‘Kucchh soche ho? Aage ka kya plan hai?’ This question, posed to a clueless school-leaving 17-year-old, can be the most petrifying of all: what if you have no idea about what you want to do?
Varun Grover’s debut feature is a deftly-drawn, affectionate portrait of a young man, an only child, who is being blown along by the force of his father’s dreams, and that is to see his beloved ‘beta Vivek’ (Sharma) cracking the toughest exam in the world, the JEE. At least it used to be, back in the 90s.
And that’s the other thing we see in ‘All India Rank’, a nostalgia-doused picture of the India of 1997, buffeted by the waves of liberalisation, with the license-raj India fading slowly from view. Grover harks back to that India, where telephone-and-gas connections used to take years, and where the journey of the average Indian would be from ‘gaon’ to ‘kasba’, and in a few instances, the ‘shehar’: once Manmohan Singh waved his magic wand, aspirations soared.
So RK Singh (Bhushan), who has a middling sarkaari naukri, and lives a middling life with his ‘meetha’-loving diabetic wife, wants his son to get into IIT, whatever it takes — biscuits ‘se gur-chana tak’, breaking the proverbial FDs — to get into expensive coaching institutes in Kota, the mecca of all potential IITians, where Bundela Madam (Chaddha) will swoop upon a classful of hopefuls, flinging her chalk pieces to wake up sleeping students, and make them fit to enter the entrance exam which will allow them to get out of their ‘nasudda’ lives. Evocative word: it, and the others which come out of this milieu, gives the film its very specific vibe.
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I know a few youngsters who did this without going the coaching route, but for a majority of Indians, these cramming sweatshops is the only way in. So Vivek, armed with a plastic bucket, a ‘jadhoo’, ‘mummy ke banaaye laddoo’, and wavering will, arrives in his dismal Kota hostel. Here he meets hundreds of students like him, who have always been first in their class, and are now one among thousands of similarly intelligent compatriots. Some who genuinely want to be first-class engineers who will be hired by high-paying companies from all over the world, but many who are here only to please their parents. This film could easily also have been called ‘Papa Ka Sapna’.
The coveted All India Rank, which determines which IIT (and which course) you will get, is what gives the film its title. Grover keeps it scrappy and real, even though he can’t resist the hostel-mein-gaana sequence (remember the same kind of thing in ‘3 Idiots,’ but here you hear only the instruments that students can use). What is nice is the way the young people are crafted: the whip-smart Sarika (Sudiksha) brighter than most of the boys in the class, and oblivious that Vivek is in hers (achcha tum bhi 3 A mein ho?) is a physics nerd. You know that she will not have any difficulty in getting where she wants to, Rinku (Pandey) will play the guitar he’s bought from the money meant for something else, and Chandan (Neeraj) is the kind of guy who will pretend he doesn’t study but secretly is preparing like mad. We’ve all known people like him.
In some places, the 90s thing becomes a bit relentless: the cassette-and-pencil unspooling, the Shaktimaan reference, the Doordarshan new year programmes, the PCOs and the STD calls, the giving of toffees in lieu of change. It’s almost as if Grover wants to stuff in everything he may have encountered, and he clearly has done this with insider knowledge: the film’s strength comes from its lived-in feeling of both place and time.
The other thing which jars a little is the near-cursory way in which a tragedy unfolds, coming and going without leaving too much impact. Maybe it was the pressure to keep everything positive and upbeat: it does help that all the actors look exactly how they should, not people dressing down and browning their faces to look as if they come from the middle classes. Kya iss varg ke bachche gorey nahin hotey?
The adult support is sound: both Agarwal and Bhushan as mummy and papa are endearing. The brief sketch of the office-office stuff surrounding Singh is again spot on, showing the viciousness and small-mindedness and frustrations of small-town India without turning anything putrid. I did wish that Bundela Madam would have been seen outside of class, though: she should have been given more to do.
Overall, I liked that ‘All India Rank’ stays resolutely in minor key, and the fact that it resists dramatisation, even if that invites occasional blandness — life is not hee-hee-ha-ha all the time. It is a choice you can make only when your film is blissfully star-mukt. The kids, who all look ordinary in just the right way, are all right. My favourite has to be the duplicitous Chandan played by Neeraj, as well as the young man who calls the BSc course he has joined a ‘kala naag’. ‘All India Rank’ may tread familiar coming-of-age territory, coming as it does after ‘12th Fail’, but it is very much its own film.
All India Rank movie cast: Bodhisattva Sharma, Samta Sudiksha, Sheeba Chaddha, Geeta Agarwal, Shashi Bhushan, Neeraj, Ayush Pandey, Sadaat Khan, Abhay Joshi
All India Rank movie director: Varun Grover
All India Rank movie rating: 3 stars
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