Aspirants 3 review: The ‘tripod’ — Abhilash (Naveen Kasturia), SK ( Abhilash Thapliyal) and Guri (Shivankit Singh Parihar) – is back for a third time, the three friends picking up where they’d left off in the previous season.
The deep personal ties, forged through intense studying to crack the UPSC — the hierarchy graven in stone within the civil services, with the IAS on top — the squabbles and the warmth of the years spent propping each other up in Old Rajinder Nagar and Mukherjee Nagar rented holes-in-the-wall, have given way to a complicated professional life, which is not as rosy as it was cracked up to be.
We’ve seen this process in recent films — 12th Fail, All India Rank — with varying degrees of success. ‘Prelims’ and ‘Mains’, the twin towers all UPSC aspirants have to conquer, are all-consuming affairs: all you do is to keep your head down and swot through coaching sweat-shops (Unacademy gets a look-in again, with SK as a teacher) and kunjis and sheer luck, and if you get through, there is the dreading interview where the aspirant is faced with a group of hard-nosed characters asking tough, tricky questions.
Season One and Two gave all the thousands who spend several years consumed by the effort the chance to feel seen and heard. Which is why the series has been so popular in its constituency, at once feeling familiar – there’s no getting away from the incessant work– as well as thorny– you fail, try again, fail, get back and try again, rinse, repeat. Tough, spirit-quenching stuff, yo-yo-ing through hope and despair.
It also acknowledges the really hard bit that try as you might, you may never be able to climb that mountain. Guri goes back to his father’s business, SK becomes a coach, while only Abhilash manages to get through to the other side, as the ‘DM of Rampur’, with that coveted chair-and-the-towel (the most important element in that office, as any civil servant will vouch for), the peons carrying your files, the official car with the laal-batti, and the hundred other things that denote the privilege and power of even the smallest babu in India.
While the earlier seasons managed to sustain interest, this time around the central conflict comes down to the Hindi vs English divide, which rapidly loses fizz as it goes along. A central character from the previous season, Sandeep Bhaiya (Sunny Hinduja) reappears here as the antagonist; in his possession is a damning letter that can cause Abhilash harm. Jatin Goswami, playing a fellow civil servant but buried under old resentments, raises the banner of uplifting Hindi-speaking sections of his district, and of Hindi in general: in and of itself, it’s a worthwhile conversation, but there’s only so much that it can be juiced for.
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And that’s the trouble with this TVF offering, which gives the characters we’ve rooted for in the past (season one came out in 2021, and season 2 in 2023), that it feels much too familiar, and gets into predictable loops, with lines that always feel like dialogues, even though the actors themselves are always watchable. The two chief female characters — ex-girlfriend of Abhilash, and present wife of Guri, Dhairya (Namita Dubey) and IPS officer Deepa (Tengam Celine) and Abhilash’s current romantic interest — do get screen time. However, they are never allowed to sway the narrative; the boys lead from the front, as always.
The season may be new, but the flow is same old.
Aspirants 3 cast: Naveen Kasturia, Abhilash Thapliyal, Shivankit Singh Parihar, Jatin Goswami, Sunny Hinduja, Joy Dev Chatterjee, Tengam Celine, Namita Dubey, Mallika Prasad
Aspirants 3 director: Deepesh Sumitra Jagdish
Aspirants 3 rating: 2 stars
