Opinion Varun Grover’s ‘All India Rank’: The quiet joy of life beyond exams, of nothing happening
The movie conveys a simple message — in adulthood, no one has the answers. And they certainly can’t be contained in the limiting space of exam prep
All India Rank is set in an IIT-coaching centre town, where young students from all over the country move for study, but its interest seems to be in capturing what it meant to live through the immediate years post-liberalisation. 
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At some point in the middle of Varun Grover’s All India Rank, in a class being taught by her, Bundela madam — luminously played by Sheeba Chaddha — asks students a question. Bundela runs an IIT coaching centre in Kota and she is teaching a class of aspirants. A student in her class, Sarika, answers her. When asked to explain further, she is eager to come up to the teacher’s desk. Bundela looks on as Sarika earnestly demonstrates her point with the help of the blackboard duster, making theoretical ideas come alive. What is your favourite subject, she later asks her. Physics, Sarika replies. Bundela, who probably enjoys what she teaches as much as Sarika does, says it’s obvious.
This is a remarkable scene, but much like everything else in the film, its joys are quiet and almost internal. Even in the middle of preparing for a competitive exam, Sarika (Samta Sudiksha) has nurtured a love for ideas, and has a genuine fascination for the subject. She has protected herself from the outside world. She has understood the possibility of education beyond exams and ranks. Eventually, when Vivek (Bodhisattva Sharma), the film’s main protagonist and fellow student at the same coaching centre becomes friends with her, he discovers a whole new world in her hostel room.
All India Rank is set in an IIT-coaching centre town, where young students from all over the country move for study, but its interest seems to be in capturing what it meant to live through the immediate years post-liberalisation. The IIT rank is not Vivek’s dream — it is his father’s desire of reaching for more. In fact, back home in Lucknow, the parents too are growing up, and growing along with the times. Sex, for instance, once viewed as something dirty that is to be hidden, is now slowly coming out in the open — it has reached the telephone diary from the bedroom. Theirs is a repressed world where it can only be a perversion. Actors Geeta Agrawal Sharma and Shashi Bhushan play vulnerable parents beautifully.
There are multiple references to the ’90s that help the film locate its times (I liked spotting Flop Show, the Rangeela soundtrack and Brainvita). But more than the literal references, there is also the mood of that time, and the film’s own mood, far removed from contemporary big-city irony, closely reflects it. There is something gentle and unfinished about the film, and it struck me while watching it how so many of our experiences of the ’90s are similar. There are also hints that the seeds of the type of nationalism that eventually grew sinister were already present — whether in the sub-plot where reverence towards the national flag is used as an excuse to bully or in the officially perpetuated distance between Sanskritised Hindi and Urdu. The film’s own title appears in both Hindi and Urdu script.
In her own way, Sarika already knew what Vivek’s father only belatedly realises — life is too vast to fit into the limiting imagination of exam results and success stories. The ending of the film echoes this feeling. Vivek finds something to value in the process of proving the equation itself, even if it is an exam question that he is answering. He discovers the adult truth — that no one has any answers — and the only thing you do have control over is your actions in the moment. As I walked out of the theatre, a group of the audience seemed unsatisfied. Some kept sitting there wanting to know more. “Kuch hua nahi” (nothing happened), one of them said. That is precisely the beauty of this film.
The writer is a film scholar and critic based in Delhi
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