3 Idiots: Idiots in a box

MUMBAI: The year 2009 marked a major milestone in the history of Bollywood. Smashing box office records, one of the biggest releases of the year and the much talked flick—3 Idiots—turned out to be the highest-grossing Bollywood movie of all time.

The film caught the imagination of people across generations and continents, with their 3 Idiots: Aamir Khan, (Rancho), R Madhavan (Farhan) and Sharman Joshi (Raju), making you laugh, cry or at some exceptional scenes do both together; crooning to all-time hit Aal Izz Well; moving on in life with individualistic thought-process and rebellious attitude and inviting their engineering college principal’s anger.

Well, the excitement doesn’t seem to settle. For all the 3 Idiots fans, there’s a big surprise. The comedy film will now be published in a book that one can cherish all life. Titled 3 Idiots: The Original Screenplay, the book will have the minutest details of a script.

Starting from a detailed introduction of Rajkumar Hirani—his journey from a typist to a director with some exclusive and never-seen-before photographs from Hirani’s personal album and from the film, screenplay writer Abhijat Joshi talking about the ‘DNA’ of 3 Idiots and more... With this initiative, the producer of the movie Vidhu Vinod Chopra has converted his long cherished dream into a reality.

Says Chopra, “The idea of archiving has been my dream since my days at the FTII. As a film student, I could read about filmmakers from all over the world except for the ones belonging to my country. This bank of films will not only serve as a document for filmmakers but will also be made available to students and cinema lovers.”

Right now their priority is the legacy of old Hindi films that needs to be preserved and documented. As said by Rajkumar Hirani, “This book is not just the screenplay; it is also a peek into the minds of its makers.”

So if you really are a cinema buff then you can be part of the genesis of the various scenes, the different points of debate and the serendipitous manner in which the cast of the film came together.

Having published Lage Raho Munnabhai— The Original Screenplay last year and 3 Idiots this year, Mr Chopra plans to continue this tradition by releasing books of not just films made under his banner but also of timeless classics that his company will catalogue, compile and conceptualize.

Headed by author Anupama Chopra, the team of writers based in Mumbai, will target Hindi classics which will have rare pictures from the filmmakers or those associated with the films.

“We have spoken to Arun Dutt, (Guru Dutt’s son) and have started working on three films—Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam, Kaagaz Ke Phool and Chaudvi Ka Chand. All three are classics and need to be documented,” says Chopra.

Unlike the West, where it is extremely easy to get books featuring the screenplays of popular and not-so-popular films, in India, the trend is not too common. The idea of archiving the Indian cinema has not been carried out successfully. Shibani Bathija, the screenplay writer of My Name Is Khan applauds any move in support and thinks that, “We haven’t done nearly enough to archive Hindi films.

Over and above for cinema’s sake (which is imperative on its own) films are a reflection of a country’s cultural history and demonstrative of attitudes and ideas one can’t find in history books. The government has been charging heavy entertainment taxes for decades.

Where is that being used to benefit cinema? I’d love to see funding available for archivists to create a truly comprehensive collection of Indian cinema.” And so goes the saying, “Golden words are not repeated again”, but what if they can be treasured?