Comics, Manga, Myself

Reading At the End of the World: The Drifting Classroom

There are a few names that immediately come to mind when you say “horror manga” — Junji Ito, Suehiro Maruo, Hideshi Hino, and Kazuo Umezu (or Umezz, if you prefer). Of these, Umezu is the oldest, born in 1936, and was still making manga as recently as 1995. Beyond his primary career, Umezu is a musician, an actor, screenwriter, and film director. And as the 2009 picture below shows, he’s also a bit of a visual personality.

He’s hugely influential in the manga industry, and the newer crop of horror manga-ka, including Ito have gone on record citing his work as one of their major sources of inspiration. Rumiko Takahashi, known for blockbuster series like Ranma 1/2, Inuyasha, and Maison Ikkoku worked as his assistant early on her career — and I believe you can see shades of Umezu in her short Mermaid Saga.

Sadly, his work has not been widely available in English. Orochi was a single-volume work published by Viz in 2002, and is now unavailable. The two volume Cat-Eyed Boy came out around 2008, and has been unavailable in dead-tree format for about a decade now, though thankfully available on Kindle and Comixology. For the record, this is what I wrote about it in Rolling Stone magazine about this title back in the day:

Kazuo Umezu is known for his gruesome, no-holds-barred comics. One of the of luminaries of the horror manga scene, Umezu knows how to unabashedly press the right buttons on his unsuspecting readers, his stories taking you down uncertain paths in deserted temples, suburban neighborhoods and bucolic villages. The Cat-eyed Boy in the stories is a monstrous-looking creature who plays the omnipresent narrator, at times an onlooker of the ghastly proceedings, and at other times actively involved in the eerie goings-on, leaving you riveted and repulsed at the same time.

But it is the eleven-volume Drifting Classroom that has been the white whale for completist manga collectors. The series was published in its entirety in 2006, and went out of print. Thankfully, in 2019 Viz chose to republish it in a three-volume hardcover format under its Signature imprint, at a great price point. The books are gorgeously designed volumes, and one of the reasons I jumped on them (other than the chance of these going OOP very soon too), was the visual and tactile experience of the hardcovers. The text you see on the covers are embossed, and the outer surface of the books have a matte texture that makes it feel like a vintage publication. I also dig the glitchy font design, with the word “CLASSROOM”. Its like adjusting an old television set to an alien signal.

This is the official description of the series on Viz’s website:

In the aftermath of a massive earthquake, a Japanese elementary school is transported into a hostile world where the students and teachers are besieged by terrifying creatures and beset by madness.

What the summary does not tell you, though, is how the story-line is a series of escalating events that are accompanied by strained nerves, wild revelations, gruesome deaths. There is a mood of panic and fear that propels the story forward, most of it heightened by the anachronistic artwork from Umezu. The series came out in 1973, after all. His style is cartoonish, and does not possess the vocabulary or style of modern manga. The emotional pitch of all characters are set to a default of 8 out of 10, and every setback or stressful situation twists that dial to 200. So, as a reader, that’s the first threshold you have to cross to take the book seriously.

The many faces of Sho Takamatsu

The story is told from the point of view of Sho Takamatsu, a twelve-year old sixth-grader who begins the story by getting into an argument with his mother before rushing off to school. The unresolved tension between the two play a significant role in events of the manga, and the narrative device is Sho’s diary in which he is talking to his mother. When the school disappears, it’s through his eyes that we see the horrors unfold. He jumps through the various stages of grief in the course of the first few chapters, and is one of the few that realize the kids have to maintain the peace both among themselves and among their juniors. It is not easy to steer this school of semi-hysterical children towards any kind of common action plan, but Sho does his best. From the very beginning, he takes on responsibilities beyond his age, calming the younger children down, taking charge of things when they spiral out of control.

The initial chapters of the manga capture the agonizing revelation that the survivors are well and truly alone, trapped in a world that is all desert and desolation, with the only resources available being the ones that are in the school compound. Umezu uses creative ways to dispose of the adult teachers, most of whom attempt to be the voice of reason as things go south. By the middle of the series, there is only one adult left, and he is in no mental condition to interfere. Having the teachers around in the initial chapters also demonstrates the freedoms inherent in the educational system in the seventies, namely, the ability to slap crying kids into silence.

Umezu eases us into a cast of interesting supporting characters in subsequent arcs. There’s Saki, the level-headed girl who has a crush on Sho and therefore sides with him at all costs. The fifth grader Gamo looks like a scrawny nerd, and he is the brains of the gang, with the best ideas and theories whenever they are in a jam. Otomo, the class representative, starts the story as a member of Sho’s inner circle. Then there are the strange ones, like Nakata with the unquenchable appetite and hyperactive imagination, the handicapped girl Nishi, who struggles to keep up with the rest of the gang.

The challenges the kids face are unrelenting. The food delivery person takes over the cafeteria and keeps everyone away from what he considers his supplies. A particular teacher loses his marbles in a spectacular way. There is an outbreak of a deadly disease. Food and drinking water problems. Factions within the classrooms attempting coups and trying to rig elections. Blame-games and accusations related to who was responsible for causing the cataclysmic event, and the occasional ripple of superstition. A sudden rainstorm that threatens to destroy the school garden with a mudslide. A conflict that leads to an outbreak of fire. People unwilling to listen to reason. The school, as is to be expected, becomes a microcosm of society, and all burden of leadership falls on the shoulders of a bunch of twelve-year old children. And all these problems pale into insignificance when the supernatural elements creep in. A strange insect appears to consume some of the school-children, while leaving others unharmed. Ugly mushrooms grow everywhere, with no way to find out if they are edible or not, and those who consume them are….oh, now that is something you should read for yourself.

Very early on, the characters come to the realization that their displacement is actually a time-jump. They have arrived many years into the future, and in their original present, the school is considered to have been destroyed in an earthquake. This introduces a nifty semi-supernatural angle to the story, where Sho’s mother hears his voice in key moments of their struggle, and her actions in the past end up influencing the outcomes of events in the children’s future. This, incidentally, also leads in to the eventual climax at the end of the series.

The sixth grade children agree to become the “parents” of the kids from the lower grades, with both the boys and the girls agreeing to carry out their responsibilities. This reads, and sounds both like social fantasy, and a reflection of the fact that it is the younger generation that think about and make sacrifices for the common good, and self-organize against existential threats. (shout-out to Greta Thunberg et al) No doubt some of this sounds very familiar if you have read Lord of the Flies, and the dozens of similar stories involving school-children stuck in mock societies bereft of adults.

Midway through the series, it is all but apparent that the story is an allegory for climate change. The desolate world the children are transported to is literally the future they inherit from a generation that has played havoc with nature. The explanation for how exactly the planet ends up this way fits in neatly with Umezu’s body-horror tics — grotesque tentacled creatures begin to appear, even as some of the students undergo physical changes because of their, ahem, dietary decisions. The fun is in seeing Umezu twist the knife even he guts the familiar tropes of the story. Like the best of horror stories, there is a tightrope between horror and absurd comedy that he excels at.

Shit gets real

As the description suggests, there is a also vein of tragic madness that runs through the characters and their tribulations. Remember what I said about the heightened emotional pitch in Umezu’s writing and artwork? That is what makes the really dark turns of insanity among the characters distressing to the reader. When such a thing happens, when a character loses it, you do not realize at first whether it’s just the creator doing what he does best, or if it’s genuinely a character trait. It’s only when true horror comes lurching at us that we jerk back in our seats. By then it’s too late, both for us reading the story, and for the characters who bear the brunt of these breakdowns.

And of course, it goes without saying that Umezu is phenomenal at pacing and the art of the slow build-up. For all my scoffing about pitch, his mastery of layout and his ability to amplify childhood fears to a crescendo is in display throughout the book. Look at this example of a page where the kids have to hide from a monster. Gamo advises everybody to pretend to be an object to clear their minds of thought, since that is the only way to avoid being detected. “Become a thing,” he urges. A wordless page demonstrates Sho’s state of mind, even as the clock is ticking.

There are numbers thrown around in terms of student casualties as the book goes on, and let me warn you — the death toll gets higher and higher, and Umezu does not shy away from gruesome visuals. One of my favorite sequences is when the school is under attack by a giant insect, one that is seemingly unstoppable. Ikegaki, one of Sho’s classmates elected Minister of Defense, takes it on himself to organize the class scrappers to attack the monster as the others shelter behind barricades. They manage to turn the insect away, but not without casualties. The aftermath is brutal.

And that of course is one of the main reasons I still love well-written manga. The focus is not just on the grand moments, but also on what comes after. The sequence of panels slowly closing up on Ikegaki’s face make me tear up.

As the years go by, I have come to the conclusion that stories set in school hold great emotional resonance for me. Not because I have great memories of my school life, nor that I put myself in the shoes of a school-child when I am reading them. It’s possible that the combination of innocence and potential strikes a chord in me. Adulthood brings with it the jaded third-person perspective towards events in the lives of school children that are so earth-shaking for them. Umberto Eco wrote, “Life is about reliving your childhood in slow motion.” That may well be true, but I know I will never feel the bitterness of a high school rivalry, the pain of a crush on the girl sitting at the adjacent desk, the sheer terror of a teacher’s disapproving glare, at least not first-hand. Therein comes in my fascination with the school story, my way of vicariously living those myriad life experiences all over again. School is never a place one wants to be in as a child, but for some of us, it is a mental image of home, of a time and place where we were safe. And in a time when nothing and nowhere feels safe, isn’t it natural that I turn to school stories for succour?

The school in the series represents a similar safe haven for the children. There is an emotional sequence around the middle, where Sho says “Tadaima” when he enters the school gates, back from an external expedition. The word, which means “I’m home” becomes a mantra for the children, all of whom begin to chant it as well, becoming a source of acceptance of the fact that they really have nowhere else to go. The Drifting Classroom, for all its perceived faults, is one of the finest school stories out there, and all you need to do is to switch off that irony-meter in your brain and give in to its charms. Despite the lump in your throat, you will find yourself cheering on the protagonists as, like the best of school stories, it ends on a hopeful note.

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Comics, Manga, Today I Learned

The Gaiman Awards

Today I learned that there is an award for comics called the Gaiman award. And contrary to what one might expect, it is not related to our favorite Wordsmith in Black.

The word ‘Gaiman’ here is an abbreviation of “Gaikoku no manga’, literally, ‘foreign comics’. This refers to comics translated from foreign work and published in Japan. For those of you who fret over what is comics and what is manga and bug-eyed-styles and all that, here you go: ‘Civil War’ translated into Japanese and published in Japan becomes manga, and can even get nominated for a manga award. You can keep your Western biases to yourself, thank you.

The list of comics nominated since the award was instituted in 2011 shows a curious mash-up of titles, including the aforementioned Marvel title; Superman: Red Son rubs shoulders with the likes of Nicholas de Crecy’s Celestial Bibendum (French), Schuiten and Peeters’ Les Cités Obscures (Belgium), Lat’s Town Boy and Kampung Boy (Malaysia), Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura’s I Kill Giants. All of which make for great, solid reading — though the jury’s still out on The New 52: Shazam, which managed to make an appearance on the 2015 nomination list. (The previous sentence is vague hyperbole, the prize went to Sweden’s Sayonara September, by Åsa Ekström)

One thing to note: the titles nominated are based on translation date, and not on publication date. This causes similar confusion as the ‘Best US Edition of International Material (Asia)’ Eisner award, where classic material ends up being nominated alongside newer ones, just because they were translated the last year. In 2016, a work by Shigeru Mizuki from the 80s (Showa: A History of Japan) beat the contemporary Master Keaton and Assassination Classroom in the Eisners.Doesn’t that make it overly confusing to judge something that is fresh along with another that has been coated with the patina of time and generational acceptance?

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Conventions, Manga

San Diego post #1

(first in a series of posts about the SDCC experience this year, with random digressions)

Did not attend too many panels at San Diego this year, except for two back to back on Saturday evening. One with Jeff Smith and Terry Moore talking about comics and the indie scene in the 90s. It started slow, when both creators made jokes about not really understanding the point of the panel, but once it got going, there were great anecdotes about jumping into the comics business, how the comics market changed over the last few decades, and great memories of previous conventions.

And this is when my camera died.

And this is when my camera batterydied.

The second panel I attended was a Best of/Worst of Manga 2013, where some of my favorite manga correspondents talked about series they liked and disliked. (It was great to be able to put faces to familiar names, like Shaennon Gaerrity, David Brothers, Brigid Alverson and Chris Butcher, and saying hello to Deb Aoki) Knew (and cheered) most of the series mentioned, and made note of the ones I did not. Funny moments included Attack on Titan and Heart of Thomas appearing in both “Best of” and “Worst of” sections. Deb made a compelling case for why Attack works and does not. Brigid was unafraid to knock on Moto Hagio a bit, even as Shannon vehemently disagreed. Much fun. You can read details here.

When the panel ended, I asked some of the panelists a question that had been bothering me the last day. Aditya Gadre had asked me on Twitter about what  title he should start reading if he wants to get into manga. My standard response to that is to figure out what kind of books and movies the person likes, instead of thrusting whatever is the core “best-of” list. He said he was a Neil Gaiman/Alan Moore fan, which got me really worked up about suggestions. And since San Diego was on, why not go to the Recommendation Mothership?

Chris took about 5 seconds to recommend Pluto, which I had thought about but dismissed because I felt it was kind of like giving Watchmen to someone who has not read superheroes. A lot of the charm of Watchmen comes from recognizing how Moore subverts familiar superhero tropes, and similarly, you enjoy the beats in Pluto much more if you have a working knowledge of the original Astro Boy stories on which it was based, and a decent knowledge of the characters in that universe. I stopped reading Pluto myself around volume 2, made sure I reread ‘The Greatest Robot on Earth’, and enjoyed the story much much more. But Naoki Urasawa is a fantastic writer/artist, and Pluto is really one of those series that is a perfect combination of art and story, without any of the manga tropes that pisses off non-manga readers.

Pluto

It’s more fun when you know who the kid is

Deb took some time to come up with two choices – Black Lagoon, which I agreed with but was a little skeptical about the bad-girl violence, and Dorohedoro, which I heartily agreed with. Black Lagoon is about a band of mercenaries called the Lagoon company, operating somewhere in South-East Asia. The story begins with them kidnapping a young Japanese salaryman who ends up joining them, and the series is an excellent mixture of no-holds-barred, stylish action mixed with moments of quiet contemplation about the nature of crime, killing and existence. Dorohedoro is a series I read a few months ago, about a man with a reptile head who fights wizards from another dimension, and this has to be the most underwhelming explanation of one of the most fascinating manga I have read in recent times. It has laugh-out-loud humor and strange secrets-behind-secrets, even as Q Hayashida, the lady who writes and draws this series, slowly draws back the curtains on both the wizard and human worlds. It is also a series where you would be hard-pressed to take sides.

Two of the bad-ass ladies of Black Lagoon

Two of the bad-ass ladies of Black Lagoon

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The zany cast of Dorohedoro

 

Brigid suggested Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (to which Deb and I both agreed). It’s about a bunch of graduates who start their business – of talking to the recently-dead and carrying out their last wishes. Each of them has a special power, like talking to the dead, or embalming, or mad computer skills. Which sounds kind of cliche, I know, but it is very very entertaining and also really creepy at times.

The_Kurosagi_Corpse_Delivery_Service

I love the cover design for the series.

The only problem with all these titles mentioned above (except Pluto) is that they are all ongoing series. Lagoon has been on hiatus for sometime, Dorohedoro is seeing steady publication, while Kurosagi is published once a year.

Other books that I thought of, which are a little more stand-alone:

Domu by Katsuhiro Otomo. Best-known for the phenomenal Akira, this was the horror-fantasy title that got Otomo noticed. A creepy story about a telekinetic showdown between an old man and a young girl in an apartment complex.

Death Note. 11 volumes. One of the most well-known manga out there, and is delightfully over-the-top sometimes and yet so compelling.

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Comics, Manga

Equivalent Exchange

The Box-set cover

Volume 15 of Fullmetal Alchemist gut-punched me good. Told completely as flashbacks, this volume has gruesome scenes of war and its effect on ordinary human beings, one in which characters established as “good” so far show the extent of blood on their hands from events past. This makes the motivations of a different character – known so far as a mass murderer who nearly killed the Elric kids – appear far more noble than we think, and make us examine the motivations of all the characters introduced so far in a different light.

Genocide, political intrigue, and dismemberment – hardly one’s choice of topics for a genre of storytelling marketed at children.It is not strange how Hiromu Arakawa balances the dark themes in Fullmetal Alchemist – there is slapstick humor aplenty. This could be one of the reasons why something that is marketed as an adult comic in the USA cannot compete with shonen manga in terms of the themes explored. With all its doom-and-gloom, there is the inherent fun that comes with reading shonen – chibi faces galore, lots of running gags – about lead protagonist Edward Elric’s short stature and temper, about Alphonse Elric’s armored body used as a receptacle to smuggle girls and cats (!!!), about the idiosyncrasies of supporting characters. I am not sure if scanlation consumers got their share of the short gags that appears at the end of every volume, with zany interpretations of the story events and alternate realities involving the characters, but it’s so so hard to not burst out laughing at them.

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These guys….

…are also these guys.

I do not intend to go into spoiler-land or even into brief-description land. The best description of FMA is Jason Thompson’s House of 1000 Manga review (and it made me very happy that he happened to write it when I was reading it). If you don’t want to do that either, read the Wikipedia summary – well, not the full article, which gives away everything. But chances are high that if you are reading this, you already know about Fullmetal Alchemist, at least in anime form. There are two anime series, the first one developed in parallel with the manga and therefore with divergent story-lines from the comic from the midpoint of the series, and with completely different Big Bad Villains. The second anime series Brotherhood is apparently a straight-up adaptation of the manga, and that may be the one I get around to watching (eventually, love, eventually). While the story is primarily about the Elric brothers,  they transform from the adventures of the two brothers on the road to the methodical unraveling of a plot that involves multiple nations and centuries of planning. At times, the brothers’ concerns become secondary to that of the supporting members of the cast. With a little bit of tinkering, it wouldn’t be surprising if this series was called Flame Alchemist, or May and her Panda, or even Homonculus Prince. (I am a Housewife? ) But yes, this is a shonen manga, and the brothers are the central characters, so it’s not surprising to see them develop as characters, learning the ways of the world from their peers, elders or – the old-fashioned way – the mistakes they make.

I am reminded of Joe Hill’s words in Locke and Key, another of my favorite fantasy series involving children caught up in frightening events beyond their control.

Scary.

I have posted this before.

It feels utterly refreshing to read a story that gives you so many payoffs in course of a 27-volume run. In most series, the early issues form the setup, the author using them as throwaway episodes to establish characterization and milieu. And that is what I thought about Fullmetal Alchemist too, but it is surprising how much the stories loop back, and how minor characters and actions in previous arcs seem to have effects on the lead characters’ actions towards the end of the series.

Most of my friends are a little annoyed at my constant sniping at mainstream American comics being published currently. Reading FMA just reinforces my belief even more – that it is possible to create all-ages comics that make you laugh and cry and cheer with and for the characters; where a character meets his end without it feeling pointless or gratuitous; where, when the stakes pile up against the protagonists and their friends, you actually begin to worry for their well-being. Where civilian casualties actually mean something. FMA goes through its story-line without being repetitive (parts of Ranma 1/2 feel that way to me) and the story is not about increasing power-levels across successive boss-fights. And you have characters with ironic lines like this:

Politics 101

 

If you are among those who has read this series already, accept a belated squee and a high-five from me. If you aren’t, you aren’t even reading this. Good-bye.

(And now I started reading Detroit Metal City10 volumes in all, should be done in the next day or two.)

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Comics, Manga, Reviews

Great Teacher Onizuka: A Review

This was originally published in Rolling Stone India, November 2009. Dusted and put up here because I plan to do a mega-reread of the series in the next few days.

Writer/Artist: Tohru Fujisawa
Publisher: Tokyopop
Rating: Four and a half stars

Meet Eikichi Onizuka, a bottom-rung university graduate (barely), whose primary interests are peering up girls’ skirts at local malls and getting into trouble – not mutually exclusive activities, those two. But fate has different plans in store for virginity-challenged young Eikichi – circumstance makes him leave his delinquence behind him and opt for a new career, that of an educator. Eikichi Onizuka, 22 years old, sets out to become Great Teacher Onizuka, the greatest sensei in Japan. His mission: to make school fun again. His secondary mission – getting to fourth base with someone. Anyone.

That is the premise behind this beloved shonen manga series, that traces Onizuka’s explosive – and often ludicrous – adventures in teaching. At first glance, it seems humanly impossible for a man of his calibre to really do much with his career choice. He cheated his way through his own academic career, seemingly has an IQ of 50, and the only legitimate qualification on his misspelled resume is that he has secured a second dan black belt in karate. He is perverted, being more than a little obsessed with young girls and their underwear. And he lets his fists do the talking most of the time. The first arc of the series establishes how Onizuka, beating all these odds, manages to get through a teacher training course at a public school and becomes a temporary teacher in the Holy Forest Academy, a prestigious private institute. He is put in charge of Class 3-4, whose students have terrorized the previous three home-room teachers into ending their careers – one committed suicide, another developed an eating disorder. It would take a very foolhardy, or a very determined educator to take up the responsibility of cleaning the school’s Augean stables.

But determination is what Onizuka has in spades. “You are a cockroach”, one of his students shrieks at him with disgust, right after the would-be teacher pops up where he wasn’t really supposed to. This analogy echoes throughout the series. Like a cockroach, Onizuka wiggles himself into his students’ lives even as they hurl expletives at him and threaten (and often perpetrate) violence against his self. Just as a cockroach skitters away from all attempts to stomp it out, our hero manages to best all the traps his devilish students cook up – from publishing morphed porno pictures of Onizuka to having him framed for embezzling money from student funds. And slowly, one by one, our hero wins them over using a combination of his perversely inappropriate world-view and his incredible physical prowess.

All long-running series by single creators run into similar teething issues – an initial rush of heady ideas that slowly slides into a predictable graph of highs and lows, where the creator struggles not only to find the voice, but to etch out a character’s life-story in a way that builds on its premise, instead of stagnating into repetitive cliche. Maintaining the momentum of a series, without over-stretching a story-line is a tough call. It would have been very easy for writer/artist Tohru Fujisawa to stumble. The second arc, that of the students being set straight by the teacher, resolutely avoids falling into the trap. Sure, it is long, but there are two aspects in which Fujisawa scores top of the manga-ka class (if you will pardon the school-based metaphor) – the delineation of the individual characters that make up the Onizukaverse. Every student in the class has a unique personality, a standalone voice which makes the reader identify with them. Partly because they are there in every classroom in any school in the world – the quiet, shy video-game-playing geek who is bullied at every turn; the computer whiz who knows more than he lets on; the headstrong yet confused loud-mouth who takes offence at minor quips; a girl whose parents are influential bureaucrats, a fact that she uses to her advantage; another with a dark secret involving a previous teacher. Sure, they are all genre archetypes, but it is Fujisawa’s genius that breathes new, fresh life into them.

The second thing that elevates the series to greatness is the sheer unpredictability of the central character. Eikichi Onizuka is a man of hidden surprises, whose heart of gold is matched only by his complete irreverence and lack of respect for authority. Early on in his career, Onizuka figures out that he really loves teaching, and he takes it on himself to be the kind of teacher that his generation did not have. At the crux of every decision Onizuka makes, however frivolous and played-for-laughs it seems to be, there is an important life-lesson that he imparts to his students. But Onizuka being the way he is, any attempt to take him seriously usually backfires, with hilarious results.

In addition to changing the way his students feel towards school, Onizuka also takes on the strict authoritarians that make up the faculty of Holy Forest Academy. His primary whipping-dog being the perennially grumpy Vice-Principal Uchiyamada – a running gag involves the Vice-Principal’s Toyota Cresta. The third arc of the series, in particular, involves a final stand against a new Principal who ousts the support of Chairman Sakurai, whose tacit approval had made a large part of Onizuka’s brushes with authority seem minor in the past.

Great Teacher Onizuka made me laugh, it had me gasping with incredulity, it made me come up with excuses to avoid work just so I could tear through the twenty-five volumes as soon as I could. It is not without its faults – a great deal of fan-service persists throughout the story, and let’s face it – if you have seen To Sir With Love and Munnabhai MBBS, you realize that the premise of GTO is hardly original. But even with all its over-the-top antics, it’s not just a fine comedy series, but also a drama that’s an indictment of the pettiness that afflicts today’s education system. It’s a scathing denouncement of self-serving, vainglorious modern-day teachers for whom teaching is nothing more than a way to make money, rather than the life-altering position it is meant to be. Hey, it made me want to go back to school, and that’s quite something!

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