Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya

Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya revolves around a ramshackle public school and its many colourful faces. It may not directly belong to the ‘Rural Cinematic Universe,’ but you can tell that it comes from the house of former TVF collaborators (you can take the makers out of a streaming brand, but you can’t take the streaming brand out of the makers). It’s the same shtick of Panchayat (ramshackle village office), Gram Chikitsalay (ramshackle government clinic) and Maamla Legal Hai (ramshackled district court): slice-of-life dramedies where everyone is a ‘sample’ character, every crisis is lighthearted, every episode has a centrist moral stance, and every monologue belongs to the Rajkumar Hirani school of happy problem-solving. The genre fatigue is real. The language is faded, like a gravy-stained page of a book that’s worn out from overuse.

Why should one go to school? If you ask the students of Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya, they might answer: to play cricket with their headmaster, or to enjoy kheer in the midday meal. For girl students, it means a 5k deposit in their parents’ bank accounts, a government incentive for women empowerment (the money is then used by parents to pay for the girl’s dowry). But then one of the female students states she doesn’t want to study anymore. She would rather marry her hip-hop dancer boyfriend. When a teacher tries to convince the girl, she declares: It’s my choice. It’s an amusing conundrum. What is actually the real purpose of education? It’s a question that the Prime Video series Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya, from the house of Posham Pa Pictures (Kaala Paani, Maamla Legal Hai), keeps circling back to. Is it for these kids–most of them who come from marginalised backgrounds–to make money and pull their families out of poverty? Because that they can do by network marketing or working at a local tobacco factory. What can really a school provide them? When the boyfriend doesn’t come to pick her up, the above-mentioned girl takes up a cycle and rides on her own. She doesn’t have to wait for anybody anymore. Education gives independence.

This seven part series reminds me a little of Maamla Legal Hai, the show set in a lower Delhi court in a part of the national Capital far away from the swag and smoothness of Central Delhi. Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya functions in the same mould: this is a sarkari school in the fictional mohalla of Tinki Toli, whose students come from a certain section of society, with parents working low rung jobs, whose only way out of the rut is education.