Shah Rukh for students

Applying for a high-flying management course? What if your curriculum reads like a course straight out of Bollywood? Semester 1: Swades, Semester 2: Manthan and Semester 3: Chak De! India.

Believe it or not, this is a real curriculum. A majority of the students of Rural Management at the prestigious Xavier Institute of Management in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India, have opted for the elective subject Community Mobilisation and Institution Building that has no textbooks but is all about learning from Bollywood films.

“One of the main reasons I opted for the course is that there are no books or lengthy assignments to deal with as in other subjects.

"This is a refreshing break from conventional learning,'' says second-year student Pratheep Purshothamana.

The content

Shyam Benegal's Manthan tells the story of a young urban group headed by a veterinary doctor, which is sent to a village to help start a milk cooperative.

Then there is Ashutosh Gowarikar's Swades, starring Shah Rukh Khan, that revolves around a successful Nasa scientist who comes home to an Indian village.

He discovers the pathetic conditions that prevail there and decides to do something to improve the situation.

The third, Chak De! India, one of the most memorable films of recent times, is about a disgraced hockey coach who puts together a winning women's team.

Professor Niraj Kumar, who adopted this unusual approach to teaching management techniques, feels the students instantly relate to this method of teaching.

In his classroom, films are seen with the same concentration as one would when reading a management book.

Students are shown one of the three films and asked to draw inferences. The next day the subject is debated in the 90-minute class.

More attentive

“The biggest change seen after adopting this methodology is that the class is more attentive. Earlier, when I would teach from textbooks, I would sense fatigue.

"But now it's a great brainstorming session, as it concerns quality cinema. At times, even the designated 90 minutes are not enough,'' Kumar says.

The idea sprang as a result of difficulty faced in compiling reference material for Community Mobilisation and Institution Building.

Even more challenging was to figure a way to explain the subject in the context of rural management.

“Earlier, when I talked about a village with certain characteristics, they would all perceive it in diverse ways — students come from different parts of the country with varying rural topography. Now they instantly understand what I am talking about,'' he says.

Kumar saw scores of films before zeroing in on the final three. He then developed the course content around these films, which deal with the theme of management.

Swades is a study in leadership, Manthan is about community mobilisation while Chak De! India is about building a motivated team.

The 30-hour course consists of nine hours of movie-watching and the remaining time is used for discussions.

“Instead of cramming study material, we debate the film's subject as a team. This way, we learn more about management,'' says student Tripati Naswa.

After going through the theoretical aspects, the students head towards a village for fieldwork, where they implement and test the theories they have developed.

The course has been well accepted and the institute is considering introducing a similar method for other courses as well.

In the past, blockbusters such as Lagaan, Krrish, Guru, Traffic Signal and Corporate have been used as case studies in various institutes to understand management theories.

For instance, the way Aamir Khan goes about recruiting players for his cricket team in Lagaan makes it a lesson in corporate management. Or, for that matter, the packaging of Krrish was a lesson in marketing management.

Professor Prashant Salwan, who teaches international business at IIM Indore, India, says: “The way Krrish was packaged was amazing.

"It was released in three languages simultaneously, the in-movie advertisements were perfectly placed and the tie-up with the Singapore government brought the cost of production down, making it a great case study for supply chain and operations management and international marketing.''

Setting an example

Krrish scored on all these fronts. It is being studied at Harvard Business School, the University of Hong Kong and the University of Leeds.

This may be a new way to teach but its popularity can be gauged from the fact that a number of other institutes are considering adopting the same method of teaching. After all, filmmaking is serious business.