Glossing over it

My Mirror column:

The real-life story of Anand Kumar and his free coaching is incredible, but Super 30 feels like a missed opportunity.

A still from Super 30, directed by Vikas Bahl. 

“Kya baat hai bhai, ki film hamaari aa rahi hai toh sab log lag jaate hain? [What's going on, bhai: is everyone piling on to me because a film is coming out?]” asked the renowned engineering coach Anand Kumar during a video interview to BBC's Hindi correspondent Saroj Singh in January this year. The biopic he was referring to released last week, but it answers few questions -- not even Kumar's own.

Directed by Vikas Bahl (known for Queen and for the serious #MeToo charges against him that led to the dissolution of Phantom Pictures in 2018), Super 30 stars Hrithik Roshan as the Patna-based Kumar, who shot to national fame a decade ago, when all thirty students in his Super 30 class 'cracked' what might be the world's most competitive entrance examination: the Joint Entrance Examination to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT JEE).

Every year since 2002, Anand Kumar has selected thirty students from underprivileged families for his free coaching, also providing them free lodging in Patna and home-cooked meals. How Kumar arrived at this vocation is a fascinating tale. In the early 1990s, Kumar's handwritten submission to a UK journal of mathematics was followed by an offer of admission from the University of Cambridge. The backward caste son of a poor postal clerk, Kumar couldn't arrange the money. Then his father died, and he spent some years in penury before finally hitting his stride as a teacher. The idea of using his abilities to improve the lives of talented poor students like himself came later, and their continued success has been his, too.

It isn't unusual for Bollywood (or for that matter, any commercial film industry) to pick a big star to play a real-life hero. Many recent biopics have done it: Farhan Akhtar as Milkha Singh, Priyanka Chopra as the boxer Mary Kom. Others have cast a known face who's also a good actor: Nawazuddin Siddiqui has appeared as Urdu writer Manto, Shiv Sena politician Bal Thackeray and everyman road-building hero Dashrath Manjhi, while Irrfan Khan was superb as the runner-turned-dacoit Paan Singh Tomar.

But there seems to me something about Super 30 that outdoes these previous instances. I do not refer only to the blackface that Bollywood unabashedly carries out in the name of make-up, literally covering the taller, more muscular Roshan's fair skin and light eyes with an artistic tan. I mean also the way that Bahl's film covers over the facts of Anand Kumar's life.

What's strange is that the facts of Kumar's life are already full of drama. Interviewing Anand Kumar for his 2013 book A Matter of Rats: A short biography of Patna, the US-based writer Amitava Kumar wrote, “When Anand describes the events... you watch his tale of woe unfold as if in a black-and-white Hindi film possibly made by Raj Kapoor.” The fact that his father's sudden death took place by choking, that the streets around their house were flooded by rain, that he had to put his unconscious father on an abandoned vegetable cart to wheel him to a clinic – all this is in Amitava Kumar's book. But in the film, there is no choking, no flooding, and Anand has a bicycle. The film depicts the papad-selling business that his mother and he supported themselves on, but there is no mention of the fact that the postal department sent Anand 50,000 rupees after his father's death, or the fact that he needed to stay on in Patna to support a family that included a grandmother and a disabled uncle. It almost feels like the facts are too extreme for the film.

Instead, Bahl's version wishes to distract us with not one but all of the following: a youthful love interest who marries another man (Mrunal Thakur, from Love Sonia); a hard-drinking journalist who makes confusing interventions; an overly villainous coaching competitor (Aditya Shrivastava); a buffoonish politician (Pankaj Tripathi). Worse, it gives us a whole first batch of Super 30 students, some with 30-second backstories that could be potentially devastating – the manual scavenger, the construction labourer, the girl with the alcoholic father -- but not one gets a real personality. The camera is so focused on Roshan's as-ever exaggerated performance that the kids don't have a chance.

Attempts have, in fact, been made on Anand Kumar's life. But the film makes these about overly chatty hitmen, and the last episode – where his coaching competitor plans to blow up an entire hospital in order to wipe out the Super 30 – has the students turning Kumar's science formulae into a bizarre combination of religion and magic. A Vedic chant about vidya is the aural backdrop to an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors to outwit armed goons. Meanwhile the villain warns: “It should look like a Naxal attack, no-one should suspect that it is meant to kill Anand Kumar, otherwise he'll become a martyr.”

The BBC interview is filled with allegations it thinks are controversial. How many students does Kumar take on in his (paid) Ramanujan classes? What fees do those students pay? Why does he not reveal the names of each year's Super 30 students until the IIT JEE list is out? Kumar answers them all, though he sounds victimised.

The film, meanwhile, refuses to even engage with the last decade of Kumar's life, involving the complexities that come after the Happy Ever After. We dearly want our heroes to be saints, and we are happy to erase their real selves to achieve that.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 July 2019.