The astonishing box office success of Bollywood’s latest super hit film 3 Idiots which has reportedly grossed a staggering Rs.382 crore, raises disturbing questions about the national IQ. Although widely acclaimed by mainstream media as a telling critique of India’s education system, 3 Idiots is a flawed and naïve representation of the ills afflicting the country’s anaemic education system.
It tells the story of three youth floundering under pressures of exams, projects, and parental expectations in a professional engineering college. Absurdly, in this college which the much-hyped director Raju Hirani in several media interviews says is modeled on an IIT, the director bristles at the very mention of words like innovation and creative thinking. Stereotypically, in the black-and-white Bollywood tradition, the college director derives sadistic pleasure in tormenting students, often driving them to suicide.
Into this tortuous concentration camp-style institution enters rebel student-philosopher Rancho, played by a mid-40s mega movie star Aamir Khan, who takes on this bizarrely caricatured director and all the afflictions of Indian education — student suicides, exam grades obsession, ragging, rote learning and lack of innovation — trivialised in contrived situations richly garnished with slapstick humour. In fact the portrayal of ragging in the movie as a harmless campus ritual has prompted several organisations including the Coalition to Uproot Ragging in Education, to lodge an official protest.
The scary outcome of the runaway success of 3 Idiots is legitimisation of the bollywoodisation of education. Already Bollywood’s simpleton icons loom large in national development debates, and ‘cultural events’ hosted by education institutions are flooded by tacky Hindi song-dance jigs. Now as testified by smash hits such as Taare Zameen Par and 3 Idiots, they are all set to hit upon education.
At best an average film, the stupendous popularity of 3 Idiots is testimony to the sheer desperation of audiences who long accustomed to trashy cinema, have transformed a middling movie into the greatest digital story ever told, a homage to Bollywood by a society of a billion idiots.
Discriminatory legislation
Considerable lip service is paid around the country particularly in Indian academia, to the concept of inclusive growth and of the need to bridge the yawning urban-rural divide. Yet one of the most blatant injustices perpetuated upon our poor rural cousins and unquestioned by bleeding heart liberals and academics, is discriminatory legislation in several states which forbids farmers from selling their land to non-agriculturists. For instance in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka state-enacted legislation forbids over 300 million farmers from selling their land-holdings to anyone except other agriculturists.
Ex facie the rationale of this paternalistic legislation based on the premise that farmers are illiterate and gullible and should be protected from urban predators, is appealing, and the country’s indifferent intellectual community has never bothered to examine it. Yet if scrutinised, this is pernicious legislation cleverly engineered by rural elites to keep village India land prices low, to accumulate vast land banks. With the urban rich forbidden to purchase agricultural land, the only option of distressed farmers — and there’s no shortage of them — across the country, is to sell their landed assets to relatively rich agriculturists at sub-optimal prices.
Against this backdrop, a proposal of the BJP-led Karnataka state government to waive this requirement and grant blanket permission to six educational groups to purchase agricultural land of their choice to establish schools and colleges, is a welcome and overdue initiative. It’s also good news that the state government is actively considering the repeal of several provisions of the Karnataka Land Reforms Act, 1961 which require non-agriculturists to obtain special permission from government officials to purchase rural real estate. If the proposal goes through, it will level the playing field and enable rural citizens to get bilaterally negotiated market prices for their land holdings. But predictably, the state’s shallow intelligentsia is up in arms against the proposal.
The renowned Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto who was recently in India, has long argued that the poor third world peasants would be considerably enriched if they are not routinely denied clean land titles and prices by corrupt bureaucracies and rural elites. Inclusive growth also requires repeal of blatantly discriminatory legislation.
Mysterious allure
Once upon a time, it was accepted wisdom that Bollywood and Indian cinema was for the unlettered masses who needed respite from their back-breaking jobs and dreary existence, to escape into the fantasy world of song and dance and impossibly beautiful actresses. And so, little attention was paid to storylines, credible plots etc. But despite the country’s relatively educated middle class having expanded greatly, Bollywood still remains stuck in the stasis of dead habit. Unfortunately even television which was expected to provide an intelligent alternative to commercial cinema, has succumbed to the mysterious charm of Bollywood (and its regional clones) and popular cinema icons.
These musings about the mysterious allure of tinsel town and its over-the-top stars, have been prompted not only by its flattery by industry captains and academics (the bollywoodisation of school and college concerts seems unstoppable), but also of serious media commentators. A case in point is the refreshingly new genre financial daily Mint, a joint venture between the Hindustan Times and the New York-based Wall Street Journal.
Strangely and somewhat paradoxically, the editor of the weekend Mint Lounge, Priya Ramani, is an unapologetic Bollywood acolyte and most of her weekend editorials are devoted to discussing films and trivia. For instance the entire editorial in the ML issue of February 20 is focused upon Bollywood idol Shah Rukh Khan and his latest oeuvre My Name is Khan, which by all intelligent accounts is an embarrassingly simplistic film about global terrorism. While arguably Ramani’s editorial wouldn’t be inappropriate for a movie magazine, constant worship at the glitzy altar of Bollywood by the editor of a serious business publication, raises disturbing apprehensions of the relentless march of Bollywood and its dumbing down of the media.