From Five Point Someone to 3 Idiots

Abstract

3 Idiots has been a very popular film from the famous Indian film industry, Bollywood. The film was adapted from a popular novel Five Point Someone written by Chetan Bhagat. Though the film was adapted from an already popular' novel, still significant changes were brought in the adaptation process. This paper wants to put light on this process of adaptation or "Bollywoodization", and will try to explain the changes. The paper will try to show that in the adaptation process not only Bollywood's noted 'tradition versus modernity' conflict plays a vital role, but also, influence of classical Indian epics along with India's past and its present socio-economic challenges play vital roles to decide the final shape of the film. Thus the paper wants to prove that though a film like 3 Idiots apparently speaks about some anti-establishment ideology of breaking away from stereotyped thinking regarding the education system of India; it also covertly surrenders and re-imposes many other dominant ideologies which try to reassure stereotyped thinking in other fields of everyday life. The adaptation process for a Bollywood film, or to put it in a more elaborate framework, the making of a 'popular' Bollywood film is a very complex process where different long established and new ideological stands intermingle to create a final product which finally tries to serve 'everything to everyone".