Nearly a decade ago, Viineet Kumar Siingh had his first release as a solo lead actor in Anurag Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz. At the time, Viineet revealed that he sold everything he owned and moved to Punjab so he could train as a boxer. Viineet created this opportunity for himself by writing the film, and hoped this would transform his career after being in the city of dreams for nearly 18 years. Dedication, perseverance, and a ton of sacrifice got Viineet his first leading role and when one thinks of all the hardships that he went through to make it in the entertainment industry, it becomes rather painful to watch him in TVF’s latest Netflix ‘show’, Hello Bachhon, which is basically an ad masquerading as a web series.
Hello Bachhon is a five-episode series based on the life of Alakh Pandey, CEO of Physics Wallah, who famously started online courses that provided affordable education to kids all over the country. Just based on that one line, one knows that this is a man who was once on a noble mission as he never got the chance to study beyond 12th standard. One can imagine that TVF heard his story, and felt it wasn’t good enough to be turned into a show, and so they decided that the drama needed to be amped up. Perhaps, after the many shows they made targeting students studying for UPSC, CA and many other fields, they felt like it was now time to jump into making ads for the institutes that these students attend? You half-expect a QR code to pop up on screen so the enrolment can happen then and there.
The five episode series tells Alakh’s story along with the stories of five students whose lives seem to have been impacted by Physics Wallah. These are the kind of stories that could be used for Physics Wallah’s pitch if they need to raise more funds in the future (PW is currently a $5 billion company). The script comes across as manipulative, bordering on poverty porn, where Alakh sir’s Physics Wallah is the solution to all social evils – child marriage, substance abuse, child labour. There is no doubt that education has the power to transform the society, but watching it on this show feels like only the education provided by Physics Wallah has the power to do so.
As one starts watching this ‘show’, one realises that this content was probably not made to be consumed as a whole; it’s a collection of reels stitched together. Every scene is designed for reels with the kind of melodramatic, inspiring music that gets people to share the ‘motivational stories’. Perhaps they wrote it as a microdrama but then forgot to restructure it when they were commissioned for a long form series.
There is no room for metaphors or story telling here. In one scene, Vineet’s Alakh is talking about breaking down a wall with his company as he sees the education sector restricted by corporate walls, and this scene is intercut with a kid breaking down a literal wall so he can earn his daily wage and pay for Alakh’s classes. There are no character arcs here, as none of the characters talk like real people. Alakh launches into a moral lecture in every scene. We get a speech about the importance of teachers, another one about affordable education, and so on. Just everything that can be said in a normal way, is turned into a long, sappy monologue which further convinces you that this wasn’t written like a show, but a collection of small content pieces designed around the same central character.
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Alakh himself is presented like a gullible manchild. When an employee criticises him behind his back, he spends hours locked away in a store room, and when an investor shows faith in his vision, he launches into yet another lecture about his mission to educate. We see Alakh’s difficult relationship with his father in a highly dramatic outburst, but it is all resolved without any real efforts. The father thus comes across as a passive character, in a sea of passive characters created to service Alakh.
TVF created a new genre of entertainment when they started making shows for students studying engineering, medicine, etc and at the time, it felt like the youth, which is often not represented in films and television, was finally getting something they could relate to. Of course, it had its problems as they continued to romanticise the struggles of students without actually questioning why they had to struggle at such a young age. But after Hello Bachhon, it is obvious that even those students are an afterthought now, as now, they are in the business of servicing those who run the business of education.
