Usually when we picture the quintessential college experience, singing and dancing in large choreographed groups to upbeat music isn’t on that list. This is because most of us don’t live in a Bollywood film. We at AMP believe this is quite tragic. Wouldn’t it be great if the answer to all your problems was to just do a little jig with your pals and sing your troubles away? Maybe with some extremely absurd yet entertaining side-plots thrown in? Isn’t that what college is all about? Well, it SHOULD be. Join us as we delegate two idiots to become students of the year in our own right, following a couple merry bands in their (not entirely accurate) collegiate lives. Without further ado: chalo!
CONTENT WARNING: mentions of suicide, discussions of mental health
3 Idiots (2009)
With great sadness I’ll admit: I’m terribly inexperienced when it comes to watching Bollywood films. You can imagine my surprise when I queued up “3 Idiots” for the first time and was met with the most batshit crazy, comedic, yet heartfelt musical experience I’d ever seen.
I loved this movie. I was confounded by it and even had to pause at several spots just to check that I was still watching the same movie, but I loved this movie. While the story is ridiculous, it keeps its core themes of mental health and education reform at the center of the stage throughout its nearly three-hour-long runtime. The narrative jumps back and forth between this friend group’s college days and their modern lives, which occasionally made it difficult to keep up with, but the film’s tone was so wacky and charming that it kept my attention anyway.
So, “3 Idiots” follows the story of our titular 3 idiots — Farhan, Raju, and Rancho — as they navigate their days in university together at the Imperial College of Engineering. Ten years pass and they all attempt to reunite with each other, with Farhan and Raju accompanying one of their former classmates on a road trip across India to locate Rancho, who went missing immediately after graduation.
Flashing back to the trio’s first day of university, Rancho immediately establishes himself as a natural-born genius when he rescues the freshman class from a bunch of seniors doing a hazing ritual. Man, remember hazing? I sure don’t! And thank god for that, because all of these fellas are forced to drop trou and do whatever their seniors say, unless they want to get… pissed on? Hmm. Hazing has always felt strangely homoerotic to me. Anyway, Rancho is accepted as a man of the people when he hides from the seniors and engineers a device that electrocutes them if they pee on it. Afterwards, Rancho befriends Farhan and Raju, who both look up to his innovative way of thinking.
Not long after this we’re introduced to our antagonist, a surly principle named Dr. Viru “Virus” Sahastrabuddhe, who has extremely strict and bullheaded beliefs when it comes to studying, deadlines, and the mental wellness (or lack thereof) of his students. This comes to a head after the first big musical number of the film concludes — a joyous anthem about how reassuring yourself that “all is well” can give you the courage to face your fears — and we’re met with the sight of a student that has hung himself in his dorm room. The tone switch here is insanely abrupt, but that’s precisely what makes it hit so hard.
This is when the film really begins to hammer home its views on mental health, specifically within Indian universities. Rancho makes suggestions on how to teach the students more effectively and points out not only where the issues are in the education system, but in society as a whole. He asks questions that no other students are asking, and he’ll often talk back to his superiors when he gets in trouble. Rancho is portrayed as such a wise and worldly guy that it’s almost ridiculous how many things he gets away with. Near the end of the movie he delivers a freaking baby on a ping-pong table with a vacuum cleaner — and NO that’s not me using hyperbole, that’s literally what happens. For all its somber and bittersweet moments, this film has some of the most absurd writing I’ve ever seen.
Speaking of somber moments, the story’s biggest low point comes when Raju eventually makes his own suicide attempt. He’s pressured to betray his friends so he can graduate, and he jumps from Virus’ office window when faced with the choice. We watch his long, difficult recovery and see how his friends stick by him even when all seems hopeless. It makes everyone’s desperation to find Rancho in the present day all the more understandable.
On the final leg of their quest to find Rancho, the friends learn that Rancho’s identity was actually falsified so he could attend university. Despite this, they manage to track him down in the far north of Ladakh, where he’s founded a school for people of all backgrounds and interests to study what they’re passionate about. He’s like some kind of modern-day Buddha — it’s bonkers how well everything works out for this guy in the end. The friends all joyfully reunite and we come away with the moral lesson that education is a journey, not a race, and that people should be allowed to pursue whatever they want. A pretty great lesson in my book!
This film is a roller coaster. It’ll have you yelling at your screen in equal parts joy and shock, it’ll make you reevaluate your entire career as a student, and most importantly, it’ll teach you how to electrocute someone with their own piss. That’s really all we care about here. As far as we’re concerned, “3 Idiots” passes its exams with flying colors, so go ahead and give it a chance!
Student of the Year (2012)
Full disclosure, I made it nearly 22 years of my very Desi life having never watched this movie. The only familiarity I had with it until recently was the music video for “Radha,” one of the plot-driving dance numbers, and a general awareness that everyone who watched “Student of the Year” would have preferred that the two male components of the love triangle ended up together instead.
Our story is told by a group of students reminiscing on their days at St. Theresa’s, an elite high school where the financial divide is so strong that all cliques fall under two umbrella groups of rich and poor. Our main friend group is almost entirely composed of ABCs — affluent brats and their companions. Yes, actually. Within this group is the central love triangle, made of three cliché points. Rohan Nanda, popular playboy son to an affluent but unsupportive father, Shanaya Singhania, resident pretty mean girl and Rohan’s girlfriend, and Abhimanyu Singh, new heartthrob from a poor, broken family who used to need a job and is therefore a bum. Obviously.
The reminiscing occurs in a hospital waiting room, where the friends are summoned to see their former dean before he passes. Dean Yogi is, for all intents and purposes, an icon. He’s funny, unabashedly queer with a copy of GQ in his desk, and is not subtle at all about his crush on the coach. Oh, and he’s the creator of the annual Student of the Year competition — a three-part tournament where the winning student in the treasure hunt, dance, and triathlon gets an exclusive scholarship to an international Ivy League funded by Rohan’s father. It’s cutthroat to the highest level — but that won’t affect our beloved friend group, right?
Wrong. Extremely. But before that, Rohan and Abhi have a rivalry that lasts about five minutes before they each realize the other has a genuine personality beyond rich brat and poor outcast. They very quickly become campus eye candy and each other’s confidantes about everything. They’re the favorites of each other’s families, have deep conversations about their aspirations, and constantly make jokes about kissing each other when emotional. If all of that sounds super not-platonic, that’s the point. More on that later.
Their friendship goes downhill when the friends go to a wedding in Rohan’s family, where Shanaya and Abhi fall into a fake-dating scheme to make Rohan jealous enough to pay more attention to Shanaya. This works, but all that fake dating turns into real feelings for Abhi, who works through his emotions using the very healthy method of Not Thinking About Them.
The group returns from the wedding in time for the Student of the Year competition, and they very quickly derail from teasing friends to cutthroat competitors while pretending that’s not what they’re doing. In the midst of confronting their friendship, we finally meet the competition-within-the-competition. Abhi, trying but failing to deal with every emotion in the world after his grandma’s passing and his confusion about Shanaya, makes the mistake of not backing away when she kisses him. Rohan walks in exactly at this moment, and the boys battle it out while Shanaya blatantly calls them out for not caring about her feelings as much as they care about each other’s. She’s right — Rohan and Abhi barely notice their mutual lack of girlfriend but vehemently fall back into rivalry with each other.
As they move into the dance competition at prom, the friend group is holding on by threads. Prom becomes a Chipettes-style dance-off where most of the group gets eliminated — except for Rohan and Abhi, who reiterate how mad they are at each other by dancing and making intense eye contact. Their final face-off comes during the last leg of the triathlon, where the first runner to reach the finish line claims the trophy and scholarship. After neck-and-neck anticipation, Rohan takes the win, but he denounces the prize in favor of spiting his father for betting against him the entire time.
Though the competition ends, the friends don’t make up until they meet in the hospital 10 years later. Rohan turns up, glowing as the musician he always dreamed to be, and very quickly loses his mind when Abhi turns up married to Shanaya for some reason. They battle it out again, during which Abhi insists that Rohan can’t be this mad at him over his ex, and he’s right! Rohan reveals that what’s actually eating at him is that Abhi threw the competition to let him win, thereby allowing Rohan to earn his spotlight. You read that right. Rohan spent 10 years thinking about his platonic best friend’s feelings, and Abhi lost a life-changing scholarship to show his platonic best friend off in front of his judgemental father. With all secrets out, the boys end with a rematch race, but not before making a lot of eye contact and talking about kissing each other. Again.
Overall, Student of the Year is definitely a movie for when you want to watch something without thinking too much. Or at all. We all need a cliquey, chaotic romance to zone out to once in a while. That said, what I really didn’t foresee is that it is just so gay. I truly thought the “Rohan and Abhi should’ve been together” thing would be fun subtext, but the entire movie is unbelievably queercoded. I’m genuinely surprised older audiences wrote it off as “just jokes between guys,” as is the fate of most queer references in older Indian media. With this much focus on a best-friends-but-more dynamic and a dean whose final act in life is flirting with a guy, Student of the Year could’ve been so woke if they committed to the bit. In my brain, this movie is the ridiculous enemies-to-lovers indulgence it should’ve been all along.
