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Kota Factory Season 3: Vaibhav, Balmukund Meena, and Uday Gupta Navigate the IIT Coaching Ecosystem, Personal Crises, and Romantic/Platonic Liaisons with Vartika, Shivangi, and Meenal.
Rating: 3/5
Kota Factory Season 3: Jitendra Kumar Maintains His Equilibrium With Impressive Control
Incessant prattle and the rattle of complex mathematical equations and problems run all the way through Season 3 of Kota Factory. To that extent, the TVF-produced Netflix series offers more of what we have come to expect from it. But that isn’t all there is to the five new episodes that take the struggles of boys and girls in the rough and tumble of Kota’s IIT coaching universe forward. The not-so-secret sauce that went into Kota Factory was hitherto predominantly sweet and sour. Season 3 adds a tinge of pungency to the mix.
Several dramatic crescendos find their way into the plot. These aid in spicing up the show as it hurtles towards its finale – the all-important IIT-JEE Advanced Examination.
Growing up has its flip side. It comes with its share of awkward tumbles and bitter lessons. Kota Factory S3 seamlessly incorporates additional layers into its narrative tapestry without overtly tampering with its naturalistic core.
Between the occasionally excessive and the unmistakably essential, the season created by Raghav Subbu (who directed the ten episodes that constituted the first two seasons of the show) and producer Arunabh Kumar offers much that is insightful, illuminating, and entertaining.
Delving into the unsettling pressures of keeping up with the curriculum and racing against time, the crushing stress of the impending exams, and the gnawing fear of failing to fulfill the expectations of parents and teachers as D-Day draws nigh, the five fresh episodes take us deep into the minds and temperaments of Vaibhav, Meena, Uday, Vartika, Shivangi, and Meenal.
Amid great emotional turmoil, sometimes bruising and sometimes life-altering but never needless, the drama of make-or-break personal decisions and exam-center alarms in the IIT-JEE coaching hub of Kota still possesses sufficient meat. The fundamentals continue to be strong.
Each episode of Kota Factory Season 3 has at least one defining flashpoint. One of the boys faces a financial crunch and is forced to tutor a schoolboy for some extra cash, while another meets with an accident that threatens to put an end to his aspirations of excelling in his IIT preparations.
In another episode, a character launches into a tirade – a monologue whose intensity is heightened by a camera that weaves circles around him – when the JEE date sheet arrives. To make matters worse, on the day of the exam, he ends up in the wrong place. Learning, unlearning, and tiding over crises are, after all, the name of the game for the aspirants.
Working with a script by Puneet Batra and Pravin Yadav, director Pratish Mehta casts the narrative net wider than usual and brings in elements that shed light on the thought processes of the coaching personnel, something that the series had not explored until this point, certainly not to this extent.
Kota Factory Season 3 highlights the impact that the painstaking process of preparing IIT and medical college aspirants for crucial written tests, and the constant emphasis on marks, ranks, and methodologies, has on Jeetu Bhaiya (Jitendra Kumar) and his colleagues.
The career moves that Jeetu Bhaiya and chemistry teacher Pooja (Tillotama Shome, whose presence among the coaching staff delivers a blow for gender representation in a hitherto largely male-dominated sphere) have to consider along the way receive as much attention as the tough calls that their students are required to make as they near the end of their stint in Kota and gear up for one final shot at glory.
Upfront, we catch Jeetu Bhaiya in the depths of a psychological trough. Shaken by a tragic incident, he goes into temporary hibernation. On his return, which has his students understandably elated, he gives the center’s Math teacher Gagan (Rajesh Kumar) a mouthful over the question of how their coaching program should be run.
