What is the purpose of education? I found the question explored with surprising depth in an unlikely place: a Bollywood film about coaching centers that begins and ends with Euler’s identity.

All India Rank was the directorial debut of Varun Grover (based on his original script). Grover is a respected scriptwriter, author, poet, standup comedian, and lyricist and brings a thoughtful moral sensitivity to everything he does. I am a huge fan, and this movie did not disappoint. 

Essentially, All India Rank is a coming-of-age story set in 1990s India about Vivek, a 17-year-old reluctantly sent to Kota for IIT entrance exam coaching. It’s a film about parental pressure, unlikely friendships formed in dormitories, the weight of middle-class aspirations, and the slow realization that life rarely unfolds according to anyone’s predetermined plan.

There have been many recent films and series about India’s coaching center culture (Kota Factory, Super 30, 12th Fail, to name a few), but All India Rank is the first that feels genuinely honest about what this experience actually entails. Not the least because it’s more realistic in its details (though Grover’s depiction of early 1990s India rings so true that I asked my daughter to watch it to understand the country I grew up in), but because it refuses to lie about outcomes.

What particularly stood out in my mind was how the movie starts and ends, of all things, with mathematics. More specifically, with Euler’s identity, one of the most elegant equations in mathematics. Now this was definitely not something I was expecting to see in any movie, let alone one from Bollywood. 

To contextualize, the film opens with a voice over, starting with “i” the imaginary number, square root of minus 1. Gradually, the universal constants pi and e are introduced leading to Euler’s identity: e^(πi) + 1 = 0, written on a blackboard even while scenes of a young man leaving his home for a training center flash in and out. For most viewers, it’s probably just mathematical decoration, a nod to the engineering aspirations that drive the story. But Grover is playing a deeper game. The movie comes full circle, ending with the same equation, this time written by the student in his notebook. This could not happen by chance. 

And Grover has given more indications of his interest in the aesthetics of mathematics. In a recent Scroll Adda he managed to sneak in the idea of mathematical aesthetics even while sharing an anecdote of his early career. It was clear, to me, that the use of mathematics in his film was intentional and deliberate. 

Since it had been a while since I had seen the movie, I went back and rewatched parts of it, and in the process, developed a better understanding of Grover’s authorial/ directorial choices. It is an inspired piece of screenwriting and illuminates something profound about learning, life, and the strange beauty of accepting what we cannot fully optimize.

As it happens, this Euler’s identity was something I was familiar with. 

e to the power Pi i plus 1
It was Euler who first saw, how these variables react
To come up with a beautiful mathematical fact,
To total up to, (surprise) the number zero.
Could we have done it without our little imaginary hero?

I wrote those lines in a poem called “The Mathematical i” years ago, (incidentally one of my only published poems) fascinated by how this equation brings together foundational mathematical concepts (the base of the natural logarithm e, the ratio π, the imaginary unit i, and the additive and multiplicative identities 1 and 0) in perfect harmony. Not surprisingly, it is considered the most beautiful equation in mathematics, revealing as it does unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, in a powerful intellectual punch of an equation. 

The imaginary and the constant coming together to equal zero. Nothing. Yet, despite that, encompassing everything. 

All this comes together at the final moments of the movie when All India Rank returns to this equation. The mathematical poetry finally makes sense as the protagonist explains that Euler believed this equation proved there was order in the universe, a way of “combining the irrational with the universal to make sense of it all.”

That phrase perfectly captures what the film itself is doing.

Yes it is a coming-of-age film, but it is also so much more. It is Grover reflecting on his youth, and the India of his youth. (Incidentally, Grover, like me, received an undergraduate degree in engineering before shifting careers.) It is a reflection on the pressures and fragility of being middle class in India. Of a nation growing up. Of being expected to chase goals that feel foreign and abstract, disconnected from any personal meaning. It is all about striving to become something, something better. 

What sets All India Rank apart from other films in this space is its refusal to treat ideas glibly. Unlike blockbusters like “3 Idiots,” which reduce educational critique to feel-good platitudes and neat resolutions, Grover’s film respects both its characters and its subject matter enough to avoid easy answers. This respect for ideas extends to how the film treats scientific concepts, not as stepping-stones to success, or plot devices, but rather as worthy of appreciation in their own right.

There’s a lovely moment when Sarika explains the scattering of light with genuine enthusiasm, not because it will help her crack some exam, but because she’s genuinely inspired by how the ideas of science can be seen everywhere in the world around her. But Grover deepens this characterization in a quieter scene around the film’s midpoint. The friends are hanging out by a lake, and Sarika marvels at how the lines on a seashell are determined by the tides, and hence by the distance between the earth and the moon. She speaks of her dream: whether or not she gets into IIT, she wants to stay connected to physics, to keep seeing these connections between abstract principles and the tangible world.

It’s a perfect illustration of what Grover seems to understand about mathematical and scientific aesthetics: there’s a beauty in these ideas that’s inspiring in and of itself, independent of any utilitarian outcome. Sarika embodies this pure relationship with knowledge, this becoming-through-inquiry that needs no external validation.

But the scene is left deliberately incomplete. When Vivek is asked about his own dreams, he struggles to answer. He hasn’t yet developed that relationship to wonder; he’s still trapped in the grammar of “becoming better”—of rankings and outcomes and other people’s expectations. The scene finds its resolution only at the film’s end, when Vivek returns to Euler’s identity and begins to articulate his own sense of meaning. It’s masterful structural writing: Sarika shows us what it looks like to have found one’s connection to inquiry; the rest of the film is Vivek’s slow, uncertain journey toward finding his.

In a recent conversation at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Grover spoke about why these ideas matter to him:

I love these kinds of things about our universe, and it really helps me stay grounded. … We are just that pale blue dot … We are very insignificant beings in this vast universe, but also we are the only way the universe can see itself or understand itself. So we have to take that insignificance very seriously.

That paradox—insignificance taken seriously, the universe understanding itself through us—echoes the strange beauty of Euler’s identity: the imaginary and the irrational combining to equal zero, nothing, and yet somehow encompassing everything. It’s the same paradox at the heart of All India Rank: that meaning emerges not from achieving predetermined outcomes, but from the act of seeing and wondering itself.

This honest treatment of science and learning stands in sharp contrast to films that either don’t care about ideas or don’t understand them deeply enough to let them breathe. All India Rank never falls into the glib territory where complex systemic problems get solved through individual inspiration or where the beauty of scientific thinking gets reduced to motivational soundbites.

This is not a story about a student who cracks the system or finds some magical way to excel. We never learn if Vivek succeeds in getting into IIT, whether his and Sarika’s budding romance has a future. There are no dramatic epiphanies or triumphant finishes. The coaching industry doesn’t reform itself. Nobody “becomes better” in any measurable way.

The film’s genius lies in how it treats this process with the same mathematical elegance as Euler’s identity. And by returning to that equation at the end, Grover does something even more sophisticated, he shows us how revisiting what we thought we knew with new eyes is itself an act of becoming. The same mathematical constants that seemed abstract and disconnected at the beginning now carry the weight of lived experience, transforming not because the equation changed, but because we have. Just as that equation finds profound meaning in the relationship between irrational and rational numbers, All India Rank finds meaning in the interplay between aspiration and reality, between what we imagine our lives should be and what they actually become.

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There’s a difference between “becoming” and “becoming better.” The latter implies optimization toward a known goal; the former is open-ended, a process without a predetermined destination. That distinction matters, especially in a world where educational technology is obsessed with metrics and outcomes. But re-watching Grover’s film, I realize this insight extends far beyond ed-tech and the latest AI tools. 

The coaching center in All India Rank represents the ultimate expression of “becoming better” thinking: a system designed to manufacture a specific type of human (the IIT graduate) through relentless optimization toward predetermined metrics. It’s behaviorism at scale, complete with rankings, mock tests, and the promise that following the prescribed path will lead to a prescribed destination.

But life, as Vivek discovers, is more like Euler’s identity than a linear optimization problem. It involves working with irrational elements (π), imaginary components (i), and universal constants (e) to arrive at something unexpectedly simple and profound: the recognition that we are always in process, always becoming something we cannot fully predict or control.

What makes this film remarkable is how it honors that uncertainty without falling into nihilism. The ending is genuinely uplifting, not because problems are solved but because the lead character stops demanding that his life conform to someone else’s equation. He learns, through experiences touching and painful, to possibly see beauty in the process itself, to find meaning in the journey itself.

In my poem about imaginary numbers, I ended with these lines:

So if you want to perceive the value of this little guy
I guess you have to just develop your mathematical i.
It may also help you remember how often we forget to see
The significance, to human life, of the imaginary.

All India Rank is ultimately about developing that kind of vision: of learning to see the significance of what cannot be optimized, measured, or reduced to a ranking. It’s about embracing the imaginary components of our lives, the parts that don’t fit neatly into predetermined categories but that make the whole equation work.

That’s why the film needed to begin and end with Euler’s identity. Not as mathematical ornamentation, but as a reminder that the most beautiful truths often emerge from the interplay between the rational and the irrational, the real and the imaginary, the planned and the surprising.