Listed as a must watch for the 100 movies bucket list, 3 idiots is a story worth remembering.
This story follows 3 best friends: Farhan, Raju, and Rancho, engineering students at the Imperial College of Engineering, one of India’s top institutions. Farhan aspires to be a wildlife photographer but is pursuing an engineering degree to fulfill his father’s wish. Raju needs to improve his family’s financial situation and Rancho studies for the joy of building machines. Rancho continually clashes with the dean, Professor Viru Sahastrabuddhe a.k.a. Virus (Boman Irani), by providing creative and unconventional answers, and later blames the institution’s rote-learning mentality for the problems that students face with their learning.
Rancho changes the mindset of his friends too. They face the trials and tribulations of dealing with an education system focused on grades and testing while students forget the main point of learning. The main “idiot,” (Rancho) played by Aamir Khan plays a character born to the assistant of a rich man. He goes all the way through engineering college for the rich man’s son. Since he is driven by his curiosity, he follows it religiously, going where his interests take him, to whichever subject appeals to him. His curiosity and his curiosity earn him the wrath of his grade-driven teachers and the ridicule of his excellence-motivated peers.
Rancho is a firm believer in free thinking and questioning the dominant paradigm. Ultimately, he converts the dean, who was fanatically set on the “traditional” mindset, to seeing things differently. The ending scenes follow Rancho in the future having achieved his dream: running a “school” that teaches kids to let their imagination, innovation and creativity take over.
Some of the lessons portrayed are:
- Don’t run behind the success: Achieve excellence first, and success will come to you.
- Creativity: Always be creative, in your answers, work and things you do. Through creativity you will learn to think outside of the box.
- Learning is everywhere: Learning isn’t limited to a classroom and listening to teachers. If you seek it, it can be found everywhere. For example, in the people you meet from experiences. You just need to grab and go with it.
- Do it with a passion: To love what you do provides the basis to achieving things that are greater.
- Never race: Don’t compete for the sake of competing. Always try to gain some knowledge and expertise. If you don’t, then you don’t gain anything from the experience.
- Say “all is well”: This is Rancho’s core mantra to help himself and his friends get rid of their fears. He says “This will not solve all problems but will surely give you the heart to face them”.
- Ignore others: Ignore the haters and move on. Remember:“If you stop and throw a stone at every dog that barks, you will never reach your destination.”
- Take a risk: Challenge yourself. The worst thing that will ever happen is “failure.” And if you do, then learn from it and take it on again. Don’t back away out of fear.
The film creatively mocks the strict, traditional schooling system in the hopes of outlining the flaws within the system. The exams are never able to quantify the true potential of a student, and ultimately only create a self-destructive cycle of competition. The system fails to appreciate the efforts of students and amplify their talents to ultimately guide them to improve upon their weaknesses. Not only that, but also to learn for the sake of learning. The real purpose of learning is to capture how it’s going to affect us and the people around us, how it will impact the existing knowledge. Nowadays, with how the education system is shaped, we tend to learn the things for the exams. Cramming for exams and missing the value of the newfound knowledge. The need to chase success, and measure it through pay grade becomes the end all for people in this world. People don’t chase excellence to appease their curiosity, but rather to make better money. We restrict ourselves by submitting to the system, and the system is at a huge fault for teaching us at a young age that our life amounts to that. The creative way that the movie captures the morals is just enough to make you want to go to school.
This movie never fails to bring me back to why I love to learn. In moments of lingering burn outs, this movie always brings me back to myself. Giving a heartfelt search for meaning to school and life, it is a perfect movie to watch, anytime of year.
