Super 30
Year: 2019
Director: Vikas Bahl
Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Mrunal Thakur, Nandish Sandhu, Virendra Saxena, Aditya Srivastava, Pankaj Tripathi

Super 30 was one of this year’s most anticipated films; a biopic on Anand Kumar, one of India’s most inspirational personalities. For the uninitiated, Anand Kumar happens to be a brilliant mathematician based in Patna, whose world-acclaimed educational program- ‘Super 30’ annually admits 30 talented, underprivileged students; offers them stay and food, and trains them to prepare for IIT entrance exam. More importantly, this entire program is offered totally free to these students.

So how does the fascinating subject translate on to silver screen?

What’s the plot?

Super 30 is a fictionalized account of Anand Kumar’s dramatic life-story. A son of a postman, he came from a modest family background. Winning the coveted Ramanujam medal in his college, he announced his mathematics prowess to the world. Impressed by his academic paper solving a difficult mathematical problem, a Cambridge professor invited Kumar to study in England but then his poverty came in the way. For a while, he even sold knickknacks on streets to make a living. A big coaching institute hired him as a teacher, where soon he made a big name amongst the students.

Now making good money, and doing well for himself and his family, he realized that poor talented students don’t have the means to get tutored for cracking these coveted exams. That realization made him switch his path. Super 30 program was born out of that. Of course, the established coaching institutes didn’t take his initiative kindly and used every trick in the book to close it down. How he fought these unscrupulous elements to make his dream into reality, giving wings to the aspirations of so many poor yet supremely talented students, that’s the core theme of Super 30.

Verdict

No doubt, both the subject and the storyline of Super 30 are inspirational; but Vikas Bahl’s direction leaves much to the desire. Hype and melodrama (and loud background music!) rule the treatment of almost every scene. The caricaturization of villains, overdramatization of class differences and a ludicrously unbelievable climax almost make you cringe at the ‘Masala’ reel treatment of a gritty real-life theme. A ‘darkened’ Hrithik plays the math-obsessed, idealistic central character but his performance too could have been helped by a bit of subtlety. As his love interest in the film, Mrunal Thakur makes good impression. The supporting cast is solid but as there is so much emphasis on glorifying Anand Kumar, the messiah, there is almost no exploration of the side-characters.

Super 30 not only does extoll the virtues of a courageous, innovative educationist taking on the system, it also exposes the dark underbelly of the thriving coaching class business, the decaying state of Indian higher education system and the immense pressure on the students trying to enter the sought-after professional colleges. It shows that given the right kind of opportunity and support, even the socioeconomically backward students will perform as well as their privileged peers. Ironically, while denouncing the ‘coaching class culture’, Super 30 may have further strengthened the notion that without targeted coaching it is not possible to crack the entrance exams!

It is a film that deserved a much better treatment!

Rating

2.5 stars