ByDeepa Gahlot

September 14, 2019 (IANSlife) Nitesh Tiwari’s new release Chhichhore, set in the director's alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) comes almost 10 years after Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots, which also revolved around students in the prominent engineering institution.

So, a flashback to the film, based on Chetan Bhagat’s successful novel Five Point Someone, set in a an engineering college. 3 Idiots is the story of three friends – Ranchhod (Aamir Khan), Farhan (R. Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi). Ranchhod’s background is mysterious, but Farhan belongs to a middle class family that has made sacrifices for his education, and Raju to a very poor family that has pinned all their hopes on him.

Ranchhod or Rancho, is established right off as an inventive rebel, who bucks the humiliating, pants-down ragging meted out to the others, by literally electrifying the ragger’s pee (a dangerous stunt). He questions the autocratic principal Viru Sahastrabuddhe (Boman Irani), makes fun of the by-rote teaching methods, but gives his friends all love and support. He also falls for the principal’s daughter Pia (Kareena Kapoor).

According to Rancho, our education system teaches students to chase success, not excellence, that parents impose their ambitions on their children, and that the resulting pressure can kill – illustrated in the film through three suicides (one failed), and statistics of high suicide rates among students quoted by Rancho. 

An example of the mugging system is Chatur (Omi Vaidya), who does nothing but slog for the great Indian dream — success in the US.

In theory, all this bashing of the system is fine, but nobody asks why Rancho who is so anti-establishment, submits to a formal education himself; and if he tops the killer exams with his unconventional ideas, surely the ‘system’ couldn’t be all that rotten. 

There is a twist to his presence in the college and to what he ends up as, which belies his declarations even more, but revealing that would be a spoiler for any who have not yet seen the film.
The film romanticises the rebel, but the rebel is necessarily an achiever—whether it is Rancho or Farhan, who gets from him the courage to junk engineering and follow his passion for wild life photography. But with its overflowing optimism, the film (like Khan’s Taare Zameen Par) does not even go into asking what happens to those who have no special talents?

3 Idiots has good performances all round — and every actor gets one big dramatic scene in which to take the spotlight away from the always shining Aamir Khan. It has fabulous dialogue, excellent lyrics, decent music and skilled cinematography. It has humour (the speech-altering is truly funny, if crude), emotion, romance in the right doses, no quarrels there — even if there are some cringe-making scenes like Farhan faking a heart attack to reverse a flight, or Rancho and gang helping deliver Pia’s sister’s baby on a rainy night with (power on the blink).
You are, of course, not supposed to ask why authority figures always must be such caricatures — whether it is Sahastrabuddhe here or the dean in Hirani’s Munnabhai MBBS (also played by Boman Irani). Or why it is okay to make fun of poverty and why Raju’s poor sister is waiting forlornly for marriage at 28 because her brother has to earn the dowry?
In the midst of the students’ pranks and angst, the film bashed the system, without necessarily suggesting a better alternative. Why young people are forced to fulfill their parents’ ambitions is a valid question, but is impulsive non-conformism the answer?
The film was a huge success. Like all Rajkumar Hirani films, produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra — this one also had Aamir Khan’s Midas touch — and he managed to look like a teenage student at age 40 plus. It also became a kind of template for all campus films to follow, and its shadow inevitably falls on Chhichhore.

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Deepa Gahlot is a theatre and film critic, author and scriptwriter.

Editing by Ritu Pandey and N. Lothungbeni Humtsoe