I saw 3 Idiots on the last day of 2009. It went down like ale on New Year’s Eve, all fun and hangover later. The film was a text book on how to connect to the urban audience; it was a Viru Sahastrabudhe at that. Director Rajkumar Hirani can wait 25 years to hand over his astronaut’s pen to a worthy successor. But he won’t make the cut as an ‘idiot’ in Bollywood because he lacks the appetite to challenge tradition.

Take Chatur Ramalingam. This modern-day version of Bollywood’s Madrasi, brought alive by a talented Omi Vaidya, is an invitation to relapse to stereotypes. Forget whether such characters track audience tastes or audience tastes track characters, stereotyping is the resort of easy film making.

In contrast, when Venkatraman Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry, it interested India for several days on television and provoked essays on his community in the print media. Good or bad, at the very least it points to an engaging subject to investigate.

Three months later, 3 Idiots resurrects the Madrasi, now talking English and come via Uganda but as selfish and pusillanimous as the original. What amazes is that this is long after Bollywood itself showed how stereotyping can be avoided without losing character. Remember Mohanlal as the police commissioner in Company? Or for that matter, did Madhavan do a poor job as Farhan Qureshi?

The sum and substance of 3 Idiots is beyond my grasp. You spare time to profile Raju Rastogi, Farhan Qureshi and Pia; then leave Rancho, Chatur and Viru Sahastrabudhe unexplained. If this lip service to characterisation was done for a convenient, bankable story, then why hype 3 Idiots as a film on our educational system? Where is the curiosity to know?

All the attention on 3 Idiots is despite it being just another Bollywood film, decades late in tackling the subject of its choice. Many years ago, as a student, I remember seeing Aamir Khan in Ketan Mehta’s Holi. Those were the days of strikes and violent ragging; it was wonderful to see a film on campus life. In 1984, some of today’s young filmgoers were toddlers, majority were probably not born. Chetan Bhagat, currently feuding with the 3 Idiots team over inadequate credit for Five Point Someone, was 10 years old. Most importantly, it was seven years before impending international default forced a rethink on Indian economic policy leading to liberalisation.

Holi wasn’t and will never be 3 Idiots because it was made at a time when youth wasn’t profitable, fashionable audience and multiplexes were absent. What can’t be denied though is that Holi was a Rancho in Bollywood while 3 Idiots is a Chatur. One ran ahead of the times, the other waited for the time-tested Bollywood formula to catch up with the changed times.

In the duration it took mainstream cinema to question education on the big screen, a couple of hundred people would have done a Raju Rastogi with no Rancho, Farhan or Pia to save them. They never magically spoke again, they died. And unlike young Lobo, they had no Bollywood to showcase their plight, no indigenous anthem to sing. If any of them were consummate followers of music and films, they would have tracked Hollywood and sung Pink Floyd, for individuality was and still is abhorrent to us.

For those who paid in real life for being different, 3 Idiots is not relief, it is another milestone in the folly of trusting mainstream. You can sit in the theatre and watch your erstwhile pains transform to consumable pills that the audience then swallows to laugh and whistle. Ragging becomes undergarments flashed dime a dozen, courting the principal’s daughter becomes commonplace, piddling on his front door is easily forgiven and you can confess all that to the interview board to secure your first job.

Has the world changed so drastically or is it that Indian trait of pardoning everything in the joy of one more child born to our billion-plus population? I don’t know.

All I had was a question — how can you portray a fringe concern in the mainstream; that too one about dissent, without making it dumb for popular consumption? Dig deeper and you suspect the deficiency is because Bollywood doesn’t understand dissent any more. It delivers well what the market wants and I saw proof of it the very next day while waiting at Mumbai’s Metro cinema to see Avatar — a whole family happily humming Lobo’s dirge.