(Abhay Kumar’s
Placebo was premiered at the Mumbai Film Festival 2015. I saw it shortly
afterwards at the Dharamsala International Film Festival where I also interviewed
Kumar. This article was published on Firstpost on November 16, 2015. The film
has since travelled to various parts of India and the rest of the world.)
THE
INSIDE MAN
After going
undercover at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences for two years, filmmaker
Abhay Kumar delivers a disturbing documentary that dismembers traditional notions
of excellence and self-worth
By
Anna MM Vetticad
“Right-handed
AIIMS doctor clears UPSC with left hand” – from the mass of news stories that
have crowded the media in the past year, you may perhaps remember this one. Dr
Sahil Kumar, we learnt from The Times of
India’s report in July, “lost fine motor movements in his right hand after it got
brutally jammed in a window” but displayed remarkable resilience over the months
that followed, transforming himself from a right-hander to a left-hander, ultimately
clearing his final year medical college exams, later cracking the UPSC and
being accepted in the Indian Foreign Service.
The story behind
that story though has been unveiled only this month. The source is not a
newspaper but a film by Sahil’s brother. Abhay Kumar’s Placebo had its India premiere – to a very positive response – at Mumbai’s Jio MAMI
fest followed days
later by the just-concluded Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF).
 |
| Still from Placebo |
Placebo is set in the rarely-probed innards of the intimidatingly competitive AIIMS
(Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences),
but it is not about one college alone. It is about high-pressure
academic environs, depression that leads to violence, suicides in institutions
of higher learning, a lack of support systems and an apathetic administration.
It is about a society that encourages youngsters to make the most important
decisions of their lives unthinkingly based on what others want, it is about geniuses
wracked with self-doubt and families that do not want us to think for ourselves.
The year was 2011. Sahil had,
in an inexplicable explosion of fury during a fight on the AIIMS campus,
smashed his right arm into a glass window. The episode left his then 25-year-old
elder sibling Abhay confused and distressed. What could possibly have prompted
a seemingly stable final year student at India’s most prestigious medical
school to inflict such severe wounds on himself, leading to a potentially
career-destroying disability?
While Sahil underwent
surgeries and undertook his own journey to recovery, Abhay discovered an
alternative coping mechanism. Unknown to AIIMS authorities, he embedded himself
among the students to shoot the goings-on at the institute and record interviews
with those who were willing and able to speak on camera.
The plan was that he would
stay with them for a few months. The project took on a life of its own though,
as the proposed six months turned into two years and almost 1,000 hours of
footage. The result is the feature-length documentary Placebo, which combines intimate conversations with fly-on-the-wall
observations all tied together by the use of some decidedly surreal animation.
 |
| Filmmaker Abhay Kumar speaking at the Lycée Notre Dame De Sion Istanbul |
Placebo begins with an intentionally misleading
dual tone, Abhay’s staid voiceover forming a sharp contrast to the ramblings
and/or frivolous banter of four interviewees (Sahil among them). The film parallelly chronicles developments
at AIIMS during this time including a
students’ protest and – quite chillingly – three suicides on campus.
As the narrative progresses
and the boys settle into their role as subjects of a camera’s gaze, they reveal
deeper and deeper secrets, occasionally even turning accusatory and borderline
aggressive towards the filmmaker. This is when Abhay turns the lens on himself,
providing us with among the most devastatingly grim, introspective and nakedly
honest sequences in the film.
The narrative raises micro and
macro-level questions, some vocalised by characters in this real-life story,
some not, many going beyond the particular challenges of being at the country’s most sought-after school of medicine.
If you have gained admission
to AIIMS, you are probably used to being ranked first in your class in school.
How do you cope with joining a group of students as brilliant as you? If you do
not continue to stand first among them, does that mean you have become second
best or average overnight?
Who do you discuss this
problem with, considering how ridiculously minor it would seem to ordinary folk
outside those hallowed walls?
How do different people cope
with stress? Specifically here, instead of mollycoddling Sahil while he was
recuperating, why did Abhay choose to pick up a camera and hang out at AIIMS?
In doing so, was he neglecting
his brother and running away from a challenging state of affairs? Has he exploited his brother’s misfortune
to make a self-serving film or did he hope that his work would help Sahil to
confront his own demons and aid in the healing process? Perhaps it is he – Abhay
himself – who needs to heal. Perhaps this film is primarily for those of us like
him who have known the helplessness of watching a loved one’s decline and
wondering if we did enough to stop it.
These are questions viewers would
do well to first answer for themselves before addressing them to the filmmaker.
Over lunch at a rooftop restaurant in McLeodganj-Dharamshala, Abhay dwells at
length on two other points raised by audience members at the DIFF screening.
One asked why Placebo does not
discuss caste-related strains at AIIMS. Another wanted to know why all four
interviewees were men, thus possibly conveying the impression to unknowing
viewers outside India that AIIMS does not have women students.
Frankly, these two questions
take a rather narrow view of the film. Placebo
is not an all-encompassing journalistic documentary which must perforce try to
tackle every conceivable what, where, when, why and how; it is a deeply personal
response to a trying situation and it should be evident to any viewer that: (a)
in a gender-segregated scenario, the institute’s women’s hostel would have been
far more inaccessible to a male filmmaker than the men’s hostel; and pursuing
women students could clearly have led to problems since he was there without
the administration’s permission (b) while caste and gender issues would
certainly play a role in these students’ lives, and while women and reserved caste
students do find their way into the narrative – via a stray remark here, a
visual there, a name that comes up elsewhere – this film is not about caste and gender, it is about a stressful
academic world. Why stop at asking about caste and gender then? What about
divisions caused by class, religion, sexual orientation, language and region?
The point is, dealing with every single social equation at the institute would
require a separate and very different film.
Still, politely asked questions
always merit answers. Here are Ajay’s.
About caste: “Caste is definitely
an issue, but it needs a more balanced point of view than mine. A film about
caste politics should not be subjective like mine.”
About women: “I had to shoot
with what was available to me. The sort of access I was looking at was simply
not possible infiltrating the girls’ hostel. I tried talking to some of them during
the protests because that’s where they came out to the boys’ hostel, but they were
just not comfortable being on camera.”
About the choice of
interviewees: “Most people at AIIMS were not comfortable. I interviewed many
more subjects including those from OBCs and lower castes, but it was a matter
of who was willing to open up, give me time, talk about things. There are clear
patterns indicating why each interviewee in the film was chosen. It was unrelated
to caste or economics. Sahil is there because of the accident, K because he
punched a glass window too, K introduces Chopra to the camera and Sethi is so
child-like in how he looks at the world, so for me these four represented the archetype
of students in our academic environment – the rebel and anarchist, the middle-class
guy who wants to do something because his parents want him to, the guy obsessed
with American pop culture and this bigger dream, and Sahil who is very average
and doesn’t know what he’s doing. They represent for me a vast landscape of
students.”
At one point, Placebo seems so intent on slamming AIIMS’
indifferent administration that it appears to be gravitating towards absolving
students of any contribution to their college-mates’ worries, especially when
one of them is shown pontificating about a social vacuum left by the ban on
ragging and the need for more interactions between seniors and juniors to
defuse tensions on campus. That is a passing thought though since the film goes
on to unflinchingly dwell on the students’ own flaws. In a particularly unnerving
scene, a boy struggles to recall even the face of another who committed suicide
during the course of the making of the film.
Placebo has been on the international
film festival circuit for a while now. The young director tells us he
deliberately delayed the premiere in India till after his four interviewees had
graduated, to protect them from any possible action at the institute. Even now,
he lets on, “AIIMS does not know the film exists.” When the authorities inevitably
find out, they are unlikely to be pleased at the picture they present.
Placebo, however, should not be
reductively labelled a sting operation on AIIMS. It is an illuminating and
highly disturbing docu feature that takes off from an acutely private starting
point, then goes on to tell a story that could belong to anyone. This is why
rather than aiming for a multiplex release (which would automatically raise his
profile) or television (where Censorship is inevitable), Abhay wants to travel
with it to festivals and educational institutions across India so that it
becomes a tool “to start a conversation”.
AIIMS in this film is but a
metaphor for an impending implosion among the human
statistics populating institutions of higher learning and excellence in India. It
is about students in mental turmoil, even agony, teetering on the precipice of self-destruction,
and being pushed over the edge by a mindless, heartless, soulless system.
Original link:
Photographs courtesy:
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