The swipe taken by ‘3 Idiots’ at dimwitted educational systems rings true because the film’s acclaimed scriptwriter, Abhijat Joshi, an unabashedly proud Amdavadi, has tapped his personal bewilderment from his student days in Gujarat.
“In standard XII, we had to memorise ‘Parshwapaschakapali Purahkaranasthi’, all for two marks!” Joshi told DNA. “That is the technical name of the longest bone in a frog’s skull. That question provoked several thoughts: Why can’t we make education more interesting and simple? Why do students needto mug up?” Years later, Joshi asked the same questions in ‘3 Idiots’, touching a chord among millions of Indians across the country and
the world.
“My views on education are exactly those that are projected in the film,” he said. “I believe students should be happy in classrooms rather than be stressed out. They should experience joy of learning something new.”
The students of English at the Otterbein College, Ohio (in north-central America) benefit from the ideals that Joshi has set for gurus; he teaches screenplay writing and playwriting at Otterbein.
In his screenwriter avatar, Joshi has recently finished ‘Broken Horses’, the forthcoming Vidhu Vinod Chopra film, and has shrugged off the controversy over the authorship of ‘3 Idiots’, stoked by the comments of Chetan Bhagat.
“I must stress that the screenplay of ‘3 Idiots’ runs into 170 pages but 160 of those pages have nothing to do with the book,” Joshi said. “The remaining 10 pages are adapted from the book, for which Bhagat got royalty and credit.”
Joshi said he had worked for two years on ‘Lage Raho Munnabhai’ and one-and-a-half years for ‘Broken Horses’. “But I gave three long years to ‘3 Idiots’,” Joshi said.
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