The best thing that Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Rajkumar Hirani have done is that now you can safely replace the word IITian with ‘idiot’. This helps. Imagine an article called confessions of an IITian; it would have been too pompous. Thank you, Chopra and Hirani, for creating the humbler shortcut. But having said that, I still cannot fathom why people are reading so much into the ‘message’ of this Bollywood masala movie. Someone told me that the big plot in 3 Idiots is the invitation to follow your heart. I can tell from my personal experience that I have actually followed my heart during my four-year stint in IIT. The safety net of a premium institute degree allowed me to learn all the things I wanted to learn, read the stuff I wanted to read and do the stuff I wanted to do. And most of them had nothing to do with engineering. I was not the only one. About 70% of the students were pretty much following their heart (with minimised risk). The Chatur Ramalingams of the world were not mainstream, they were the exceptions. Our socio-economic safety net is still pretty much formal education and anyone questioning that is living in denial. The smarter way to follow one’s dream is to have that safety net.
The other thing people are going gaga about is the voice this movie has raised against pressure we put young people under. Well, well, well? Messrs Chopra and Hirani, isn’t it simply because we have created population at a much faster rate than infrastructure? Why blame the poor education system? Where exactly is the pressure justified? Let’s take Bollywood for example. There’s pressure to provide a hit in your debut appearance, there’s pressure to get the right boyfriend/girlfriend, there’s pressure to make more money than the next producer, there’s pressure to become famous. Though we haven’t heard cases of suicide yet, the pressure is enough to push people into substance abuse. In fact, if grapevine is to be believed, nowadays there’s a new pressure in Bollywood called the copyright pressure.
The movie has supposedly raised another issue: we produce IIT graduates who take up high-paying jobs and we don’t make original thinkers who could pick up a Nobel Prize for an invention. IITs are not places for fundamental theoretical science. They are about applied science. A Princeton will always win more Nobel Prizes than an MIT or a Cal Tech. And MITs and Cal Techs will get people higher-paying jobs. It’s our failure to create a Princeton that should be lamented and not why IIT grads are not picking up Nobel Prizes. In a lecture, Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan claimed that he failed to get admission into the IIT. From a na?ve logic, this makes the 3 Idiot argument stronger. But in reality it doesn’t. If Venky wanted to do chemistry, then IIT may not have been the right place. IIT is a fiercely competitive career choice like the Public Service Commission and most people go there to be assured of a livelihood. After that it’s up to the individual and his interest. My guess is that Venky possibly would still have got the Nobel Prize even if he had qualified for IIT. IITs have produced many writers, social workers, musicians and none of those subjects are offered in the IITs.
There is another 3 Idiot kind of logic that finds favour with a lot of people. It’s the fact that most IIT students finally go to IIMs and do managerial jobs and don’t become great engineers that this country needs. The joke is that people first do engineering and then become managers and do re-engineering. I want to kill this argument forever. IIMs offer post-graduate programmes. This means that people would have done their graduation in some subject at least. So why don’t we lament the fact that the English graduate going to an IIM is not becoming an author, the commerce graduate at an IIM is not becoming an accountant and so on. MBA is another shortcut to competition and people who want assured success will go there. That’s not a fault of the system?it’s a worldwide phenomenon. Am I trying to justify our education system? Not by a long shot. There are enough faults. But at least the system works. Education in India is the only chance someone has to break the social hierarchy. It’s the only weapon one has to compete against the offspring of a rich Bollywood producer. Democracy in India is mostly symbolic; at least education is not. 3 Idiots is a lovely movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But for heaven’s sake, let’s not try and read any meaning into it. Bollywood philosophy is the latest social malady in India; it’s best left to news channels and glossies.
?The writer is an ad professional and an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad