
Meanwhile, Rancho and Pia post Farhan's letter to his favorite photographer, who offers him a position as assistant. With intensive care and support from his friends, Raju recovers in time for a corporate job interview. Unwilling to betray Rancho or disappoint his family, Raju unsuccessfully attempts suicide by jumping. After discovering their antics, Virus threatens to expel Raju unless he writes a letter implicating Rancho in the break-in. One night, the three friends drunkenly break into the Sahastrabuddhe household to allow Rancho to profess his love to Pia. He also attracts the attention of Chatur Ramalingam, an arrogant Ugandan-born Tamil student known as "Silencer" due to his abilities in rote learning and procrastination.

Rancho quickly falls in love with Pia, Virus' younger daughter, a medical student, and always scores the highest marks out of his class, much to the dismay of Virus. After giving unorthodox answers in class, Rancho comes into conflict with the college's director, Viru Sahastrabuddhe, known as "Virus", whose traditional and strict philosophies on education contrast sharply with Rancho's carefree love of learning. Their third roommate and friend, Ranchoddas "Rancho" Chanchad (Aamir Khan) is a highly talented and eccentric inventor. Farhan has a secret passion to be a photographer, but studies engineering in fear of his father, whereas Raju chooses engineering to support his family, but has poor grades because he fears the consequences on his family of failing. 3 Idiotas, a Mexican remake, also was released in 2017.įarhan Qureshi (R.Madhavan) and Raju Rastogi are students and roommates at the prestigious Imperial College of Engineering (ICE). A Telugu remake was planned despite Nanban having a Telugu dubbed version titled Snehitudu. This film was remade in Tamil as Nanban (2012) which also received critical praise and commercial success.

The subtitled version of the film grew popular in South Asia, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, South Korea, and the United States. The brains behind the innovations were Remya Jose, a student from Kerala, who created the pedal operated washing-machine Mohammad Idris, a barber from Hasanpur Kalan in Meerut district in Uttar Pradesh, who invented a bicycle-powered horse clipper and Jahangir Painter, a painter from Maharashtra, who made the scooter-powered flour mill. The film is distinctive for featuring real inventions by little-known people in India's backyards. It also became one of the few Indian films to become successful at the time in East Asian markets such as China, eventually bringing its overseas total to more than US$65 million at the time-the highest-grossing Bollywood film of all time in overseas markets, before being overtaken by Chennai Express in 2013. It also held the record for the highest net collections in the first week for a Bollywood film. Upon release, the film was the highest-grossing film in its opening weekend in India and had the highest opening day collections for an Indian film up until that point.
