to dissect the culture that almost swallowed them. While their predecessors imagined and approximated it, these artists have lived it. They have lived the transition from cozy-living-room-cum-tuitions to mammoth three-storeyed coaching institutes.
For instance, we see a documentary like Abhay Kumar’s Placebo ; the filmmaker, triggered by his younger brother’s struggles in India’s biggest medical school, discreetly follows four students around campus for a year. The film’s undercover nature enables the authentic chronicling of a fragile campus atmosphere — one where the “weak” fall by the wayside, while authorities refuse to address the unhealthy environment.
It’s a sobering picture in which an average student like Akash — essayed by Ritwik Sahore in the Amazon Prime web-series Laakhon Mein Ek — would never survive. The show develops within a gloomy pre-IIT coaching-institute called Genius Infinity, where brainwashed teenagers sacrifice their best years to chase their parents’ dreams. The creator: Biswa Kalyan Rath, the popular stand-up comic notorious for vivid jokes on his IIT-Kharagpur stint.
Then there’s the “aftermath” syndrome — infecting minds that have lost their sanity while attempting to win the race. Young filmmaker Vaibhav Munjal’s short film, Platform Paune Das , is an unsettling 10-minute account of a troubled entrance-exam topper searching for a mythical platform at a railway station. It ends with a shot of the dazed boy deliberately running into a pillar.
It is similar to the narrative thread of Barun Sobti’s (as IIM-Berkeley graduate, Arjun) in Milind Dhaimade’s lovely little indie, Tu Hai Mera Sunday . An easygoing Arjun, despite the constant prodding of his concerned sister, gives up a lucrative job early, rattled by the sight of his ex-boss having a meltdown in an airport. Watching the jittery man abruptly strip down to his undies, Arjun decides to drop out before it’s too late.
These are the stories most representative of a fatally desensitised education system. Fortunately, owing to new digital mediums, they don’t have to rely solely on the archaic templates of commercial cinema. They cater to a self-aware cross-section of a young population keen to question order, identify with existentialism, and be heard. And they are narrated by the ones that got away — a hardened batch replete with career survivors.
When my childhood friend systematically broke down before our Class XII board exams — he rebelled, clowned around, and screamed at his shell-shocked parents for a whole year — I wondered what his problem was. I had never seen anything like it. I asked him if a girl had broken his heart. I simply couldn’t fathom the idea of a 15-year-old burning out.
Today, I understand why. Mentally, he was running into pillars and stripping down in public every single day. Maybe now he might realise that perhaps the madness didn’t lie in him. It lay in a system that convinced his parents that “ laakhon mein ek ” meant “one in a million”. Thanks to a few like him who grew past those moments with a story to tell, we now know it meant “part of the herd”.
When not obsessively visiting locales from his favourite films, the writer is a freelance film critic.
