Hindi Medium, When I saw the title of movie, I knew the film is talking about education in India. The protagonist Raj is the son of a tailor who lives in an old neighborhood. His family is not poor, but still not rich. When Raj grew up, he fell in love with Mitu, a beautiful girl from the same social class, then they married as they wished. Years later, Raj has become a well-known fashion merchant, and got his own brand and design studio, living a wealthy life, and is a well-deserved husband and father. When the daughter reached the age of school, the couple tried various means to get their daughter to enter top prestigious elementary school in Delhi. They even moved to the slums to pretend to be poor people, just to defraud the school. In the slum, Raj met the kind and honest family of Yahim. Yahim’s sincere dedication made Raj’s shocked. He saw the darkness and the nature of education, and Raj realized that the education system in India is so unfair. Raj eventually gived up sending his child to the prestigious school, instead, he sent his daughter to a normal public school, near his home.
In the film, it exposed the inequality between poor people and rich people, and the unfairness between these two classes in India. Moreover, in India, it seems that English is not just a language, but a status symbol, maybe we can give it a name as lingual discrimination. If someone speak English instead of Hindi, the society pays more respect to him. Raj speaks Hindi, and his wife Mitu speaks English. it is love that allows them to cross the class. I once heard someone says that Indians like to speak English, though grammatical errors are endless. This shows that the phenomenon of India’s class division is very serious and the gap between rich and poor is very large, even languages are classified. The greatest success of this film is that the director made very heavy topics in a relaxed and humorous way, though this film involves education, class, family, system, etc.
The crescendo of the whole film is the speech Raj made at the end. The speech was quite wonderful, Raj confessed a series of shameful deeds he had done to get his daughter into a prestigious school, and also revealed the ugly face of the wife of the headmaster. Usually after such kind of speech in a film, there will be thunderous applause; however, this movie broke the convention, only Raj’s wife applauded for him, and then they quietly left. This is what the movie showed us, a serious and true attitude, because in our real life, the social barriers and cognitions actually cannot be eliminated by just a sincere speech.
The film just showed the audience of the unfairness and inequality of the education system and social classes, and I think it is great deeds for us to try our best to help eliminate such unfairness.