Director: JAYANT GILATAR

Cast: Shabana Azmi, Juhi Chawla, Divya Dutta, Rishi Kapoor, Richa Chadha

Supposedly a well-intentioned tribute to the world’s “Creators Of Leaders”, this unfortunate film is designed as a depressingly kindergarten representation of the Indian primary schooling system. Or, namely, KantaBen High (okay, I added that ‘High’) – where a atrociously cold-hearted principal named Kamini (the layers), essayed by a perpetually important-faced Divya Dutta, makes it her life’s mission to make hers an elite school for rich snobs. We know she’s a terrible person because her hair is short, her temperament is calm and she dresses fashionably.

For this, she plans to kick out many veteran teachers (Juhi Chawla, Shabana Azmi – as sisters) by taking away their chairs, making them pay for tea and ridiculing them for advocating short cuts to memorise mathematical formulas. Who can blame her, really? These are teachers who teach math by singing “the fear of algebra is none; when you learn it, it’s full of fun!” or the ridiculously worded BODMAS song (“Once you know values of X and Y, I promise you will score very high”). The kids answer in hand-waving rhymes too. Also, Miss Chawla’s software engineer husband (Sameer Soni) speaks in sweet-nothing computer metaphors to show what a learned, sorted chauvinist he is. (“You are the CPU, I’m the hard drive and your job is the RAM”)

Anyhow, K-K-Kamini joins forces with the constipated-faced “foreign return heir” Arya Babbar, who spends time acting in Whatsapp emoticons and spelling out his ambitious plans (“My school will be world-famous than yours”) to suave competitor Jackie Shroff (special role, as compared to Rishi Kapoor’s “Above All Special Role”). His pinned ‘Suits Suck’ button adds all the more to the intrigue. Not.

When the exhausted Azmi (commutes from Four Bungalows to Virar everyday to take care of a paralysed husband) suffers a stroke after being wrongfully terminated, her morose sister Miss Chawla find san unlikely ally in the media: Bhairavi Thakkar (Richa Chadha), a bindaas Gujarati news anchor (clue: dhoklas on her news desk). Eventually, the final showdown is decided through a KBC-style 5-crore-prize-money Quiz contest. Rishi Kapoor, the celebrity anchor, is the only one who seems to be in on this tacky production values.

Naturally, the wronged sisters’ prepare for the quiz by reading on desks with strewn Oxford dictionaries and generic General Knowledge books. Student video testimonials are limited to kids nodding their heads sagely and saying, “We have forgotten our teachers.” Every racial stereotype, meanwhile, is represented by one well-meaning teacher of the school (Catholic, Sikh, South Indian, Maharastrian, Sindhi…). It’s all about making your family.

This is all after Chawla announces on TV that teachers get paid a princely 4.25 rupees/sheet to correct papers and Rs. 25 to supervise board exam sessions.
These are shocking numbers, which deserve to be addressed by a more polished and less sanctimonious film. For now, Divya Dutta’s ‘Rosy Miss’ and Divya Jagdale as Mrs. Iyer in Amole Gupte’s ‘Stanley Ka Dabba’ remain the only on-screen teachers that invoke the good-cop-bad-cop teacher routines of our real childhoods.