Movie: 3 Idiots

I have always admired Raju Hirani’s movies.  Raju Hirani uses his movies to send across pretty serious message to wider audiences embedded with humor to compensate for the seriousness of his message.  During the whole movie whenever you begin to feel that a sentimental drama is going to unfold, he suddenly relaxes you giving it a humorous twist. 

This movie is about three engineers who made it to a top school in India.  One of them, Rancho (Aamir Khan) is not your typical kid.  His idea of engineering is different from most others, including his professors, and his idea of success is different from most students around him.  It’s a tale of what education should be really about.

Wednesday: Movie

Here is a perfect example of what’s going wrong with India and its people. I have serious objections to the kind of message this movie promotes. This is the exact kind of path I DON’T want India to take up. Unfortunately, many young people that I talked to seem to like this movie and the message.

It is the kind of robin hood justice, not very different from how Naxalites operate, imposing their own version of justice onto the people, taking up a gun and shooting a guy without thorough investigation, based on perceptions, hearsays, and whims, and not very different from the kind of justice what Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia dole out in their countries. Take the gun, shoot the guy who you think is the criminal, do away with laborious and painful judicial procedures – that is the message of the movie.

Many young people seem to like that kind of justice. ‘You know he is the terrorist, why not just shoot him?’ they ask.

What India needs is not more of such heroic and robin hood kind of punishments, but more procedural investigation, and more rule of law. What we need is more people stopping at red light and not the other way round where every Indian takes law into his hands to take a decision right then and there whether he should skip the red light or not. What we need is more procedural arrests, not more of fake ‘encounter killings’. We need more accountability into our system, not more of doing away with it.

Some young Indians have justified Naseeruddin Shah’s (the common man) role in the movie. They believe it is OK to kill four alleged terrorists without due course of legal procedures, without providing the evidences, without having to prove them guilty within the legal framework. And why is it so? Just because they all ‘know’ that these four guys are terrorists.

What is missed out is the basic premise on which the entire legal structure, in fact, the very concept of a modern nation is based on – that every citizen has a right to justice, and a person is innocent unless proven guilty.

In the movie, a policeman is blackmailed into killing an alleged terrorist, who is not convicted in any court of law as yet, on the pretext that he is saving many innocents people from a non-existent bomb. The policeman creates a ‘fake encounter’ and disposes off the last alleged terrorist, and this is celebrated and hailed by everyone around him.

I don’t subscribe to such arbitration of justice. We have courts and we have a legal system in place. If people think that the system is really slow and inefficient, they have to fight the system to make it better, not take up the gun to kill the accused before they are even paraded into the courts. What’s the difference between the terrorist and the ordinary man now? (I have the same argument against Rang De Basanti).

We need to understand and believe that even a terrorist has a right to justice, because we do not know if they are criminals unless proven guilty. They are all innocent till they are proven guilty. Every accused person should have access to a lawyer, even the worst criminal, a serial killer, a rapist or a terrorist. Recently there was a hue and cry when someone suggested they are going to provide lawyers to the alleged terrorists who got arrested. We think that providing a legal support to an alleged terrorist is tantamount to condoning terrorism.

During most part of the movie, the audience view Naseeruddin Shah as a villain, who is trying to free four alleged terrorists by blackmailing the police with a bomb threat that could kill hundreds of people. But later on, Naseeruddin Shah kills three of those alleged terrorists with a bomb and the last one by blackmailing the policeman. As a twist to the whole movie, he gleams that he is a common man who is frustrated with the recent turn of events in the country with so many terrorist bombs blowing up everywhere and that he is only out there to seek revenge.

The police officers also feel happy at the turn of the events and they believe in Naseeruddin Shah’s new story completely without verifying it. All those who are working on the case give out a sigh of relief. There is a sudden change in the attitudes and nobody wants to track him down anymore because now they feel Naseeruddin Shah is like one of them, an ordinary citizen, just taking a simple and straight revenge by exactly following the methods the terrorists follow.

The people in the movie and the audience now sympathize with him, condone his actions, accept them and even congratulate him for that. He is allowed to go scot free. Even the police officer in charge of the operations goes to congratulate Naseeruddin Shah without making any investigations. The police is all happy because he made them dispose of those alleged terrorists.

Many people who have seen the movie felt it was OK to kill those terrorists because it was in some way handing out justice – a little faster mechanism without having to go through court-kacheri. They felt that Naseeruddin Shah acted in the best faith and he did nothing wrong. The fact that he has just murdered four innocent people goes unnoticed by the people in the movie and the audience.

The problem is when we mete out justice guided by feelings, perceptions, and impressions. They can be false sometimes. They can be constructed. That’s why we have a court, a legal procedure, and a due course of law to convict people.

I created a small scenario here to extend how fallacious our arguments can be if we were to go by those carefully constructed feelings and perceptions.

I would like to extend the movie only by a minute. As soon as the police officer leaves (after congratulating Naseeruddin Shah for the great deed he did), Naseeruddin Shah picks up a satellite phone from his grocery bag, and calls Abu Basha, a master mind terrorist, who is lounging in a big bungalow, and tells him that ‘kaam ho gaya hai’. Naseeruddin Shah informs Abu Basha that now nobody will be able to trace the bombings to Abu Basha since the four people that would have connected previous bombings to Abu Basha are now all dead.

Abu Basha congratulates Naseeruddin Shah and asks him to be careful next time around and make sure no lead comes to him in the next set of bombings.

I am quite sure that such a twist to the story would once again make the audience change their stance and now they may vilify Naseeruddin Shah for what he had done.

The problem with such stories is that the perceptions can change. That’s why we have a judicial procedure to take care of such problems of perceptions, media reports, and other constructed notions.

No matter what, whether we like it or not, we need to stick to judicial procedure in this country. We need a dose of more rule of law, not less of it. This movie is a bad example coming at a bad time.

Taare Zameen Par

[I wrote many articles on this blog- most of them criticize India and Indians. Beauty is hard to find in India. There is ugliness everywhere. But, once in a while I get a glimpse of something beautiful. And when I see something beautiful and excellent, I do not fail to celebrate it.]

Few days ago, I saw the movie Taare Zameen Par. It is one of those rare moments when you can really celebrate excellence right here in India. It is a very well made movie. Kudos to Amir Khan, Darsheel Safary and other very good artists who have made this movie worth watching! Photography was excellent, cinematography superb, and screenplay outstanding. Great direction! It moved me, it swayed me. And most important of all, it had a great message!

There were so many great moments in this movie and each moment was captured so well.

The movie is about a kid who just wants to have fun and grow up at his own pace. The movie captures so well each of those glimpses where a kid enjoys the world around him, innocently, and so childishly. The joy of that paint drop landing on Ishaan’s cheek, the urge to jump into the water puddles, dreaming dragons and monsters, are what the kid’s life is made up of. The present day parents, who are keen on pushing their kids to join their rat race, are robbing their kids from enjoying those beautiful moments. Nowadays, I don’t see kids (in cities and towns) playing in the evening. I see them coming home, and then going off to tuition or straight to homework.

The movie shows travails of a young lad who is just being himself, a kid, trying to cope with this ever competitive world. He wants to learn at his own pace. He wants to enjoy the finer things of life, waking up late, dreaming, and just having fun. Ishaan (the protagonist) is a fine artist but suffers from dyslexia. I still believe that this movie could have been made without using dyslexia as an excuse. It could have been any kid who just wanted to enjoy the life around him. The parents are frustrated with Ishaan, who never seems to learn to write or read. He is thrown into a boarding school because he does not conform to the expectations of his parents, his teachers, and his society.

Though it highlights the problem of one kid who stubbornly refuses to conform, there are millions of kids in India who are being told to give up their childhood. The kid’s life is now reduced to a drudgery of learning by rote. In one instance, when the Ishaan explains a Hindi poem in his own way, the teacher urges the students to ‘interpret’ it in exact same words he prescribed. There goes another kid’s creativity and originality down the drain.

Ishaan’s father wants his kid to conform, learn, and succeed. In this world and society, there is no room for deviating from the norms. The parents see their success through the accomplishments of their kids. Parents want their kid to be top engineer, a top doctor, a CEO, or a top sports player. Everybody wants child geniuses; nobody wants a nice human being.

Children tend to grow at different rates, taking their own times, not necessarily confined to the orderliness and timeliness of a curriculum of a school. A kid can grow the necessary skills to enter the mainstream at any age. What he does at a certain age does not determine his performance for the rest of his life. That’s why I keep saying that just because a kid got into a top school does not mean much. It only means that he was good at that age. To assume he would be good for the rest of his life, and to assume that a kid who has gone to an ordinary college would remain ordinary for the rest of his life is quite foolish- but that’s how most Indians measure themselves.

One of the important messages of the movie is that you need to care for your kid. It does not mean you provide food, good school, books, toys, and video games. What it means is that you need to be there and assure the kid that he is quite OK in whatever he does. Every kid needs to be treated special. And kids should end up feeling they are special.

What is important is how the kid perceives this world. Caring parents who encourage, motivate, and applaud everything the kid does while ignoring his many ‘foibles’, ‘mistakes’, ‘flaws’, ‘guffaws’ and ‘inadequacies’, make kids life better. Hopefully, they make better human beings.

This movie conveys some important messages.

# Every kid is unique.

# Care for your kid and encourage him in whatever he does.

# Parents should not measure their kids only by their marks and scores in the exams.

And remember this:

Each kid grows differently at different rates at different ages. A kid who is completely uninterested in studying the alphabet, math or language at certain age may grow to like them at a later age and that’s when he will move at a rapid pace.

Then, there was a strong message from Amir Khan, about some islands where the tree just dies out because people around it curse it. Of course, it must be an allegory, but it has a good message. It’s so easy to kill a soul by constantly discouraging it.

We set our standards based on false assumptions, misconceived values, lofty morals and hypocritical ethics, and try to impose them on our kids, making their lives miserable. Here’s a speech from Lt. Col. Frank Slade from the movie Scent of a Woman. [This is one of my favorite movies – I have seen it more than 20 times].

And I have seen, boys like these, younger than these, their arms torn out, their legs ripped off. But there is nothin' like the sight of an amputated spirit, there is no prosthetic for that. You think you're merely sending this splendid foot-soldier back home to Oregon with his tail between his legs, but I say that you are executing his soul! And why? Because he's not a Baird man. Baird men, you hurt this boy, you're going to be Baird Bums, the lot of ya.

I really liked many aspects of Tare Zameen Par. Thank you Amir Khan, for giving me a piece of excellence to celebrate!

[I actually wrote a longer post interlaced with accounts from my childhood, but then I went on hold myself against posting it for obvious reasons].

Related Posts: Guide to Indian Idiocy I, Bad Parenting- Insensitivity and Indecency, Trying to find beauty in India, Apotheosis of IITs and myth of merit, My Stand on Reservations IV;

‘Rang De Basanti’ in action

What happens when people take law unto their hands? What happens when citizens believe they are better at doling out punishments than the state? What happens when responsible citizens believe they have a right to choose what laws they will abide by and what they will violate?

Why do I think the example set by ‘Rang De Basanti’ is a bad one?

Here’s an incident, in which the infuriated mob take on a thief, punishing him. What’s the next step for India? People taking up a gun and killing a minister because they believe he is corrupt?

Guru: Why I didn’t like the movie!

I am disappointed with Mani Ratnam. Guru turns out to be a lackluster, slow-paced and very predictive movie. The latter part of the movie turns slow and quite boring. The songs were not spectacular either.

But that’s not why I didn’t like the movie. I didn’t like the movie for the message it conveys- Do whatever it takes to succeed, even if it is the corrupt or illegal means. The message is dangerous and it epitomizes the attitudes of the new generation of India- inimical to itself. When a poll was conducted if the Indian youth would resort to the methods employed by a scandalous stockbroker to earn the ‘success’, majority of those who polled said a resounding ‘yes’. When I saw that result in a magazine few years ago, I couldn’t believe it. India has changed. It has changed for good in many ways. And it has changed for the worse in many ways. The Indian youth has wrong role models and that’s not a good development.

While I expected the protagonist to be punished for his illegal practices, the movie condones, accepts and legitimizes those actions. Such condoning, then accepting and then legitimizing all pervading corrupt practices leads to institutionalizing them forever. The present India needs to moves away from doing that- we need to move away from corruption that seems to touch every Indian soul. We need to say what is right and follow it, however hard that path may be. We need to know what is wrong and discard it, however hard that path may be.

Babudom, corruption, untouchability, casteism, nepotism, dynastic politics, etc, are all bad things of India. Legitimizing those practices perpetuates them. This movie does the same.

Should judiciary be influenced by public opinion? I think NOT. In this movie, the judiciary falls for the applause and approval of the corrupt protagonist and basically gives him a clean chit. I came out of the movie with a heavy feeling. What has become of us? Why are we rationalizing and explaining away the wrong acts as if we are victims of this system? What Guru Bhai does is plain wrong. Just because the system is wrong, we cannot use subversive tactics to undermine it and capitalize on it, to reap rewards from it.

Just because the tax system in India is fallible, should we stop paying taxes or evade taxes using ‘smart’ techniques? Should we disobey traffic laws just because they are not perfect? Our corporate laws are not perfect. I face these imperfections everyday in my life. We all get ample opportunities to easily subvert the system, go around it, to basically reap the bounties. That’s not right. We need examples of heroes who have done it right in spite of the flawed system. Not the examples of those who have ‘smartly’ outmaneuvered it.

Lage Raho Munnabhai

I saw this movie two days ago, and I think this is one of the greatest Indian movies. Kudos to Raju Hirani! He is one of the very few people in India that I would love to meet and chat in my lifetime. The others being Abdul Kalam and Pranay Roy.

I rate most of the Indian movies very low and don’t watch too many of them. For me, the top criterion for judging an Indian movie is ‘originality’. Both Munnabhai movies (MBBS and Lage Raho) score 100% on this. What stumped me when I watched the first one was its freshness- it was completely original with no pretense and no clichés drawn from other successful Hollywood or Indian movies. The second one is even better. It’s extremely hard for most Indian movie makers to handle a serious topic such as this. They made a mess with both Bhagat Singh movies. I came out of the movies having lower respect for Azad and gang than what I had. The director did a lousy job. Most other Indian movies- present and past could not handle serious issues very well- they lost out on what they wanted to convey.

Here is a great movie. Lage Raho kept the audience enthralled and captivated in its grip- the director took me (and other audience) through all the highs and lows, through extremely sentimental stuff and then within a minute to boisterous laughter. He played with me like popcorn tossing in a popcorn-making machine and I allowed him to do that. I was sad, I was happy, I laughed to my heart’s content, and thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

Conveying the message of Mahatma Gandhi to the present generation is extremely tough. His image is eroding very fast and he is becoming less and less of an entity in Indian scheme of things. However, Raju Hirani took this extremely tough message and conveyed it to Indian masses through his favorite characters- Munnabhai and Circuit. The screenplay was excellent. There was not a single moment when I felt distracted or got bored- I was just glued to the screen all the time. The banter, the language, and his new words- Gandhigiri, etc, are fresh once again. He has built up each character with great care and the actors live up to their unique characters.

By tying up Gandhian messages with modern India- old people drink beer and party in Goa, the protagonist being a Gandhian (in contemporary sense) resorts to drinking liquor, the director has made Gandhi valid in our lives once again without losing his core and original message. By touching upon dignity of work, relevance of truth and satyagraha in contemporary world, discarding superstitious works like Vaastu, Astrology and Numerology, Raju Hirani captured real Gandhi (without other idiosyncratic practices that seem to bother many people).

Must watch!

Rang De Basanti!

I watched the movie (Rang De Basanti) last night with some of my friends. It was a good movie. I would like to watch it once again. Aamir Khan and other actors were good and it was nice to see a movie where a single protagonist doesn’t take complete credit.

An interesting debate ensued after the movie when we were having tea late night on MG Road (Bangalore). I thought it was a good movie but not a great example. (Imagine every disgruntled youth taking up a gun and shooting down people) I went a step ahead to equate Bhagat Singh, Chandrasekhar Azad, et al, to modern day freedom fighters/militants who blow up things or kill a figurehead to make a point. You can now imagine the kind of onslaught I got from rest of my friends – who of course have great respect and reverence for these ‘revolutionaries’. Not that I don’t respect those revolutionaries. I just do not agree with their methods. I believe they set a wrong example in the larger context. In my opinion, a revolutionary who believes in an ideal has to see it through- test with time, and change the methods if needed, and sail through rough weathers to get the required support from people to bring the change.

On this score, I do not have a great opinion on the martyrs who do just one thing in their life- like, kill a president or a leader, following which their contribution stops (because they are dead or convicted). Most of the time they are too young or suddenly get emotional to act in haste. In some cases (like many terrorist and militant outfits out there), they are just bums who have no direction and suddenly realize this is the only way to make a mark in their otherwise ordinary lives. They just don’t know how to go about convincing people or taking the message across – because that’s goddamn hard, and therefore employ the only effective way that they have at their disposal- kill someone or blow up something, cause sensation, and hope their message is delivered. (Most of the terrorist outfits have whole lot of guys who think on this line).

I definitely do not approve of the methods employed by the carefree-but-suddenly-became-committed youth in this movie. I cannot imagine where every death or assassination is being justified over All India Radio. How do you actually know if the Defense Minister is responsible for MIG-21 crash (causing death of Madhavan, the pilot)? It’s a subjective argument. One has to resort to legal or journalistic investigation to prove such things. This is no different from terrorists sending out a video/audio tape to justify why they kidnapped or a slit throat of a captured journalist. The whole argument is subjective and very farcical. One has to fight the system employing right methods and it is usually a long and arduous task- there are no quick fixes for bringing in a revolution. An act of assassination because one of your good friends got killed is more an act of revenge that an act of a cause. Such actions don’t set great example. If ever they do, they encourage the youth to continue to be carefree hoping that one assassination will make up for their lack of seriousness and commitment. The youth in this movie are not driven by a cause. And their means employing a slapdash solution without knowing the long-term effects reflect plain immaturity.

When we are at crossroads in our lives, most often we do know what is the right path, but it is goddamn hard to take it, and most of us just take the easy path, and pretend that it was the best path available.

The path taken up by Mother Theresa, or the guys who hugged the trees to stop deforestation in India, or the guys who went to Rajasthan and dug canals to bring water to villages, etc, are hard paths and the right paths. It takes immense strength and energy to be part of the system and fight the system. Instead, just blowing up the whole parliament doesn’t get us new dams, new railroads, protect our forests, or bring people out of poverty. In many societies it’s called terrorism.

A good example would have been where one fights his/her way through the system to change the system- ‘become a politician, or join IAS, or become a police officer’ as the pilot says in the movie. I would have loved that example, but then I guess it would not have made a ‘sensational’ movie. Death of a Defense Minister is ‘sensational’ enough! We may have to live with that for the sake of sensationalism.

The debate that followed this discussion was even more interesting where in we touched on various topics including Gandhi vs. Bhagat Singh, etc. I shall write my thoughts on this subject in my next session!