In 2011, Abhay Kumar, then 25 and a recent postgraduate, showed up at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to visit his brother, a medical student. He walked out of the institute two years later, with more than 1,000 hours of footage and stories from deep within India’s most prestigious medical college.
What started as an idea to visually document his brother’s recovery after a serious student brawl, ended up becoming a narrative that explores the lives of some of the country’s brightest minds.
So what is on their minds? One character has visions of his perfect profile photo on Facebook, another spouts theories on the nature of time, a third is in a state of hysterics after ingesting copious amounts of bhaang.
While the bright-eyed ambition and pride of the medical students are all too obvious, darker threads also run through the campus, such as the tyranny of failure, depression and the risk of suicides.
“But this is not an exposé,” Kumar makes clear. It isn’t really a documentary about AIIMS, as much as it happens to be set in AIIMS. “It was never about the place,” he adds, “It could’ve been any institute.”
But AIIMS isn’t just any institute. The acceptance rate is 0.07 per cent, as compared to 7 per cent at Harvard and 8 per cent at MIT. We don’t see how these students got here. But once they do, the battle has only just begun. The students have different ambitions and their struggles vary. One character dreams of migrating to the US, another leads a student uprising after a suicide on campus. After the protest, he reflects that some of the theatrics were just for show. The film was not just about “showing kids smoking pot,” but explores the stress at elite institutions and how education systems often fail students.
While filmmakers find it easy to direct the camera at others, Kumar hasn’t shied away from putting himself in the film. Placebo is not a documentary and Kumar is no ‘fly on the wall’ narrating events in a dispassionate manner. He is as much a participant, in a brutally honest scene his younger brother — lying in a hospital bed with a badly damaged right hand — upbraids him on camera for neglecting him and obsessing about filming.
“I was clear it had to be subjective,” says the Chandigarh-born Kumar, who adds that he has only seen two or three documentaries in his life. “I was experiencing it in a continuum. The film was being constructed at every step. I didn’t try and think of a finished product.” This sense of continuum — aside from the jerky camera, uninhibited rants, movements in time — give the movie a visceral feel.
The screening at MAMI was attended by Dr Chopra, whom Kumar first meets in a hostel room on camera. Chopra said, “I am grateful he made such a movie. This is a sensitive topic. But for the first time you see how undergraduate medical life is… It is very sad how our medical education system works. It is very stressful, and I thank him for focusing on it.”
Kumar took the carefully considered decision to screen his film only after his subjects had graduated from AIIMS, to protect them from any potential backlash.
AIIMS is likely to be less than thrilled at how it has been portrayed — administrative apathy and student disaffection included. “There is one tiny glitch,” Kumar told audiences after the film was screened to a rapturous response, “They still don’t know that this film exists.”
“It’s like gate-crashing a wedding,” he told the audience. “You walk in and don’t expect people will find out.”
Bhavya Dore is a Mumbai-based journalist