comedy

*** Gave me the Sunshine.. of Seasons Past***

Warning: This is not a review of 3 idiots. And sometimes the language in this post could be a tad colourful for your taste.

I am a child of the eighties. Unlike the children of the late Nineties or the Noughties, who grew up with Satellite TV and alternative career choices, my options were limited. I never clearly knew what I wanted to do. Maybe I don’t know still. I was good in Maths. I hated blood and dissecting frogs, and I wanted to travel outside my hometown, maybe work somewhere in a city in India or even abroad. I have 3 cousins who are Engineers, and hence my parents were keen enough to make me one. And so I became one. All of this sums me up as a blend of Raju, Farhaan and Rancho – our three protagonists of 3 idiots. And hence, unlike “reviewers” who would compare this with Munnabhai B.Tech [with certainly no idea of what they're talking about], I feel deeply connected with this movie in a very obvious way. I have gone through that phase of peer pressure, fear of failure, coping with parental expectations and above all, the struggle between the safe-route naukri routine and the true calling in one’s self. I have a confession to make – I became a Mechanical engineer not because I was fascinated about Machines or autombiles, but because it ensured a better and a secured future. [ #Fact: Majority of Mechanical and Civil Engineers get recruited by IT services MNC's, or go ahead with yet another struggle called CAT]. And yes, although I am not proud of my decision that I never gave enough room for my own interest in music, movies or writing which surely doesn’t match my Mechanical Engg degree [or my Masters in Operational Research], it certainly pays off my bills and in a way they make me happy. Yes, I am materialistic, who’s not?

But let’s not ramble around like this, and get back to the movie. The world of 3 idiots set in a certain Imperial College of Engineering is typical of any Engineering college campus. The water tank aka ‘Tanki’ is reminiscent of the one that was in my campus. Of course, we had a biological name for it And like non-living objects, we had nicknames for each and every character we found as worthy of being termed as a characteristic. So similar to the movie which has Chatur the Silencer, we had a Silent Killer, a DOPA [Dean of P@ndy Affairs] and also Remix King [I wish he's reading this] who was responsible to add his wicked non-veg remixes to popular Bolly numbers [shining examples being Behra Piya Bada Bedardi, Hilake Pilake- Sharara Sharara and something that I can't write about in public but I can certainly reveal that it is based on Tushar Kapoor's Is Pyaar Ko Main Kya Naam Duu]. Although I wasn’t at all as competitive as Chatur, I did know an awful lot of people who were the ulta-cramming machines like Chatur, but quite ironically, would never top the class. And amongst others, I also had a couple of mates who would spend late nights until the wee hours of the morning playing cards or multi-player games and still score the highest marks. Typical Ranchos they were. And also a world which had the multi-tasking Millimeter, the Mega-Byte and Giga-Bytes And for such obvious reasons that the movie brought all these memories back to me in a gush, I loved it. Not just a bit, but a whole lot.

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