‘Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya’ Series Review: An Education-System Satire That Misses The Memo

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.

You know the drill. You have an idealistic new teacher (Prasanna Bisht) who is appalled by the laidback quirks of this place. You have a goofy headmaster (Kay Kay Menon) who wants his students to shine in the upcoming board exams because the principals of the top 10 schools will profit from a state-sponsored scheme. You have the dim-witted students who are too far gone to change course. You have the staff who are too far gone to undo their incompetence. You have a sensible counsellor (Naveen Kasturia) whose own daughter resents him. You have an opportunistic MLA (Deven Bhojani) who takes interest in the school for election-sized reasons. You have one pressing issue — water-filter and lab budgets, incomplete Midday meals, 3 Idiots-style father-son conflicts, a random LGBTQ+ track, elders who don’t see the point of education — per episode. And you have the unlikely underdogs uniting like a family. The resolutions are so clean that everything feels like a template. The film-making is so invisible that watching the show is almost the same as reading it.

The title and setting refer to Adarsh Balak, the series of comic illustrations that satirise Amar-Chitra-Katha-coded school posters. So the parody here is more heightened than its TVF counterparts. Every situation is over the top. When we first see the school, a politician’s brother-in-law is using it as a temporary lodge. When an ED (Education Directorate) officer arrives, he finds the principal playing cricket more intensely than the students. A future topper is nick-named K3-ji. A millionaire invited to inspire his former school starts selling pyramid schemes during his session. A group of kids staged as junkies are revealed to be addicted to the junk-food of a student who’s an aspiring chef. A sanskari teacher named Mrs. ‘Sharma’ is too shy to teach a chapter on reproduction. A macho Hindi teacher is blackmailed by a tiny student who threatens to reveal his side-gig as a henna artist at Gurgaon weddings. A politician’s aide agrees to fund the school’s new laboratory in return for adding mythological propaganda in the history textbooks (where ‘baldness’ becomes a metaphor for the sort of communal biases that shows cannot spell out). A simpleton teacher quips “she wrote such a good essay on patriotism that I watched Mr. India twice”. And so on.

The problem isn’t the skit-like humour or the conveyor belt of childish gags. It’s the irony of undercutting this Adarsh-Balak treatment with the corny righteousness of the very posters it’s supposed to spoof. These tonal jumps defeat the purpose of the genre. It carries on the tradition of Indian storytelling that cannot tell a joke without ‘legitimising’ it through social meaning (conversely, Hollywood movies cannot get emotional if it’s not diffused with a punchline). Nobody trusts comedy enough to convey a message; a lecture always comes. Even if the intent is sincere, the show tries to straddle both sides. It’s hard to take the characters and their intellects seriously when they abruptly dole out wisdom (set to an elevator-piano score) at the end of episodes. I’m still waiting for a title that commits to farce as a medium of commentary, not an attachment to it.

There’s also the holy elephant in the room. The timing of Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya is worth nothing, even if entirely unintended. With the ongoing student protests across the country, you’d think the unserious-but-serious tenor of a show about a rot in the education system would reflect the manner of GenZ rebellion. Yet, it does not register. There’s something off about how the writing normalises the decay and decenters the youth, like it’s asking us to smile at the dysfunctionality of our culture (the we-are-like-this-only syndrome). It acts as an antidote to the more performative and intense social dramas, but in the process, it looks just as designed.

Franchises like Panchayat, Gullak and its ilk are guilty of doing the same in the long run. With their ‘bittersweet’ tropes and nostalgic observations, they tend to desensitise audiences to the cracks in society by presenting them as slice-of-life entertainment. Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya does not exist in isolation of the world it occupies, but it runs the risk of trivializing the failures of grassroots schooling and, by extension, failing to read the urgency of the moment. When a student declares to her dad that she’s joining coaching classes for NEET, you almost want to warn her. The echoes are uncanny. But the scene, like many scenes from many similarly-themed shows, is more concerned with leaky eyes than leaky institutions. It’ll be interesting to see if Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya chooses to be in conversation with reality in its next season. Perhaps the satire of it all cannot afford to be an escape anymore. Perhaps it’s supposed to be a reckoning. After all, what is tragedy but comedy with nowhere to go?