3 Idiots has been hailed as a film that asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of learning and academics in our ‘premier’ institutes of education. The filmmakers have apparently offered a private screening of the film for HRD Minister Kapil Sibal.

The movie’s success certainly lies in the fact that it addresses the manner in which our education system encourages mindless and mechanical rote learning over creativity, curiosity, passion and genuine understanding. For students struggling to cope with high levels of pressure and competition, for young professionals stuck in jobs which make tremendous demands on their time and energies but which seem increasingly joyless, mind-numbing and meaningless, 3 Idiots understandably strikes an emotive chord. It helps that its message is delivered with wit and humour.

As an alumnus of an engineering college myself, I watched the film with interest. Having watched it, I was forcefully struck by the sheer absence of women in the world of engineering college as imagined by the film. In a film about the burden of pressures and expectations faced by students in science, why is there no attempt to acknowledge the particular pressures faced by women in science and engineering? In fact, while women appear in the background in the classrooms, the three main characters are not shown to utter a single word to any of any women in their college! And women are of course never portrayed as faculty. The trio’s friendship is symbolised by the masculine ritual of pulling down one’s pants, drawn from the ragging experience. In this matter, the film appears to uncritically mirror, rather than critique, the world of actual engineering colleges and science classrooms, in which women continue to be under-represented and marginalised. [Many recent Hindi films (such as Dil Chahta Hai) are in the “buddy movie” genre, celebrating male bonding; it is intriguing that there are none that celebrate female friendships and solidarities.]

When I was a schoolgirl, my physics teacher in high school would constantly advice girls (in front of the whole class) not to prepare for the IIT entrance exam because they are not capable of ‘lateral thinking’. A vice principal would tell women students not to ‘rob’ men of scarce seats, since women, in any case, would later give up their careers in order to care for families. Male classmates would remind us that women ‘can’t understand science’. For women students like me, such sexist remarks by classmates and teachers added an enormous and demoralising burden to the already intense stress of preparing for entrance exams to IITs and NITs.

3 Idiots even celebrates the sexist brand of ‘rape jokes’ that was common in the male-dominated campus of NIT Calicut where I had been a student of electrical engineering in the 1990s. The film’s repeated jokes about ‘balaatkar’ brought home an unpleasant memory of a painful quarrel that followed when a male classmate had participated in a skit that portrayed a rape scene as a source of humour. Nothing I could say would convince him that there was nothing remotely funny in rape.

In a film about the cruelty of the education rat-race, it is ironic that the cruelty of social expectations and the marriage market towards women, far from being critiqued, is celebrated as a source of humour. We are supposed to laugh at Farhan’s discomfiture at the prospect of marrying Raju’s ‘unattractive’ sister Kammo. While her brother becomes an engineer, Kammo’s fate is to cook, care for her paralyzed father, and wait for her brother to earn a dowry. The film has no qualms about making Kammo a butt of masculine jokes: an ugly burden to be palmed off on anyone willing to ‘accept’ her for ‘free’.

Though the film talks about how poverty can be a major barrier for a student to get a decent education, it is silent about the systematic manner in which institutions of higher learning are being turned through state policy into enclaves of the rich and the privileged. Skyrocketing fee structures today are slowly closing the doors of these institutions not just to the working class ‘Millimeters’, but also to the lower middle class Rajus, and even to the middle class Farhans.

3 Idiots also fails to talk about how academic research, particularly in science and technology, is today strongly influenced by considerations of industry funding and commercial viability. Good research is inhibited by deadlines and bureaucratic technicalities (which leads to Jay Lobo’s tragic death in the film) or a lack of creativity. The fact that entire centres and departments in IITs and other premier engineering colleges are funded by millionaire businessmen (for example, the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology in IIT Mumbai) and corporate houses (the Bharti School of Telecommunication, Technology and Management in IIT Delhi for instance) drives research in directions that are dictated by business interests rather than by science.

Most dangerous, however, is the fact that the film never questions the mainstream notions of ‘success’ – measured by publications, patents and financial viability. It is not enough for Rancho to be a school teacher, helping youngsters to really understand and enjoy science. He is ultimately vindicated because he is Phunsukh Wangdoo of the 400 patents fame, aggressively pursued by corporations all over the world. The film celebrates the patents and intellectual property rights regime; while intellectuals like Nobel laureates, economist Joseph Stiglitz and scientist John Sulston, have held that this regime impedes the pace of science and innovation by promoting the privatisation of science.

3 Idiots has borrowed heavily from Chetan Bhagat’s 5-point Someone. However, the film deviates in significant ways from the book. The most important difference is that Ryan Oberoi (on whom Rancho is loosely based) is not on a mission to constantly advice everyone or to change the education system. He is just a bright engineer, passionately fond of machines, who cannot stand the constrictive academic atmosphere in IIT Delhi. Ryan therefore reacts by refusing to study hard or by mugging his lessons. He adjusts to the system partly by cheating and partly by just studying what genuinely interests him.

3 Idiots sets out to convert the story of the three boys in 5-point Someone into an overt comment and critique of the education system. However, 3 Idiots only skims the surface and touches upon some of the symptoms – but ultimately the “solutions” offered by the film remain trapped in the same market paradigm that is at root of the problems that beset the education system in India, and engineering education in particular.

- Radhika Krishnan