3 Idiots, and Why I Disliked It

...or at any rate, failed to love it.

I'm aware that I am one of the very few people who isn't raving about the film "3 Idiots" -- a film about the lives of three average students in a 'top-notch' engineering college. Yes, it did make me laugh. And there definitely were a number of things about it which were commendable.

Nonetheless, there were a number of reasons why I wasn’t comfortable with the film. To begin with, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the title “3 Idiots” simply given the baggage which the word “Idiot” carries with it. (Disclosure, yes, I do use the word myself but it’s a habit of which I’m attempting to disabuse myself.

The word “Idiot”, as FWD/Forward put it, 'is derived from Latin and Greek roots; it originally referred to persons who did not participate in civic activities or to “ordinary persons”, then to unskilled labourers, and eventually to people who were ignorant or who lacked education. It seems to have made its first appearance in English around 1300, in reference to people who lacked reasoning skills and were poorly, if at all, educated. By the 1800s, being an Idiot had turned into a diagnosis of mental inferiority – the hierarchy being imbeciles, morons and, the lowest of the low, idiots. And, not surprisingly, the term made its way into law: Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “Three generations of idiots is enough,” when defending the forcible sterilization of Carrie Buck in Buck v. Bell in 1927. The California penal code was finally amended to remove the word “Idiot” from the law books only in 2007,' and in India, the term is still used at law.

Given that history, it’s not one of my favourite words.

One of the primary things in the film which I disliked was the speech where a student’s speech in a language he didn’t know so that, unbeknownst to him, instead of talking about the achievements of the head of the educational institution, he wound up talking about rape. After that, the students obviously joked about the incident. And, somehow, I didn’t find it funny – I’m entirely unconvinced that the word “rape” should ever be used to describe anything other than, well, rape itself. Even leaving aside all other arguments, one (hopefully) would not walk up to a survivor of torture saying that an exam was torture. Given the sheer number of women who are raped, I do not believe that “rape” should ever be used in a context unrelated to rape in a public forum. It isn’t a word which exists to be appropriated whether for the purpose of analogy, or metaphor, or anything else; it exists in itself. And it profoundly affects the lives of many people.

However, what really put me off was the fact that although the film was very funny in many places, it didn’t treat a serious subject in a humorous manner, or simply be funny while dealing with light-hearted subjects. What the film did was keep oscillating rather wildly between the two extremes of deeply upsetting subjects and extremely funny scenes. And I’m one of those people who, if watching a comedy, would just like to be able to watch without having the comedy interrupted by tragedy such as a student killing himself effectively because of autocratic megalomaniac who was acting as an educator-administrator in the educational institute where the student was studying.

I acknowledge that the lack of accountability by educators in such circumstances, and the other issues which the film highlighted, are issues which should be addressed. And perhaps a film filled with hilarious scenes is a good medium through which to address the issue. For me though, the oscillation between the hilarious and the sad was emotionally draining. And by the time I finished watching the film, despite its feel-good ending and despite the fact that I’d laughed a lot, I also simply felt sad.