Ramanujan is a legendary young Indian mathematician. In his honor, India set up a national mathematical competition under the name Ramanujan. One year, a young man named Anand won an award and began his legendary career. The movie "Super 30" tells this story.
The historical Ramanujan sent the paper to the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, which attracted the attention of famous mathematicians such as Hardy. Since then, this uneducated genius has been accepted into the scientific circle. Inspired by his predecessors, the protagonist of the film, Anand, also applied for Cambridge and received an admission notice. However, he came from a low-caste family in India and struggled with the poverty line. In order to support him, his father borrowed money everywhere to pay for tuition, and he became ill with overwork and illness. Anand had to give up his dream and sell snacks on the street. Fortunately, he was found by a cram school and packaged as a star teacher to attract cram students. After Anand became rich, he felt that the poor children lacked educational opportunities, so he resigned to start a free cram school. Each issue only accepts 30 people, which is the origin of the title.
The film uses various details to highlight the inequalities created by the Indian caste system. Both Anand and the poor children he taught were black-skinned, and the children in the tuition classes were white-skinned. This is a clear difference in appearance between high and low castes in India. High-caste children are fluent in English, and low-caste children have poor English, and Anand has to devise teaching methods to give his students the courage to speak English.
In India, the lower castes are not just abstract identities, they cannot engage in higher occupations from generation to generation, leading to the inheritance of poverty. From clothing to diet, everywhere is weaker than higher caste children. They travel to pick up trains, rub cars, and paddle rafts. Because I can't afford shampoo, every child's hair is a mess. The poverty shown in "Super 30" is very textured, and it is not at all the poverty imagined by some filmmakers.
Super 30 uses a phrase from the Indian classic Mahabharata to point the root cause of inequality to the Indian cultural tradition – "If you want to train a king, teach the prince." Anand's father was just an ordinary postman, unable to pay for the postage for the letter to London. But he will talk about "times have changed". These plots all make "Super 30" have a distinct critical color.
However, explaining the problem is only the starting point, and what to use to solve the problem is the foothold of "Super 30". In 1975, China also produced a film on the theme of educational equality, called "Breakup". Comparing the two movies, we can find the excellence of "Super 30".
Stills from "BreakUp"
The most famous scene in "The Break" is that the headmaster, Long Guozheng, raises the hand of the young farmer, points to the calluses on it, and says, This is the qualification for admission. Anand was the complete opposite, and since admissions were free, he devised rigorous exams. When a child was turned away for a one-point difference, Anand told him that there was often a point difference between success and failure. This is not simply chicken blood, this is the logic of the scientific enterprise itself. Anand rejected the caste rule and replaced it with the rule of science.
The story of "Super 30" is based on the rise of cram schools in India. Parents will not hesitate to send their children to cram schools. However, the pursuit of science is always better than the tendency to inflame. Featuring a student of Anand as the narrator, the film begins with an introduction to the world-class high-tech companies that Indians are controlling today. The driving force behind this success is the thirst for knowledge among Indian children. Although they are still moving bricks and herding cattle, they hope to become nuclear engineers or become astronauts to explore space.
In "Breakup", young farmers enter the Labor University and still learn to raise pigs and farm the land, which makes the theme of equal rights a joke, do people in the city want their children to go to this kind of school? In contrast, Anand's cram school, although it can only be taught with a broken blackboard and illuminated by cow dung power generation, has never abandoned strict teaching standards, and the ultimate goal is to let the children enter the Imperial Institute of Technology, india's highest school.
Also in 2019, China also released a movie with the theme of tuition, called "Galaxy Tuition Class". The engineer played by Deng Chao only showed a hand of "siphon phenomenon" and completely relied on chicken blood to educate children. On the contrary, in "Super 30", the knowledge points are endless, and they can be clearly expressed with pictures and actions. In recent years, a number of films with solid scientific skills have emerged in India, so that I envy them, where are so many film talents who know how to express science?
A real photo of the protagonist of the movie
Of course, the shortcomings of Super 30 are also obvious. In order to create pressure on Anand, the film forcibly sets up a fee-based tuition school as a villain. In fact, the two are not contradictory. The principal of the cram school has given a plan to give the best few students free of charge, with an advertising effect, and Anand will not let his students study hungry. This is the most realistic solution.
As the background of the film, ramanujan is famous in history, in addition to talent and personal efforts, but also the wisdom of British mathematicians. They don't care about caste, they start from real talent. Both the historical context and the film itself tell us that only scientific rules can make true equality.
Source: Popular Science Times
Author: Zheng Jun, member of the Chinese Writers Association, science fiction writer, executive director of the China Future Research Association
Editor: Mao Mengyuan
Final Judge: Yin Hongqun
Some of the images come from the Internet
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