From the director of movies like “Pyaar Ke Side Effects” and “Shaadi Ke Side Effects” comes a third and, equally comic and disturbing movie about the underlying class divide in our country – Hindi Medium.
The film revolves around a business man, who has gone from rags to riches, selling clothes in Old Delhi. Raj Batra (Irrfan Khan) owns a fashion studio and has a lovely wife (Saba Qamar) and a daughter.
Raj is the quintessential Indian who has new found wealth but struggles in forming sentences in the language of the British, English. Raj has the wealth, but not the status that must come with it. And more than Raj, his wife Meeta wants to upscale. In her words “is desh mein angrezi zabaan nahi class hai” – english is no more a language in this country, but a symbol of class – status. Meeta is hell-bent on redefining and restructuring her family, placing themselves in the high class society of Vasant Vihar, to find the validation that money and success are bound to bring.
The problems for the couple begin when they start to find the school for their young daughter. Meeta wants the best for their kid – she wants her to study in the best school of the city – an English medium school, of course. But the place they come from does not stop defining them and they must strive, to create themselves again, to make themselves fit in the social strata where they don’t belong inherently but have the means to do.
In comes Dobriyal’s character who is a daily wage earner. His hard hitting expressions in the film shall leave the audience moved for a long time. However, the movie, which has treated the whole situation and the hypocrisy of it all comically to a great extent, tends to be a little preachy and over dramatic in the end, but the film surely does drive the point home.
Catch the movie in theatres near to you tomorrow to catch a real glimpse of the education system and social hierarchy that has shallowed our society for long now.
