'F.A.L.T.U' (Hindi, Campus Film)
Director: Remo D’Souza
Cast: Jackky Bhagnani, Riteish Deshmukh, Chandan Roy Sanyal
The four word Herbert Spencer coinage, ‘survival of the fittest’, is a theory that students learn quickly in our educational systems. Not from an over-enthusiastic zoology teacher but from experience. This portion of their education is systemic. Competitive academics aren’t for the weak hearted and around this time of year there are rows of students who will fall in line with this analysis.
Ritesh Virani, F.A.L.T.U’s protagonist, is not one of those students. For him, the board exams are merely a hurdle that separates him from a summer of drinking, dancing and general debauchery in Goa. Entirely disconnected from consequences, Ritesh believes that our ‘flexible education system’ will find him admission to a college despite a barely passing grade.
As expected, neither Ritesh nor his clique of underachieving friends, Puja Nigam and Nanj Nair, obtain that elusive piece of paper that dispels the real world for a few additional years - an admission letter to higher education. Vishnu, the fourth leg of their barstool of a group, has an entirely different problem - an overbearing father whose expectations have never met his son’s.
When Ritesh conjures up a mythical university with the aid of Vishnu and a shyster rather snidely named Google (Arshad Warsi playing a cross between Circuit and Red from Shawshank) he is rewarded with a slew of real students: students forgotten by our rigorously stratified educational system.
The remainder of 'F.A.L.T.U' is about how Ritesh, Google and Bhaji Rao, Ritesh Deshmukh playing a principal dressed like a prep boy, inspire a motley crew of students and turn their fake university into a fake vocational training college.
The film is littered with so many songs and montages that it is impossible to escape the feeling that the film’s narrative is present purely to service its music and visual design.
It juxtaposes moments of juvenile humour, best among them being hearing the eight times tables set to the tune of 'Munni badnaam huyi' replete with a 'Darling tere liye' chorus, with didactic sequences on how the educational system fails the
very people it is supposed to help.
Each member of the audience, I suppose, only need imbibe what is part of their personal syllabi.