An "Idiot"ic Thought?

So all of us saw ‘3 idiots’ and loved it! And I am no exception. If I enjoyed a movie, I don’t believe in sitting and trying to poke holes in it just for the sake of writing a review. It is after all a movie and not real life and there are bound to be creative liberties taken by the makers in the process of putting together something which enthrals millions of movie goers and behind which goes hell a lot of effort. A critic, on the other hand, has his job easy – watch the movie and tear it apart.
No. that would be quite harsh. And besides, all critics are not like that! That’s not the point of this post anyways.
It was heartening that one of the most important & concerning aspect of technical education in our engineering colleges was highlighted and articulated quite well in the movie. I consider myself lucky to be alumni of one such premier institute and even though I am proud of that fact, I have often felt that the way in which we were learning stuff there was not the best possible way. We used to cram up heat and mass transfer text books, vomit out whatever we learnt by rot in the answer paper and then forget about it. (I had cribbed about this in one of my earlier posts too). That message has been captured quite well in this movie and it helps in terms of reaching a larger audience when the same is an integral part of a super star’s movie.
But I felt that there was something else which bothered me about the movie. So here it is, trying to put that thought into words without really intending to “review” the movie.
It was another theme of the movie – the one on “Chasing your dreams”. On the silver screen, it looks good when the hero gets to follow his dream but the moot question here is, how many of us, at the age of 17 (when we are about to enter an engineering college) know what we really want to do in life? Do we have that much clarity at that age? And even if we have clarity, how many of us have the liberty and freedom to follow them? I might look stupid admitting this but if I had told my dad that I wanted to be an author and not an engineer after my class 12, he would have beat me with a cane to the engineering college door. (Ok..It was not that bad…but you get the point right?).
My view is that, at 17 years old, our idea of what we want to be in future is probably not the result of a well thought of and practical approach to life but considerably influenced by things like hero worship, peer pressure etc which often has a big role to play. It is the responsibility & prerogative of parents to guide us at that stage to equip ourselves with a basic degree which can then act as a backup plan in life if our dreams evade us and to that extent, R Madhavan’s (character’s) outburst of “I don’t want to do engineering …..because I know I won’t be a good engineer” did not cut slack with me. You get done with engineering and then pursue your passion but don’t say you are bad at engineering (and hence at clearing your exam papers) because your dream is something else. Doesn’t work in real life baby!
And again, on the other point of even if somebody is damn sure that his passion is X and not Y, how many can really afford to follow their passion in this country? I mean in the movie it was very convenient that Madhavan’s character who is from a fairly well to do middle class background wants to follow his passion of photography whereas Sharman Joshi’s character who is struggling hard to support his family is happy getting any job from the campus.
But what if it was the other way around? Would have been a tough (& probably implausible/impractical) situation if SJ’s character didn’t want to take up any job but instead wanted to take on photography?
Something worth thinking?