I have always strongly felt about spreading education amongst all children. I am amazed how underrated is the importance of education for a person’s overall growth. For all the issues that are grappling India, there hardly is any noise about giving quality education to our kids, while I believe that needs to be number one priority for any society. Half-hearted attempts and empty promises are what we have been accustomed to. In words of Ravish Kumar, the zero TRP anchor of PrimeTime, NDTV India, ‘Amongst politicians, Education in India just revolves around giving of free books, uniforms or shoes’.
There is hardly any discussion on implementation issues, ideological issues related to education. While everyone wants to emulate USA in every aspect in India, no one talks about their county school system.
In the name of modernizing our education system, what we see in private schools are just different avenues of taking money from parents. It can be swimming pool fees, computer fees, annual festival fees, etc.
Hindi Medium as a commercial movie brings out these aspects very subtly. It brings out the concept of Right to Education Act, something which we are used to only hear as a news item. It also talks about the upper middle class hypocrisy where we would go to any extent to get good education for our own children but hardly talk about government schools where most of the children from poor economic backgrounds study. The film brings attention to the deteriorating condition of government schools. The constant repeating of the concern of the mom that if her child does not get good education, then she will become drug addict keeps telling the audience of the importance of the education for the child at its young age.
Personally for me, the fact that a commercial movie was made around these ideas itself is very heart whelming. Though I had read about the movie before watching it along with my mom in theater, every scene in which the audience including my mom was applauding, laughing or sighing was giving me goosebumps. It was like validating everything that I have had in my mind, something which I have always wanted to work on, make at-least a small impact. Hopefully, we will see some political movement around the issue of education. Its about time we had one.
