Open it up.

There have been few movies with a message as strong as the one in Bollywood flick 3 Idiots. Excellent thing to talk about in an out and out commercial movie : Education. A long neglected issue in India and by far the most important. In order to pull India out of it's fallacies, it needs it's people to grow out of their ignorance and finally grow by education. Can a movie such as 3 idiots bring about some change in the way indians perceive education?

There are really 2 major tasks here : One, to get the masses educated, to attend a school in the least. Two, educate every child such that he/she goes out there not just to find a means for his living but to find his passions and the courage to pursue them.

The general middle class in India, succeeds in the first task. But miserably fails in the second. Yes in spite of the lakhs of engineers and doctors that it produces, I think our education system has been a miserable failure. Because I am convinced that not all those one lakh minds (per year) really wanted to be engineers and doctors. They all didn't really have the same interests and aspirations. They anyway chose this path. There are several reasons why they would do so: lack of options; it's easy to join in the rat race; parental pressure;cowardice;monetary issues. Lack of inspiration and most importantly the lack of an open, free mind. Yes, because our education fails to create open, free minds.

i pity those who are unable to open it still. For i know that in spite of having enjoyed the 3 hours of 3 idiots there will be a father and a mother who would want their son to be an engineer and daughter to be a doctor, only. There will be many such idiots. No movie can change a generation of idiots. Or can it?

I say this because even after 70 odd years of Indian cinema portraying the idea that love has no barriers, i know of many real love stories seeing no such luck. We love love songs and romantic sagas on the screen but when they turn out to be true, our problems of social acceptance exist. In spite of knowing that love happens and there is nothing wrong with it, there are still people who stand to question it and sometimes kill it. Movies are a 3 hour miracle, where lovers meet and idiots follow their passion. Life is not.

But being an optimist, I think change can come by. We just have to break the mould. We have to act by example. We have to motivate those who have taken a step ahead and tell our elders that tradition is not always correct. We have to open up cluttered, narrowed minds. A movie, a message, a blog, a speech, a book .. any means of doing so is great.

The purpose of education should be to create minds which can think for themselves and act towards a better world. We kinda desperately need this sort of an education. Because 3 Idiots is good, but many idiots.. are not!