Ritvik's Blog

Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, M. S. Dhoni: An Untold Story, Padman, Dangal, Sanju……… Wait, what? A bewda , a tharki, a drug addict. Sanjay Dutt is far from what the quintessential biopic material is like. Then why is Raju Hirani, arguably the best director we’ve seen in recent times, doing a biopic on him? I mean, have we run out of inspirational stories to start making biopics on people who helped terrorists? Right? Here’s the problem we all have with Sanju- We want all our idols to be ideals- people who have fought against the odds, wrestled against the rules of the society, so on and so forth to achieve success. We don’t want to watch a movie about a person who commits mistake after mistake and ends up in Yerwada Central Jail, convicted of illegal possession of an AK-56 rifle which was smuggled into India before terrorist attacks. But I still want to watch it. Why? Because I want to watch his ability to navigate his ship through the ups and downs. There would be very few peo...

“Getting a job is a dive. You can have a magnificent one. But you are in a swimming competition, not a diving competition.” I heard this somewhere a long time ago and it has become one of the many one-liners which I keep mentioning in my ‘deep-shit’ talks. But as I navigate my way through the peaks and troughs of engineering life, I realise more and more what our “education factories” have turned us into. Churned out in batches of thousands, we are expected to have the same knowledge, same skills, and the same strengths. At this juncture, it is rather easy and common to blame the institutes, the professors, and most importantly the ‘system’. But if you think about it, why wouldn’t they turn into factories? After all, they are delivering what is expected from them. After investing lakhs of Rupees and four years of one’s life, what is the minimum output every student expects? A job! That is what our education institutes seem to have reduced to, mere recruitment agencies, dancin...