3Idiots: An Idiot Movie

The movie 3Idiots created lot of controversy these days, without any concrete reasons though. More than anything else, the movie proved the idiocy of bollywood producers/directors in understanding the very important concept of, freedom.

The movie, basically, tries to send a message of 'freedom of thoughts' in Indian education system, which in its present state is simply a system of rot learning. Unfortunately, the movie turns out to be completely against the 'freedom of thought' message, when in the end of the movie hero (Aamir Khan) becomes very rich scientist by having 'patents' of some 200 inventions! Now any person who favors 'freedom of thought', as is the case with our hero of this movie, can never ever support the system of 'patents'. But the hero not only supports 'patents' he actually uses that system. By taking 'patents' our hero restricts the very 'freedom of thought' which he tried to promote while in his engineering college! He forgets that, his 'patents' will stifle the creative imagination of other inventor scientists. His 'patents' will kill the very innovative thoughts which the movie is trying to promote! In fact, taken to its extreme, the IP system can stifle the free education system which movie is supposedly trying to promote (see here for the evidence of this where some Harvard professors are trying to take 'copyrights' of their lectures!).

This grave logical error is made by the script writer and the movie crew simply because probably no one of them know, let apart understanding, what actually 'freedom' is. India is a socialist country and a repressive society where words like 'freedom' are complete strangers to most of the people. I am sure, if the movie script writer was aware about the ideas of libertarian thinkers like Stephane Kinsella (here), Jeffery Tucker (see above article of Harvard professor and copyright issue), and economists, Boldrin & Levine (here) then he would have not made this logically contradictory error in his movie. But Alas!

And in between all these, ironically, the movie producer and the book writer Chetan Bhagat, on whose book the movie is supposedly based, quarreled openly about the 'copyrights' of the book. Such a nice way of promoting 'freedom of thoughts'! Chetan Bhagat proved himself to be a 4th Idiot by making such noise about his copyrights once the movie was a hit. He, in this particular case, proved himself to be a bad entrepreneur who could not foresee the success of this movie in advance at the time when he sold his copyrights in few lakhs rupees to the movie producer. He could not see that the movie will make 175 crore rupees in just one week. If he was a good entrepreneur then I am sure he must have sold his book not in lakhs but in crores. Actually copyright itself is not any rights because no one can own an 'idea'. So the whole quarrel was useless and illegitimate from Chetan's side. The movie script was very different from Chetan's book and that made it a different product and not a copy of his original book. And these people forget the advantages of copying and the dangers of copyrights (see this nice video on this issue).

Without a deep understanding of the libertarian ideas one cannot truly promote freedom and that was the case with this movie too. In the end the movie 3Idiots turned out to be an absolutely IDIOT movie.