The Curious Case of Phunsuk Wangdu:

Prequel to Taare Zameen Par

SPOILERS GALORE THROUGHOUT

Really! Is this it? Even if one were to suggest that all the 5 stars ratings had hyped up the film a bit too much for me…still, is this it? I mean, seriously, is 3 Idiots really the best film of the year…the best since Lagaan as some people are calling it? I'm surely missing something here. Either that or, Akshay Kumar never quite realized that all he had to do to elevate his films from the 'low-brow & crude' humour tag that they were pinned with was to sprinkle them with some convenient pop-philosophy and a pretentious life-affirming feel-good message. Because, really, that is the feeling I got after spending 3 hours with the 3 idiots and the 3 hundred more in the auditorium. Of course, I'll be the first to admit that I am in the teensiest minority possible here since the whole crowd was laughing with the film, and everyone I know loves the film, like I don't remember in recent memory. So, being the biggest Idiot of them all, I request you to not read the following as my 'review' of the film. I surrender; I'm ill-equipped to review a film that I don't 'get'?

3 Idiots begins then with one of the idiots Farhan Quereshi (Madhavan) faking a heart attack to land a plane, and then con a cab driver at the airport into taking him to his friend's house, the second idiot, Raju Rastogi (Sharman Joshi) who joins him in a hurry without any pants on! An emergency landing and a pant-less dash better be worth something…it is. For they've just found out the whereabouts of the third idiot of their triumvirate…Ranchoddas Chanchad (Aamir Khan) who'd just as mysteriously disappeared from their lives as he had entered. Ranchoddas aka Rancho impressed Farhan and Raju on his first day at the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE) hostel when he gets even with his ragging seniors by proving that salt water is a good conductor of electricity! Wonderful, right? Yes! That he does so by electrocuting the penis of the senior in question who is about to piss on Rancho's door is another matter. We've all had a hearty laugh…and that should be it! You can't even call it crude, because hey…it's also very clever, you see. You're electrocuting a man's dick, but you're also learning about salt water! That is what Rancho's caboodle of education seems to be- to not merely learn by rote, but to understand stuff and employ it in your daily life. Noble indeed! That the manifestation of this comes by way of electrocuting dicks (repeated again in the climax of the film) and delivering babies on a ping-pong table with the help of a vacuum cleaner (I kid you not!) shouldn't be a bother!

Supposedly then, this film is about the education system and what's wrong with it. But save a scene where a professor insists on the 'definition' of machine instead of an explanation of it, what flaws of the system does it really address? Is it really a scathing remark on the education system when an examiner refuses to accept the answer-papers of students who turn up late for the exam? This when they've conveniently not bothered to inform the examiner of the truly justified reason for their being late! We hardly see the professors of the ICE. All we encounter over and over again is the Principal, Viru Sahastrabuddhe (Boman Irani) aka ViruS and his encounters with Rancho & Co. When Rancho is not offering Virus free suicide statistics (the film chooses to see only the system as responsible for student-suicides, and not ragging…which actually has been proven to be the reason for more suicides than parental and peer pressure), he and his idiots are busy turning up at his daughter's engagement or pissing on his front door! Yes, for though it is unfair of a senior to piss on a junior's door (ragging that is met with penile electrocution)…it is supposedly just and funny for two students to piss on the front door of their Principal's house! Because Virus is evil, you see. The murderer, as he is dubbed, responsible for students committing suicides. And that is what the film eventually boils down to. Not a comment on the education system per se, but a personal one-upmanship between the 3 Idiots and Virus. Unlike Munna Bhai MBBS, where along with Boman's Dr. Asthana, the whole medical fraternity and the hospital staff and its patients alike were imparted valuable lessons in life; or Lage Raho Munna Bhai, where Gandhigiri wasn't used merely to reform Boman's sardar, but sold as a relevant catchphrase to the apathetic society in general…3 Idiots doesn't have a large-scale awakening.

What it does have is a catchphrase- All Izz Well…a catchphrase that it oversells, to the point of contriving an extremely far-fetched scene that is intended to make the term iconic. In the Munna Bhai films, Jadoo Ki Jhappi and Gandhigiri became part of our everyday lingo…but the films didn't aim for it. In 3 Idiots, even after hearing Aamir spell it out umpteen times, offering a Paul Coelho-esque placebo pill to our problems in life…the script actually engineers Virus' reversal by staging a childbirth so bizarre, the Farelly brothers might call a hit on Hirani for coming up with it first. On the day that the 3 Idiots are expelled from the institute, the city is very conveniently flooded in a deluge of biblical proportions. Virus' daughter (Mona Singh), again very conveniently, happens to go into labour at just the moment. His other daughter, Rancho's insipid love-interest Pia (Kareena Kapoor), conveniently happens to be away in a hospital they can't get to…and the 3 Idiots happen to cross their paths just as conveniently! So Rancho, inspired by the Deepika Padukone BSNL ad, proceeds to deliver the child via medical counseling by Pia over the webcam. Oh shoot…the lights are out and the mother's too weak to push! Fear not, Rancho, just like his brilliant salt water innovation, comes up with an idea to not only generate electricity with an inverter (duh!) but suck the baby out of the tired mother's womb with the help of a…vacuum cleaner! But that's not the clincher. This birth of an innovation tied in with that of an actual birth (I can already see people reading into the brilliance of this twinning!), is made all the more significant when the apparently stillborn baby responds and comes to life upon hearing the term All Izz Well! The whole setup of the catchphrase is finally given its iconicity-cementing payoff in this most excogitated of scenes I've ever seen! And yes, Virus finally learns that true brilliance lies not in education by rote, but in knowledge with illustration. Hear, hear!

But even if one were to overlook all these, can someone please help me justify the number of loopholes that this script has? Pray why is Pia getting married to the same loser that she'd rejected 9 years earlier? Why does Virus react the way he does when he sees Raju at Pia's wedding…especially after he'd made his peace with the 3 Idiots when they graduated? Why didn't Farhan and Raju never bother to ask Rancho's address, and even if they didn't why did they not bother enquiring with the college about it since it is made amply clear later that he didn't provide a wrong address? And why didn't Pia, being the Principal's daughter, get the address out of her father, especially since she so easily accesses the keys to his office? Why did Rancho keep his secret from his best buddies and Pia?

This brings me to the 'secret' in question. The film hinges at the intermission on a curveball so sharp, I felt the film had suddenly been hijacked by Stephen King. Thankfully, and unfortunately (!), that wasn't the case. Rancho was never Rancho we realize. The son of a gardener, he, like good Will Hunting, had a penchant for learning…solving grade 10 problems while old enough to be in the 6th! Upon learning this, his master decides to fund his education until he grows up and earns a degree in Engineering! All this because his own son, the real Rancho, is a duffer…and the old man is planning ahead, knowing that the degree will help in getting roadway contracts for his son in the future! Talk about long-term planning. The kid was in the 6th grade…you devised a plan right until his graduation in Engineering! Anyway, our loyal, un-ghostly but equally phantasmal, doppelganger disappears after securing his degree and hands it over to the real Rancho. He studied, we are told, not to get a job but for the sheer joy of learning!

So who was he? The answer is revealed in the Ladakh-set climax, where we finally realize why Ranchod baba gave such pop-sermons during his stay at ICE. Like the Lama, a hop and skip away in Dharamsala, our Rancho is actually a Tibetan chap called Phunsuk Wangdu! Yes, not only is Aamir Khan playing a 22 year old, he's also supposedly a Tibetan! Wangdu has set up a school that encourages innovation and education the way he believes it should be. Wangdu is what Ram Nikumbh of Taare Zameen Par was before he came down to Mumbai ! Noble, again…but shouldn't Wangdu be proud of what he's done…and get his friends in on it and as many people as possible. Instead, the only person he chooses to write a letter and invite to be a part of his noble scheme is a vertically challenged help from ICE…not his two best buddies or the girl he loved! Why? Cuz otherwise there wouldn't be the contrivance of the all-important, plane-landing, pants-forgetting and wedding-abandoning journey to attain enlightenment from the Tibetan baba literally at the top of the world!

It's not just the contrivances though. The laziness! I like Hirani quite a lot, but how many times is he going to have a free thinker (Munna, Rancho) teach a Boman-in-some-getup (and the audience by extension) to see the flaw in his tenets of living and adopt the more ideal fulfilling approach towards life. It's not just the concept of a funny social message giving film that is getting repetitive; it's also the situations and the characters. Boman in all three films has now personified the face of the ills of the society, clique, group, etc. that the film in question seeks to question. In both Munna Bhai MBBS and 3 Idiots, he plays the authoritative mean-spirited head of administration. Like the orientation scene in Munna Bhai MBBS where Sanjay Dutt raises his hand and asks a befuddling question to Boman, you have Aamir raising his hand here and asking Boman a similarly innocent yet foxing question at the orientation! In Lage Raho Munna Bhai you had Jimmy Shergill being coaxed to overcome his fear and come clean to his father, played by Parikshit Sahni, following which they bond and shed a few manly tears. Here too you have Madhavan being coaxed to overcome his fear and reveal his true aspirations to his father following which they shed a few manly tears. Who plays the father, you ask? Why of course, Parikshit Sahni! If Munna Bhai MBBS had a comatose patient and a jilted lover who'd attempted suicide and a young man fated to die early…all being revitalized by Munna with his practical musings and a zappy song, you have in 3 Idiots, an amalgamation of all the three cases of Munna Bhai MBBS in Sharman when he attempts a suicide, ends up comatose and is slated to die! And we have the winsome Munna in Rancho's avatar working his humour to get him out of it! But how am I supposed to feel any anxiety or any emotion when we know, right from the beginning, that Sharman is alive…since he's undertaking the journey with Madhavan! It's not so much about 'will he make it?', as much as it is about 'how will he make it?', then! It robs this development of any pathos that it could have had.

And that is something I am very curious about. For a director unashamed of displaying emotions, Hirani seems very intent on being un-melodramatic here…to the extent where he trivializes everything with a comic yield. His approach is very commendable, especially in an age where melodrama is a curse word, but what's the point of spoofing Raju's abject poverty as a 50s film? It offends as a comedy for someone who's lived very close to such an existence, and fails as a drama for someone who's never experienced it. Why would you have a paralyzed man flailing his limbs wildly sandwiched between two people atop a scooter on his way to the hospital? These are zany yes, but to what end?

It is the humour then, most of all, which I didn't get in the least bit all. 27 instances of pissing, farting and pants being dropped to offer a posterior salute…these are funny…but in a puerile, childish and slapstick way. This is surely not the comical genius evident in Munna Bhai MBBS and Lage Raho Munna Bhai. Or for that matter is a rolling pin flattening dough after it has been used to scratch a grey-haired chest funny or simply gross? Is the substitution of the word chamatkar with balatkar and dhan with stan really the argument against rote learning that it pretends to be or merely an excuse to bring down the house with its innuendo? Would we have celebrated this comedy of confusion in an Akshay Kumar film where they wouldn't have been canny enough in disguising the cheap humour as an important lesson? And isn't that ultimately what 3 Idiots sadly is all about? Cheap humorous gags passed off in the guise of an important social film!

Rating- **

P.S.- I realize I haven't spoken about the performances. Aamir Khan adopts a fine body language and behaves every bit a 22 year old. Notice him especially in the scene where Boman hauls him to the classroom…Aamir lets his body loose so that he isn't walking with Boman, but being dragged. No matter how good a performance, I still can't fathom why we needed a 44 year old 'playing' a 22 year old…however believable he makes it by virtue of his talent. Sharman Joshi's is the performance you take home. His Raju, despite Hirani's efforts otherwise, emerges as the emotional voice of the film. His attempted suicide played to an Opera (a wonderful use of the setup earlier), his waking up drunk in classroom and his interview scene are the highlights. Sharman truly shines in  this one. Madhavan has the least role of the three, but he is effective in his part oozing with an affecting sincerity. Kareena Kapoor unfortunately has become so used to her glam roles that for the first time she is having difficulty being herself even! Omi Vaidya, though a bit loud I felt, was nevertheless interesting. Boman Irani worked for me in a big way. In a script that didn't bother to look at the other side, of people who have invariably become a part of the system not by choice but because they didn't think there was any other way, Boman lends his character with a nice air of desperate authority. Watch him especially as he clings on to his being right when he accepts defeat to Rancho but insists that he was right about the gravity-defying pen. He is a man who did all that was told to him, followed it to the point without questioning it…but finally realizes that maybe, just maybe, he was cheated after all!

P.P.S. – The film borrows from Scent of a Woman, Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, School Ties and Teaching Mrs. Tingle apart from others. It also borrows gags from chain-mails like the man clicking a picture of the 5 burqa-clad women, to name one.