All India Rank: 12th Fail romanticised struggle, Varun Grover’s film is traumatised by it

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You’d be hard-pressed to find such moments of truth in stuff like 12th Fail, a movie whose lens was so far removed from its subject it may as well have been placed in a different state altogether; or Kota Factory, whose aimless anger was reflected in its lathi-coded language. “Phodna hai, crack karna hai,” the fan-favourite Jeetu Bhaiya would tell his students, as if he was sending them with hockey sticks to beat up members of a rival gang. All India Rank is a far more tender film, a much-needed alternative to the kind of entertainment that audiences have been endorsing in recent years.

Forget romanticising the struggle of the middle class, Grover seems to be actively processing his own past via his film. In several scenes, his perspective is indistinguishable from that of a trauma survivor. As a student in Kota, Vivek appears to be caught in the dichotomy of having his whole life ahead of him, and yet, feeling so trapped. It’s a complex situation, summed up succinctly by Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Like hockey in Chak De India, the coaching hub backdrop in All India Rank is entirely incidental. The movie is, above everything else, a coming-of-age drama. Vivek isn’t some kind of closet poet or a rambunctious student politician; his ultimate epiphany in the movie is realising that he is just another brick in the wall, ‘lakhon mein ek’.

Despite being set in a recognisable reality, neither 12th Fail nor Kota Factory bothered to question the system that normalises putting children through pain like this. Why is something as basic as a good education still so hard to find in our country? Why is it normal for thousands of kids to sacrifice their childhoods in the pursuit of their parents’ dreams, and still end up failing? Why is nobody harnessing their real talents, or even bothering to discover them? And how in the name of HC Verma is it acceptable for the entire country to collectively shrug at the news of nets and spring-coiled fans being installed in dorm rooms to make them ‘suicide-proof’? How depraved have we become that we don’t even bat an eyelid when a hostel owner tells the national news agency PTI that ‘it is bad for business’ when a kid hangs himself.

For most of this country’s population, turmoil isn’t an option, it is a certainty. And it’s irresponsible of films set in this world to not ask why. And it’s even more irresponsible of them to present this as some kind of trial by fire. Had 12th Fail been a fantasy about an elf overcoming trolls and other assorted magical creatures, there would be no reason to complain. But it isn’t, is it? All India Rank wants answers; from a system that has allowed the lives of children to be turned into a multi-billion dollar industry, from discontent men who view their offspring as insurance policies, and also from itself for even briefly buying into this myth.

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The movie is certainly wise enough to understand that there’s more to life than making (more) money (than you need). But it also makes an effort to explain why an entire generation of Indians thought that this is the only way to climb up the social ladder, to escape the class that one was born in and assimilate into another. Vivek’s father isn’t a bad man; he isn’t, for instance, like the dad in Udaan. But the fact that he — a representative of the generation that has voted right-wing governments into power, thereby dooming everybody’s future — has the capacity to change his mind is more inspirational than any romanticised rags-to-riches story can be.