Schrödinger’s Razor of Life— All is(n’t?) well
Humanity had entered the last year of the first decade of the second millennium. Four boys; friends, also entered the movie hall of their favorite single screen in the bustling city of Kolkata. Each of them were born within 6 months of each other had been thick as thieves for 9 of their 14ish years of existence. A pair of them lived within 200 meters of each another and the other pair lived under the same roof; being cousins in a joint family. They attended the same school and often dined at each other’s homes; the cousins’ home was not more than 3 kms away (to be translated as “a small walk and a share auto ride away”).
They entered the modest movie hall to watch a movie that was already on its way in becoming a cult classic. They sat side by side, ate food that they had sneaked into the movie hall in their bags and were even magnanimous enough towards the theatre to buy the inhouse popcorn. This was an older and simpler time of course; when the prices of popcorn were in the higher double digits rather than the current arm-and-a-leg kind.
What followed inside the four walls of the hall was pure revelry. Popcorn kernels bounced on their laps as they would often erupt in simultaneous laughter, often in unison with the entire theatre. They sniggered at the main character’s awkward attempts at romance; unaware of how much each of them would fail or remain novices in the same in the years to come. They were even solemn at times; not quite grasping the intellectual meat of certain subplots unfolding but sentient enough to get absorbed in the suffusion of the built up cinematic tension.
After several hours of hooting, hollering and cheering, the quarter finally got up; brushed off the food residue from their clothes and exited the hall and their own ways, in more ways than one; for unbeknownst to them, life would carry them along paths so diverse that this would be the last movie the four of them ever saw together.
They would spend the remainder of their schooling days in institutionally created silos such as Section A and Section B and Science and Commerce and then proceed to (literally) diverge farther away from each other through geographic dispersion.
One of the lads was pursuing a Ph. D in some fancy aeronautical field in The USA. Another, his cousin, was killing it at an insurance company in Delhi (or somewhere in the NCR). Another one of them stayed back, masterfully handling the family business with his elder brother and abiding by his filial and familial duties.
The fourth is in Mumbai, currently in a self conceptualized twilight zone of the MBA program he is pursuing. He spends most of his time staring listlessly outside his 7th floor hostel window at the scattered construction workers working perennially under the grey blanket of the Mumbai monsoon sky, a spitting image of American interpretations of the Soviet Union. At this very moment, he was doing the same; punctuating his drawn out gazes with the drawn out sentences he was using to populate this blog piece.
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None of what is written above matters to what will be written next. I figured if I could perform some literary sleight of hand to grab a few eyeballs, it might be worth it. Of course, I had to resort to the literary kind of sleight of hand because I can’t wield cards, only words (and that too barely!).
How the four of us split up or what we do matters very less, if at all. The single screen, the food gorged and the prices of ‘consumables’ matters even less. What does matter though is the guffawing laughter and the movie that was playing out on the screen to somewhat impressionable young minds —
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Perhaps any analysis I perform of movies will be an imperfect one, rife with inconsistencies and personal biases. This is perhaps a problem with the performing arts in general, where any amateur thinks they can be a critic, and where a creator, while open to criticism and feedback, may also question the intelligence of his unresponsive and unsympathetic audience for not thinking, seeing or “feeling” the same way as him or her.
I know I am both guilty of, and a victim of, the same. Despite having just started out experimenting on comedy open mics (the most shameless plug you’ll ever see), my seemingly unfounded arrogance is a great barrier to entry towards objective analysis. (“They probably laugh at banal shows like Tarak Mehta” my mind goes on stage, in front of tumbleweeds and pin drop silence)
Something about 3 idiots had gnawed at me ever since I had completed my engineering degree. I had even read the original source material during my second year, and felt that this was a rare case of the movie being better than the book (perhaps due to being less distasteful and more cheery). But there had always been the seed of cynicism planted deep within me and as certain life events and truths unfolded in front of me, I could feel scepticism towards pop culture and big screen portrayals develop further and further.
Thus, without further ado, here’s three lessons (this will be a LinkedIn post after all, it can’t be complete without some associated learning and I know enough now to leverage the power of three) that the amateur critic in me could muster up for filling up a blog, fueled by some free time, boredom, a distinct lack of relevant subject expertise, a desire to write and, most importantly, a petty and unfounded malice towards a random coming of age movie which certainly had its merits.
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“Has he lost his mind? Can he see or is he blind?” — Think of that time you were in engineering college. It may have been a merrier time than now (or miserable, I am not one to stereotype all engineering colleges as havens of fun and frolic). You would have had a classmate or a batchmate who’d end up becoming the gold medalist of your Institute/University. Think of him or her. Think of silver and bronze medalist as well, but think of the gold medalist harder. Remember how they were in college; the company they kept, the committee rooms they spent their time in, the places they hung out at, their frequency and choice of alcohol consumption and also, the time they spent buried inside books and classes. Think long and hard about your topper.
Now recall if they were also excellent in “building things” like Rancho was; whether they were able to dedicate significant time to “engineer” things as per their will and desire (Remember, we are still talking about a largely flawed education ecosystem where the demands of curriculum often clash with true engineering, as per 3 idiots anyway). Did they partake in as many hostel shenanigans as an engineering student did? Did it seem that their decisions and actions had almost no consequences on them, perhaps owing to them having a lot of family money? And finally, was your topper batchmate a prodigy of such stature that they were top of their class despite doing things their own way, joyously drunk and unphased in the face of rebukes?
If you answered yes to the above questions, then congratulations, you are at the periphery of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and were a part of the MIT cohort from which Tony Stark of Iron Man and Marvel fame graduated, a character sometimes more realistic than Rancho himself.
Despite all the criticisms of the education system, getting a gold medal at an institute level requires consistency and perseverance and is nothing to be scoffed at and not something that can be achieved while the background score of a film runs. Despite whatever the “marks don’t matter” brigade says, there’s a significant weightage to good grades that is given by providers of conventional careers.
This of course does not mean that a gold medal is the end all. There are plenty of ways to enjoy and enrich oneself in college (something that Rancho was a proponent of, if not in an obnoxious manner). But they won’t all lead to a gold medal, perhaps only a few will.
Prioritization and holistic development is key. You can’t “win” all aspects of life, professional and personal, even if you chant “All is Well” 108 times along the way.
“Walk a mile in my tattered shoes”- Imagine being a diligent student all your life and working your up to a top engineering college where you find yourself falling behind on your grades. It happens to the best of people, there’s no shame to it. So you try to cram harder to catch up amidst people who have been toppers in their own capacities.
Not to be forgotten is the fact that you also come from abject poverty and a single income household with a bedridden parent and a dependent sister. You are the ticket out of poverty for your family, a mechanism to climb the economic and social ladder.
With these thoughts in mind, you enter your college and strive to do your best, perhaps sometimes in not the best way possible. So you sit down and try to study earnestly and end up getting taught a “lesson” by your friend who hails from dynastic wealth that “All is Well”.
All was not well for Raju and he certainly didn’t need to hear that from his “friends”. He was almost literally fighting for his family’s livelihood while being preached a watered down Hakuna Matata by the protagonist.
Who knew that the visionary that Aamir Khan was, he was portraying the influencer aesthetic before social media had even been conceptualized properly, let alone blown up. He put on display his best aspects and propagated a message that was perhaps not all that best for everyone. To top it all of, he was even living a fake life; he was a poorly construed doppelganger of his father’s employer’s son, a cornucopia of comical sounding names and identity theft.
Perhaps this was the true lesson of 3 idiots, to not fall prey for snake oil salesmen who peddle half truths and utopias which don’t exist. Don’t fall for the viral video makers who ask you to self terminate your employment to pursue your “passion”, don’t fall for hyper specific advice that may not apply to you and while not everyone can walk your shoes, don’t be in the company of those who refuse to acknowledge your differences of origin, let alone belittle or trivialize them.
Poverty of purse is palatable, poverty of principle is not.
And finally..
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”- It was sometime during October 2017 when I saw, live with my own eyes, a person studying for the CAT exam. It was in one of my classrooms in engineering college and the person in question was a vague acquaintance of mine. I had heard of this exam before and understood that people gave it to get into IIMs and other fancy institutions but I hadn’t seen an actual person solve quants in front of my eyes.
In a fit of regressive and puritanical thought, I silently questioned his rationality in attempting to do an MBA, especially right after engineering college. At the time, I felt that it was rather odd and wasteful to do a ‘business’ degree after years of slaving away in machines labs and soldering circuit boards. I felt happy with my core job that I had gotten placed in a few months later and felt that it was the ultimate fruition of my engineering degree.
I wish I could feed that 20 year old Sudarshan a knuckle sandwich now.
After four years of electrical engineering, two years of working in operations (littered with some random freelance writing) and one year of working as a content writer, I am now a year and knee deep into my MBA degree in marketing and will perhaps personally “engineer” stuff now.
It doesn’t matter if the herd is drawn towards an MBA or if society scorns those who desire to become tattoo artists; one’s decisions should be based on certain objective metrics (does this increase my income?, does this increase my employability?) laced with certain soul searchers(is the joy of the role worth the pay cut?). There’s no timing to it.
So sure, there’s no shame to Farhan becoming a photographer (but I still think he should have given his final exams), just like there was no shame in Suhaas (Kareena Kapoor’s fiancee, portrayed in the film as a clown) becoming an investment banker despite doing engineering.
Within your means, you can do whatever you want. Its that simple! With Rancho’s bank balance, you can do wine tasting in Italy every year; with mine, you can write arbitrary and nonsensical blogs to expunge your inner demons with a tinge of self deprecation to go along the way.
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Four former boys, now men, plied away at life in their own respective cubicles of existence, some still bullish on the paths they had earmarked for their efforts, some still meandering their way around their existential crises. They arose out of different circumstances and are crafting and living through different situations of their own, striving for perfection and self actualization. The metaphysical whereabouts of three I do not know, but one persists in gazing lazily though his 7th floor window at the cars with headlights that twinkle under the sparkle of constellations of apartment lights that litter the Mumbai skyline.
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