The dawn of the Internet Age and spread of OTT cinema is one of the positive outcomes of the digital revolution. It has radically transformed Indian cinema and movies, and freed the intelligentsia interested in this story-telling medium from having to compulsorily watch Hollywood and esoteric European cinema, depicting narratives of alien societies and contexts. OTT corporations such as Netflix and Amazon are commissioning intelligent Indian producers for feature films and serials, which are getting better with the passage of time. Alternative cinema funded by Netflix and Amazon among others has succeeded in narrating tight stories that capture the grim lives of the majority in the country’s ill-planned cities and neglected rural outbacks. Recently, one had the good luck to stumble across an evocative and impactful alt cinema production titled 12th Fail which narrates the trials and tribulations of a village boy with his heart set on qualifying as an IPS (Indian Police Service) officer. The utter backwardness of rural India where he grows up, the grim conditions of a coaching school and his repeated failure in the UPSC exam are realistically portrayed, as is his grit to clear this all-important exam while working in a flour mill to keep body and soul together. A point forcefully made in the film is the huge advantage that middle and upper class candidates enjoy because of English language fluency, for which the hero is totally unprepared because of his rural education. Although the Supreme Court has decisively ruled that the choice of medium of instruction is of parents and not government, there’s no shortage of grey eminences who parrot that children’s early years and primary education should be in their vernacular mother tongue. Even the otherwise enlightened NEP 2020 reiterates this. Politicians and pundits who wax eloquent on mother tongue primacy readily enroll their progeny in English-medium schools and foreign universities. One of the virtues of 12th Fail — which has a schmaltzy happy ending — is that it exposes the hypocrisy of the Indian establishment which has gamed the system to keep the under-class down by denying them Inglish education.
