There’s already a fictionalised, commercial-infested series about the edutech provider Physics Wallah on Amazon MX Player. Netflix has launched its own ad-free version of the company’s underdog-to-unicorn story.
Hello Bachhon is named after the signature greeting of Physics Wallah founder Alakh Pandey. The five-episode Hindi series traces the challenges faced by Alakh (Viineet Kumar Siingh) as he tries to move from a scrappy YouTube channel to an established business without sacrificing his ideals or the interests of his followers.
That’s the show’s pitch, which probably mirrors the sales pitch of the publicly listed company. For all its efforts to create a broader context for Alakh’s striving (the poor state of formal education, the rapacity of rivals, the pressure on students who take entrance exams), Hello Bachhon is a five-episode advertisement for the Physics Wallah founder’s awesomeness.
The show has been released at a time when artificial intelligence poses serious competition to non-classroom teaching. Hello Bachhon tries to emphasise the human connection, suggesting that AI cannot deliver what Physics Wallah – and Physics Wallah alone – provides.
Created by Kota Factory writer Abhishek Yadav and directed by Prathish Mehta, Hello Bachhon relies on its lead actor’s transparent sincerity to plug itself. Viineet Kumar Siingh’s Alakh is a saintly, student-first type who sacrifices and struggles to achieve his goals.
Alakh is hugely popular among his subscribers for his lack of pretentiousness and his skill in simplifying complex concepts. Alakh also insists on keeping Physics Wallah affordable, adding an “education-for-all” feather in his cap.
He’s supported by his sister (Girija Oak Godbole). But Alakh’s father (Jairoop Jeevan) rubbishes his dreams, contributing a layer of inter-generational conflict that is more engrossing than Alakh’s efforts to expand his enterprise.
Alakh’s co-founder Prateek Maheshwari (Vikram Kochhar) has the sorry job of introducing Alakh to various funders, only to be turned down each time. Workplace ups and downs are treated as moral crises. Alakh is undercut by poaching and threatened by a rival. These repetitive scenes, possibly of the most interest to Physics Wallah investors and loyalists, only burnish Alakh’s image some more.
Each of the students who become Physics Wallah customers represents a part of a problem for which Alakh has the magic wand. These include an impoverished villager from Bihar, a Mumbai slum dweller, a young woman in an orthodox family in Haryana and a bright cricketer torn between academia and sports. Alakh also leaps to the rescue of a student who drives himself to ruin at a coaching class in Kota.
There are slivers of insight in the hunger of pupils for good marks, the conservative values of Alakh’s father, and the obsession with getting into an Indian Institute of Technology college. But writers Abhishek Yadav, Ankit Yadav, Vernaali and Sandeep Singh Rawat are unable to expand Hello Bachhon into a larger examination of why students need coaching in the first place, and what edutech platforms mean for Indian education.
With the Physics Wallah logo write large over the episodes, the series ends up as a brand building exercise that is passed off as nothing less than a social “revolution”.
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