As the exam season ebbs and the results season rolls in, newspapers fill up with stories of how girls have fared better than boys and Twitter timelines are replete with jokes about kids who get 99.6 per cent (“ Itne marks mein toh gareeb ke teen bachche pass ho sakte hain”… har har !). Oh yes, magazines and weekly supplements start carrying profiles of successful (*T&C apply) people who reveal their disastrous scores in the Board examinations.
If we have to look for heroes with dubious academic records, we have to look no further than Bollywood. A large majority of them have happily screamed “ Maa, main pass ho gaya ” before wolfing down the celebratory gajar ka halwa without ever disclosing their percentage or even the course they studied. But then, you could argue that their subsequent travails — losing a job to nepotism or losing a girl to affluence — were not linked to their marks anyway.
The trajectory of the Hindi film hero’s tryst with academics has been an interesting one and can be educational in itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, the hero was a perfectly rounded individual — every placement committee’s wet dream — winning accolades in studies and extra-currics alike. For example, Rajesh Khanna in Aap Ki Kasam is a top student in the final year of MSc, who plays cricket, football and hockey with aplomb. He delivers heart-tugging lines about how his education will get him a job and help him break out of the poverty he has been shackled in.
“ Badi degree… achhi naukri… ” were part of the working class hero’s ambitions well into the 1980s as bespectacled heroes got selected for jobs on the back of their academic prowess. In Chashme Buddoor , Farooque Shaikh has a gold medal in addition to his first class degree (in Economics) and is planning to get a PhD before trying to get a job that would also get him the girl of his dreams. Interestingly, his wastrel roommate (Ravi Baswani) wears a Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) jacket but betrays none of the academic prowess the college is known for.
This changed radically in the 1990s. Protagonists became richer, plots more escapist. Academics weren’t anyone’s priority and the 1990s heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan became a superstar when he spectacularly failed in an exclusive private school of England. The film was the runaway hit, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayege (DDLJ) . Instead of dying of a heart attack, Raj (SRK)’s father played by Anupam Kher celebrates the son’s failure with champagne and assures him that marks weren’t about to get him anywhere in his life, especially the family business he was about to join.
The most enduring films of the 1990s had college-going protagonists who seemed to graduate without any visible effort and then promptly joined the thriving family business or some other non-academic profession.
Aamir Khan’s films through the period (late 80s to early 2000s) — Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak , Dil , Afsana Pyar Ka , Parampara , Dil Chahta Hai — were all about him passing through college desultorily and even when some mention of his graduation was made (“ Papa kehte hai ” in QSQT , “ Koi kahe kehta rahe ” in DCH ), none of it was actually used later on.
This changed further in the late 2000s. The hero of Wake Up Sid fails his B. Com exams and becomes angry instead of repentant. The situation is exactly similar to DDLJ — a hero who fails his exams, confronted by his businessman father (even played by the same actor) — but this time, the hero refused to be bogged down by his results and did not join the family business. He would follow his passion, he declares, and walks out to become a photography intern in a culture/lifestyle magazine.
Chasing excellence
Later that year, another hero graduated in engineering with flying colours but refused to join the rat race of degrees, jobs and success. Aamir Khan of 3 Idiots was the maverick inventor, who studied engineering not because Sharmaji’s son did so but because he was genuinely passionate about the subject. The engineering genius’ 400 patents in the 2000s were as unreal as Jeetendra’s ‘first class first’ degrees in 1980s, but the rationale behind academics had changed. The Bollywood hero was chasing success earlier. He is chasing excellence now.
Diptakirti Chaudhuri is a Bollywood buff and the author of the recently released ‘Written By Salim-Javed: The Story Of Hindi Cinema’s Greatest Screenwriters’
