Performance-wise Madhavan, Sharman Joshi and Aamir Khan are winners none less than the other, performances doubly creditable because they don’t really look like college students any more (My wife would disagree of course-according to her there wouldnt be many college students who look as cute as Aamir Khan).
The technical work is top-notch and some of the camera-work breathtaking. The credit for why Three Idiots works must go primarily to Rajkumar Hirani and to the very intelligent and equally funny script with several laugh-out loud moments that kept me continously engaged and invested in the fate of the characters. And when in a very astute observations on human nature, a character says that what hurts more than seeing a friend fail is to see a friend succeed, I just could not help but chuckle in agreement at the genuineness of that “confession”. I could see a friend I knew in the character of the ultra-competitive Chatur, and the “engineer by nature” Rancho (Aamir Khan) and saw bits of myself in Farhan(Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi). Several scenes and plot-points reminded me of things that I personally experienced in college and in high school (my high school being a far more competitive and stressful place than my college, where your worth at least in front of the teachers was determined by how many marks you got).
#Indianfm mohan hits movie
When one of the characters unwittingly reads a speech “remixed” without his knowledge (watch the movie to understand what I am saying), I laughed aloud because it reminded me of how I would take SFI/DSF (college political parties) pamphlets and then read them out in class after modifying their passionate rhetoric with a few apposite words replaced or inserted, much to the merriment of the class. A struggle I myself experienced since I went to engineering school, like one of the protagonists, not because I had a love for engineering (I wanted to be a novelist/journalist) but because it guaranteed me the most secure future.
Instead the focus was on pressure, fear of failure, coping with family and authority and most importantly the struggle between who others want you to be and who you want to be yourself. Which is why, despite its faults, I loved Three Idiots.īecause this was the first time that a movie about college was not about cool clothes, hot chicks, fast cars and dance fests. In Three Idiots, I can say that I finally found a little bit of myself on the screen. I grew up in a middle class family in Calcutta and having studied in practically a boys-only engineering college with friends from similar financial backgrounds for whom hanging out meant a cigarette or a pastry from Monginis while sitting on the green grass, the world of Sid, Sameer and Akash was very much out of my realm of experience, though I understand that many people who go to college would find themselves reflected in “Dil Chahta Hain”. A feel-good heart warming story of friendship Dil Chahta Hai struck a chord in the heart of many movie-goers and would possibly be in most people’s list of favorites.Īthough I appreciated how different it was in look and feel from old world Bollywood, I personally did not love Dil Chahta Hai so much mainly because at an emotional level I could not connect with the story of three friends who drive a Mercedes to Goa, go to hep discos and then manage their dad’s business in Australia. Dil Chahta Hai was a watershed in the history of Bollywood, purely for how it was perhaps the first time that urban college-going students were shown speaking and dressing in ways that sounded and looked realistic, as opposed to the “Maa main pass ho gya” good-boy and “Khambe jaisi khadi hai”-singing bad boy stereotype.