Before I reveal who the real idiots in this 3 Idiots saga are, let me tell you that it is the beautiful character of Chatur who saves the film from becoming a pompous, pedantic, and pontificating bore. The film is overburdened with the genius and flawless hero, the personification of perfection, Aamir Khan, who delivers solid transformational messages whenever he opens his mouth to utter words of Godly wisdom, or to crack a smart-aleck joke about the much vilified ‘system’.

Watch out Aamir, you have started to look and sound like the senior pontiff and the celluloid pedagogue Robbin Williams in most of your films and public appearances.

Raju Hirani sticks to his ancient forte as a spoofer instead of venturing out of his comfort zone. He again delivers an entertaining film of his favourite genre in his trademark style, following his Munnabhai MBBS formula to the hilt like a stuck record. He even borrows themes and character sketches in entirety from his debut masterpiece.

The fault lines are beginning to appear anyway. Its screenplay is obviously laborious, contrived, and implausible. Its acerbic smart-ass humour tends to annoy in places. The camaraderie among the three protagonists lacks chemistry, with too obvious an emphasis on its superhero, which reduces the other two to convenient props. You don’t find the Munnabhai-Circuit kind of pristine, innocent, and touching relationship and bonding here.

Hirani has another problem and its source lies in his being a film editor. He wants every frame of the film to evoke a loud audience response. In order to achieve that end, he crams up the narrative with smart jokes and gags, clever pieces of dialogue, pranks, dramatic or melodramatic events, and unexpected twists in the tale. His effort and anxiety is a bit too evident in 3 Idiots, which compromises the cinematic integrity of the film and almost turns it into a laughter show. And the entire Kareena-Aamir track is hogwash, including the crappy and fake ‘bachha delivery’ sequence, and force-fitted into the main narrative.

The film has one track that is truly inspired and brilliant, and it works the best - the fart-master Chatur’s track. The flawless performance by the actor who plays Chatur’s role, named as Omi in Nikhat Kazmi’s glowing review of the film, deserves a resounding khullamkhulla applause and standing ovation. He plays an Ugandan Indian student, who speaks broken Hindi and keeps referring to his English Hindi pocket dictionary to express himself in the local lingo. He is one of those studious ambitious types with an intense competitive spirit bordering on stupidity. He sucks up to the establishment to belong to it.

He refers to ‘passing urine’ as ‘mootr visarjan’ after consulting his pocket dictionary when chided by his seniors for speaking in English during a ragging session. He eats a lot of ‘chooran’ to keep his digestive process going, and is a perpetual farter who blames others for his smelly exhaust fumes. He is the perfect foil to the 3 smart-ass pranksters since the Director of the Imperial College of Engineering, Mr. Viru Sahastrbuddhe (Bomman Iraani) a.k.a Virus, is not a credible character; his rock solid and wholly unreasonable hardheartedness is too bizarre and mean-spirited to be passed off as idiosyncratic and quirky behaviour.

Chatur is the ‘sutradhaar’ of the film. The film actually begins with him calling up Sharman and Madhavan after five long years of their passing out of the institute, asking them to meet him atop the institute’s water tank since he has information about the whereabouts of their missing friend, Aamir. The rest of the story is revealed thereafter in bits and pieces through flashbacks. It is as much the story of the three central protagonists as that of Chatur, who was once mortified in front of the entire institute by Aamir by way of a prank. He had challenged Aamir to meet him after five years to compare where they both stood in life.

Chatur is Hirani’s trump card, the joker in the pack, and the surprise element. The actor provides the audience some genuine mirthful moments with his perfect portrayal. In a dramatic scene where a drunk Chatur throws a challenge to Aamir, with tears of anger, shame, and extreme frustration rolling out of his bulging and burning eyes, he has the audience on his side. That also turns out to be the best-performed scene of the film. It is he who comes across as an idiot, a simpleton, a geek, and a regular butt of jokes and pranks played by his fun-loving smart-ass classmates. He steals the thunder from right under the nose of the better-known thespians in the cast.

The main story begins with three young men joining a prestigious engineering college that is governed by a quirky, madcap, stupid idiot, extremely vengeful, vainglorious and chutiapatic institute director brought down from some strange planet or excavated from Harrapa by Raju Hirani and his co-writers. The SOB harasses his genius students to death for their supposedly brilliant expositions and unique approach to learning and blackmails them into submitting to his supposedly archaic teaching regime. A genius of a student Ranchod Das Chachad a.k.a Rancho (Aamir Khan) arrives on the scene to reform the tormenting Virus by bugging and fingering him. He bonds well with two other students Farhan and Raju. The trio succeeds in reforming Virus and sends the message out that the education and examination system stinks and it needs serious reforms because it cares a bit too much for grades etc. and fails to recognise the true potential of students. The super idiotic Virus is the symbol of such supposedly rotten education by rote.

He is reformed after 3 geniuses help his pregnant daughter deliver a baby using their big invention, an INVERTER, to generate electricity, to operate a vacuum cleaner, which is retrofitted with a handheld suction device generally used to clean choked up shit pots and sinks. The apparatus is used to suck the stuck baby out of the womb of Virus’s elder daughter Jassi. Before his reformation, Virus inspires a suicide and an attempted suicide, the two glaring, jarring, and ghastly notes in an otherwise feel good run-of-the-mill comedy film. Rancho tops the final exams, and after having accomplished his ‘Bawarchi’ act, leaves by taxi to disappear for the next five years right in front of his friends’ eyes. They meet again after five years thanks to Chatur’s single-minded mission to prove Rancho wrong. The film ends with Kareena trying to force a smooch act on a non-committal and severely embarrassed Aamir, who is not actually a ‘Chhajad’ but a ‘Bangadu’ who owns five hundred patents of brand new inventions, and runs a school in the hills of Laddakh.

The familiar snippets of college life, comic bantering, non-stop parodying and spoofery, and blatant playing to the gallery kind of stuff in the first half of the film is quite overwhelming and effectively covers up for the implausibility of the film’s monochromatic characterisations and the ‘make-believe’ nature of the plot. What follows thereafter is trite and contrived, with predictable dramatic events. You can clearly make out the layout and the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle by now. Virus will be won over, Kareena will unite with Aamir, Sharman will pass out and get a job, Madhavan will become an ace photographer, and Aamir will do better in life than Chatur to prove his point. The wise should know that just as Munnabhai MBBS had nothing to do with medical education, 3 Idiots has nothing to do with purported and reported engineering education or educational reforms.

I am not able to ingest and digest the description of Rancho as a non-conformist student by some reviewers. If he is a non-conformist, how come he tops the class? That means the existing examination system recognises his genius and he fits into the scheme of the establishment very well. Hundreds of students who join the IIMs and IITs every year actually affirm their conformist agenda. They are ready to be cogs in a wheel because the wheel needs the cogs to stay functional and compensates them handsomely for the effort.

A non-conformist is generally a school and college drop-out. Making an inverter and a remote-operated model airplane is hardly non-conformism. As soon as you intend to achieve something in life, you conform.

Do you know who are the real non-conformists of today?

Probably a farmer, who refuses to sell his land even if he gets a lucrative offer and goes about tilling it with his pair of bullocks and locally available outdated equipment, and then loses his entire crop in a drought. He spurns the overtures of marketers and tries to live and die within his own means.

A tribal is a non-conformist. He refuses to accept the standards of excellence, productivity, rewards, and yardsticks of happiness prescribed by the so-called civilised and educated people bent upon reforming him.

One of the biggest non-conformists in our society is a full-time housewife and a mother who is repeatedly bombarded with the message to conform to the new standards of a modern woman and yet finds her happiness in taking care of her family. When Kareena Kapoor or Katrina Kaif or Deepika Padukone decide to settle for the life of housewives and mothers now, at the peak of their careers, they can be considered non-conformists.

The day you totally reject the idea of ‘success’, you are reborn as a true non-conformist. When an IIM graduate retires to his ancestral village to carry on his conventional farming, he will be considered a non-conformist because he embraces failure. He is out of the rat race.

Driven by your inner urge you may become a photographer, a doctor, a filmmaker, a model, an engineer, an inventor, an explorer, a film reviewer, a politician, or an executive in an MNC, but you are still part of the rat race, because the idea to achieve and prove your worth reigns supreme in your head.

He is a non-conformist and a rebel who provides the open source code of his path-breaking computer programme to the whole wide world for free and then retires to Ranikhet.

A sanyasi is a non-conformist. He reduces his dependence on society to the extent that it cannot demand conformity from him. A naga sadhu and an itinerant beggar are other prime examples of non-conformism. In India the non-conformists are respected and looked up to.

A non-conformist chooses failure as his destiny. A genius eager to reform the system cannot be a non-conformist. Someone has to fail for others to pass.

A non-conformist does not give a damn to the idea of self-actualisation. He exists beyond Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Aamir Khan playing Chatur’s role would have been a non-conformist thing to do. If he agrees to do the role of a castrated Casanova in my under development classic film he will be a ‘baap’ level non-conformist.

Now let me tell you who the real idiots in this story are. Raju Hirani, Vinod Chopra, and Aamir Khan are not the idiots in spite of their tall repeated claims to the contrary.

The real idiots are those who go and watch 3 Idiots after paying inflated ticket prices to laugh at:

1. …Chatur’s ‘balatakar speech’,

2. …the repeated display of fat well-fed bare male bums,

3. …the re-enactments of snippets and anecdotes from hostel and college life,

4. …the mocking of parents and teachers, and

5. …sundry skits and gags and hackneyed ragging scenes in the film.

There are millions of such idiots and as long as they exist, Indian cinema will continue to thrive in its present form.