Coach For India:
Two seasons of the Netflix series Kota Factory exposed the education racket in the Rajasthan town, which, from a modest doria sari weaving centre has grown to become the coaching destination for students hoping to ace the common entrance test for admission into engineering or medical courses. They flock to Kota, after looking at the success of IIT alumni heading major international companies, and stories of campus placements with seven-figure salaries. The elite engineering institutes have become the go-to higher education destinations for ambitious parents, if not their children.
There was nothing new to add to the the avarice of coaching classes, atrocity of parents and vulnerability of students, so the new Amazon Prime series Crash Course, directed by actor-writer Vijay Maurya, from a script by Manish Hariprasad and Raina Roy, treads familiar ground. The peppy title track and dance number is actually in variance with what follows in the episodes.
The man who personifies the greed and drive of Kota is Ratanraj Jindal (Annu Kapoor), who has risen from poverty to set up the top coaching institute, but dreams of running his competitors out of business and renaming the town after himself. The main rival is the old-school teacher Arvind Batra (Siddharth Kak), who started coaching as a mission and is alarmed at the venality of his sons Shashank (Bhanu Uday) and Mayank (Chirag Vohra). There is poaching of students and teachers between the two institutes, and other underhand ways of winning the rankings war. Both of them use a fixer, Binny Agarwal (Udit Arora), who makes a commission from whoever pays.
Jindal is acutely aware that less than one percent of students who appear for IIT entrance exams get selected, so the competition is fierce. Middle-class parents take loans and mortgage their homes to send their sons—and a few daughters—to the swotting camps of Kota. Failure could doom families, which leads to kids living in, what a character calls a “pressure cooker” atmosphere, heading for an explosion. Jindal wants the top-ranking students to be from his institute, even if it means locking the kids into their hostels and supplying them with concentration-enhancing drugs.
When a show is about teenagers, certain stereotyped characters (the class clown, the scholar, jock, weakling, gang leader, hot girl, etc.) and tropes are inevitable—romance, sexual awakening, crush on teachers, jealousy, rebellion, depression and in extreme cases, suicide. They are all mechanically ticked, without any additions, or even an attempt at a fresh treatment.
Jeetu Bhaiya, the popular teacher of Kota Factory is turned to AK Sir (Pranay Pachauri) in Crash Course, who makes physics fun, while other teachers push rote-learning. Still, while it stays on the students and the warring institute heads, there is some substance the series, but to pad the 10 episodes, there are characters who serve no useful purpose—like the canteen owner (Bidita Bag), the lady friend (Vasuki Punj) of a married teacher, or the dopehead Mayank.
Among the crowd of kids, Vidhi Gupta (Anushka Kaushik) as the girl who becomes a bone of contention between Jindal and Shashank Batra, Hetal Gala as her best friend, Mohit Solanki as the kid crushed by his father’s hopes, Bhavesh Balchandani as the jester, Riddhi Kumar and Hridu Haroon as the campus lovebirds and cautionary tales, have the best bits and they are all sincere and enthusiastic actors.
Towering over all of them Annu Kapoor, who even makes his evil character human, because to his mind he is offering the students what he never got — the chance to fulfill an aspiration. Like the town gleaming with prosperity and upward mobility (captured in all its shades by Nagaraj Rathinam’s camera), he is the man who does what it takes to win, and does not care about who or what he destroyed on the way.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
