About 3 years back when Raju Hirani released his last film, I remember all the facebook and orkut statuses had been updated to "Bande Mein Tha Dam". It was the after-impact of the film. The story repeated this time with words being changed to "All izz well". Raju does make some impact on the audience everytime he makes a film and he has indeed done a good job in adapting Chetan Bhagat's "5 point someone" to his own "3 Idiots". The reason I am saying 'his own' is because 3 idiots is actually different from the original book.
Ranchordas Shyamaldas Chanchard aka Rancho (Amir Khan) a boy with a different outlook towards the concept of studying, a brain who thinks about applying science rather than merely learning it, got admitted amongst the geeky pundits of the Imperial College of Engineering aka IC where grades and marks determine how successful are you going to be in the road ahead. Veeru Sahasrabuddhe aka Virus (Boman Irani), the director of IC a man with constant wrinkles on his forehead and an ability to make anyone feel small is clueless of what is going to happen in his own college when his staff placed this guy Rancho and 2 more idiots Raju Rastogi (Sharman Joshi) and Farhaan Qureshi (R Madhavan) in one room of the hostel.
Rancho with a mentality of "Strive for excellance and then success will follow you" is least bothered about grades and results, and on the contrary, Raju and Farhaan however inspired are by Rancho's theory, have to focus on grades due to family pressure and the outcome is contrary. Rancho someone least bothered about grades stands first in the class while the other set of idiots come last and second last respectively. Rancho's answer behind this is the word 'passion'. He coaxes Farhaan to pursue his own passion of photography where he will stand way ahead of others. Raju on the other hand is lost in the race of grades and has long forgotten the word 'excellence'. Both the guys at the end rectify their flaws and follow what Rancho had to say for them. It is a happy graduation day picture, except that Rancho has disappeared from the set. The entire movie is in the search of this guy Rancho who disappeared from the graduation day 10 years back and the story above features in bit and pieces as the flashback scenes.
Raju has very well captured the student life, the race for grades, the student superstitions, the student pressure, the student suicides etc painting the education system very well on his canvass of 3 Idiots. It was a lively experience reminiscing the good old student days where we have lived parts of these lives in bit and pieces. Songs are very well made expect that I would say 'Zoobie Doobie' was a mistake.
C.K.Muraleedharan has done a wonderful job in his cinematography capturing Laddhak, Shimla, Manali and the IIM Bangalore campus as the IC at it's brilliance.
Now going back to my first expression, the movie is different from the original book - the reason being, it is a film. Raju has made it filmy with his typical melodramatic masala and obnoxious scenes where Amir Khan delivers a baby using a vacuum cleaner.
The book I guess is Chetan's own story and hence much closer to reality. Ryan the hunk, Hari the guy with Prof Cherian's girl and Alok are 5 pointers and thus below average graders. None of them top the class. So to sum it up, Chetan has done a good job of bringing out an important real life topic while Raju has done a good job in putting it on the reels. Rating: ***1/2
