BOOKISH

• Both the book and the film are about three students — who go on to become best friends — of an engineering college. Five Point Someone (FPS) calls it IIT, 3 Idiots (3I) calls it Imperial College of Engineering.
  
  
• The first time the three characters come together is when they are being ragged by seniors. The nature of ragging is slightly different, however.
  
  
• There are clear parallels with all the three characters. Ryan is Rancho (Aamir), Hari is Farhan (Madhavan) and Alok is Raju (Sharman). Like in the book, where Hari is the narrator, Farhan’s voiceover stitches the film together.
  
  
• The background of Raju is almost ditto the book. They are a poor family, where the father is physically challenged, the mother does all the work and the sister is of marriageable age with her prospective in-laws asking for a Maruti car as dowry.
  
  
• In the book there is the strict professor called Cherian who becomes Virus (Boman) in the film. And in both cases, his son commits suicide because of the kind of pressure he exerts on him to perform. It is the same professor’s daughter that one of the boys falls in love with.
  
  
• The question paper stealing scene is a big plot point for the book and the film.
  
  
• Like in the book, the students are asked to define “machine” in one of the scenes elucidating the redundancy of bookish definitions.
  
  
• The main theme of both the book and the film is the failure of India’s education system; ranks and grades are futile exercises.

FILMI

• The film doesn’t end with college life. It has this separate track about two friends trying to track down the third friend.
  
  
• Unlike the book, where all three students were struggling in their studies, Rancho is a class topper. We also find out later that Rancho is an impostor and he has been studying on behalf of someone else. That is, of course, an original twist from Hirani and co-writer Abhijat Joshi.
  
  
• Farhan, the narrator, doesn’t fall in love with the professor’s daughter. It is Rancho, the Ryan of the book, who does. After all, Aamir has to romance Kareena.
  
  
• Alok jumps off the balcony because he is caught stealing the question papers. Raju attempts suicide because he is rusticated from college by Virus.
  
  
• Farhan’s desire to be a wildlife photographer is an original idea. And so, all scenes explaining that desire are not there in the book.
  
  
• The concept of Phunsukh Wangdu and his unique school, where original thinking and not mugging-up books is encouraged, is only in the film.
  
  
• With Rancho not around, Pia is set to marry another guy called Suhas. The character of Suhas is not there in the book and the whole scene of Raju and Farhan stealing Pia from her wedding is fully filmi.

Five point someone writer Chetan Bhagat says that the story cannot be credited — that too in the bolder and bigger opening credits — to someone else (rajkumar Hirani and Abhijat joshi), given the fact that there are more similarities with the book than he was told.

3 Idiots producer vidhu vinod chopra, director rajkumar hirani and star aamir khan insist that they have done no wrong by honouring the contract and giving due credit to author chetan bhagat at the end of the film in the closing credits.