I hate to say this, but the article is complete bullcrap. Have you even seen the movie he references ? The protagonist is supposed to be this "naturally talented genius" who detests the bookish Indian academic education system, so throughout the film he takes potshots at the stuff he's taught in school, ultimately choosing to drop out without a degree until the Dean formally requests him to take the finals, upon which he gets the highest grade in the university. Its a completely one-sided portrayal, and while it is valid in the sense that Indian education system is wholly bunk, it is unfair to draw any deep profound lessons out of a shallow screenplay played for laughts. The pencil thing as has been pointed out by the commentators below is an urban legend.
The most talkedabout scene in the whole film involves a vaginal delivery using a vacuum blower as a suction device, and a AA battery as an inverter as the OB barks out instructions on a webcam. As a former electrical engineer I refuse to even entertain the possibility of such a stunt. Yet everybody in the media - the newspapers/TV/talkshows went gaga over this scene, suposedly a parable for "necessity is the mother(pun intended) of invention".
There's 2 scenes where the conductivity of brine is demonstrated when a person urinating on a live wire gets electrocuted, again played for laughs.
There's a scene where a student in his final year is unable to graduate because his thesis involves getting a toy helicopter to fly. He's unable to figure out the propulsion mechanics, so in disgust he throws the helicopter into the trash. The hero, our natural genius sophomore, picks up this helicopter, spends the time rigging up wires in the EE lab & finally gets it to fly. He puts a camera on the copter & as it coasts high in the air, it captures the video of the senior who has committed suicide by hanging in his dorm! Now is that crass or what ? Commiting suicide for failing to figure out some stupid propulsion mechanics! I remember thinking at the time that if this same film had been made in English, the critics & audience in the US would have torn it to shreds for such pandering & crass footage. But India being what it is, this very scene was lauded for its authenticity!
Even setting aside all that, the wrapping a string around your palm 11 times is simply trading off precision for some trial & error , not sme clever solution. For the preschool numbers thing, he's making up the rules as he goes along.
Frankly, the article should be titled "Not thinking".
The movie is filled with impossibilities, true. But have you seen Bollywood movies? Have you known the Indian audience they cater to? The impossibilities are the reason the movie did well; no half educated person is going to seriously attempt delivering a child with a vacuum over a webcam. At the same time, these stupid feats brought people to the movie, and forced them to realize how pathetically screwed up our education system is. Sure, we didn't do anything to fix it from that one movie--but for at least a few months, every time the movie was brought up, people started caring about changing the way our kids were taught.
I'm not suggesting this movie was something that raised awareness about an unknown issue, but it did succeed in bringing it to the forefront for quite a while, as Aamir's movies have been known to do. If you've seen other Bollywood movies, you know that 3 Idiots is a godsend when compared to the literally thousands of song filled intellectually vacuous love stories that we've been inundated with.
Furthermore, that suicide wasn't for the helicopter. It was after the dean called his (sick?) father, and told him that his son was not graduating that year. I do not remember the specific circumstances (I have terrible memory and watched this movie a few months ago), but claiming that the suicide was due to an engineering failure is ignoring many aspects of the student's life.
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As for the string solution--I don't really see why you need precision in cutting a pizza in 11 slices for a random customer. It's an interesting solution, one I hadn't thought of, and I'd say one that many others hadn't thought of. The point was to deal with what a cook would have in his hands, not a mathematically sound approach. While the latter might be clean, it would be physically impossible to implement with a pizza cutter that might not be sharp enough, or a pizza where the cheese and sauce still oozed over the crust* (in which case you never could get equal slices).
> But have you seen Bollywood movies? Have you known the Indian audience they cater to?
0. By a twisted quirk of fate( ie. being an Indian by birth), I happen to be addicted to Bollywood movies. I average 4 per month & have been doing so for atleast 2 decades now.
1. The guy is supposed to make a quadcopter fly in order to graduate. He is unable to. The Dean says he'll flunk if he doesn't make it fly. The guy looks at the wall in his dorm which says "loser" ( or was it "rebel" )in giant letters. The hero makes the copter fly. There's a tiny camera on the copter. The camera transmits aerial footage to a wintel laptop. As the copter soars, the laptop shows the guy hanging from a ceiling fan in his dorm .....impressively manipulative, yeah ? I think we call that camp out here. It was so in-your-face, manufactured outrage...
2. In reality, that quadcopter was built by Ashish Bhatt, a smart EE engineer out of IIT Bombay. He sells those at his startup IdeaForge (http://www.ideaforge.co.in/web/products )
3. Suicides on Indian campuses is a legitimate issue. Back when I was a student, there were 2 suicides in my campus, both because the student in question flunked some engineering/math course. The number of student suicides is disproportionately large ( http://www.google.com/search?q=suicide+IIT ). There were quite a few seminars on suicide prevention after that film.
4. Strictly speaking, it was a movie by-the-numbers...lets insert a suicide here, lets talk about pencils in outer space there, kind of thing. otoh the audience/critics were completely awed by it & made it the biggest film ever out of Bollywood.
> Strictly speaking, it was a movie by-the-numbers
I wasn't trying to say this movie has amazing merit; just that it served its purpose in an industry and to an audience where it isn't very easy to do so.
> Commiting suicide for failing to figure out some stupid propulsion mechanics! I remember thinking at the time that if this same film had been made in English, the critics & audience in the US would have torn it to shreds for such pandering & crass footage. But India being what it is, this very scene was lauded for its authenticity!
But that's kind of unsound to assume that the suicide must have been due to the specific event (not getting a helicopter to fly), rather than the bigger picture in this person's life.
Surely failing to graduate in an environment that places everything on having a paper diploma, including one's own image/self-worth, is more to the point of the suicide.
"Surely failing to graduate in an environment that places everything on having a paper diploma, including one's own image/self-worth, is more to the point of the suicide."
I can't speak for the parent poster but my criticism of the film is not with the themes, but with the trite way in which they are portrayed. I can't imagine an audience not understanding that this is what the filmmakers intended them to take away from the scene, but I can imagine them being put off by how they went about it.
> I can imagine them being put off by how they went about it
Remember that we're talking about the same movie industry where a man can slap another man and have him fly some 20 feet, after which he gets up and starts dancing with a lover. Relatively speaking, 3 Idiots was sane.
I solved that thing in less than 2 minutes too, and bet my pinkie finger nobody would take more than 15 minutes to figure it out.
There is some background of truth in the article, that most people lose the will to be creative (not the ability) over time. But it's over-generalizations galore.
You solved the problem easily because the article name was "overthinking" and it was saying that "children could do this".
You would be absolutely amazed at what that does to your problem solving ability. You actually stop over-thinking. You don't go to your advanced number-theory knowledge you may or may not have and you look for a simple solution.
Sorry, but everyone that read the article and then solved the problem is tainted.
I could not solve the problem and gave up after an hour. I gave the problem to my preschool child and they also could not figure it out. Since the article didn't provide a method for 'childifying' our minds I guess the only solution is suicide.
The most talkedabout scene in the whole film involves a vaginal delivery using a vacuum blower as a suction device, and a AA battery as an inverter as the OB barks out instructions on a webcam. As a former electrical engineer I refuse to even entertain the possibility of such a stunt. Yet everybody in the media - the newspapers/TV/talkshows went gaga over this scene, suposedly a parable for "necessity is the mother(pun intended) of invention".
There's 2 scenes where the conductivity of brine is demonstrated when a person urinating on a live wire gets electrocuted, again played for laughs.
There's a scene where a student in his final year is unable to graduate because his thesis involves getting a toy helicopter to fly. He's unable to figure out the propulsion mechanics, so in disgust he throws the helicopter into the trash. The hero, our natural genius sophomore, picks up this helicopter, spends the time rigging up wires in the EE lab & finally gets it to fly. He puts a camera on the copter & as it coasts high in the air, it captures the video of the senior who has committed suicide by hanging in his dorm! Now is that crass or what ? Commiting suicide for failing to figure out some stupid propulsion mechanics! I remember thinking at the time that if this same film had been made in English, the critics & audience in the US would have torn it to shreds for such pandering & crass footage. But India being what it is, this very scene was lauded for its authenticity!
Even setting aside all that, the wrapping a string around your palm 11 times is simply trading off precision for some trial & error , not sme clever solution. For the preschool numbers thing, he's making up the rules as he goes along.
Frankly, the article should be titled "Not thinking".