Varun Grover’s debut feature as director, All India Rank, unfolds in the 1990s, a time of giddy liberalisation and pop trivia. Witty references abound; for instance, what links HC Verma — a writer of lucid and luggable Physics textbooks — with Mansoor Khan, the director of the unwieldy 80s romance Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak? Answer: both men went to an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology). It is an amusing tidbit, made funnier by the dubious lesson extrapolated from it: that children who go into IITs stand to excel in any field, be it book-writing or Bollywood.
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In a class of hopefuls, Vivek (Bodhisattva Sharma) hears this spiel. Yet we know not for certain if he buys into it. At the start of the film, he’s bundled off from Lucknow to Kota to prepare for his IIT entrance exams. He’s a shy, gawky 17-year-old, with his walkman and thermos. “I have no dream,” he says, an innocuous teenager’s confession, unthinkable — then as now — in aspirational middle India. We check in with his parents, pinching every penny so their son can study in peace. His father, a low-ranking government employee, enumerates the merits of a top-tier engineering degree; job, respect, ease of life. And there’s a fourth benefit he does not immediately verbalise: social standing.
From the beginning, Vivek strikes us as sincere but adrift, as kids of his age ought to be. He warms to two of his hostel mates, mouthy repeaters played by Ayush Pandey and Neeraj Singh, and takes a shine to smart, focused Sarika (Samta Sudiksha). In a scene, the quartet cycles down to a riverfront to shoot the breeze. Grover builds the scene around natural sounds and the gentle existential queries of this group. It is a beautiful moment in the film, a geeky and unglamorous mirroring of the Chapora Fort sequence in Dil Chahta Hai.
