3 Idiots - Most Idiotic aspect (This is not a movie review)

3 Idiots, was the most hyped and talked about movie of the year, thanks to the faceoff between chetan bhagat and vidoo vinod chopra and co., regarding the ownership of script, and the publicity magnet amir khan . Though it was a good entertainer with a message, which most of were already aware of , but definitely a movie which exaggerated everything. Although I can make a list of it but would restrict myself to the one which caught my attention most as it was definitely the mother of all exaggerations. Let me remind it, in case you missed it while humming "all izz well" and reminiscieing your college days or cursing your choice of profession,it was regarding the number of patents that Phunsuk Wangdoo (or whatever he was called) held on his name. I can definitely say that who so ever was behind that idea of quoting 400 patents, certainly didn't knew the meaning of patent, or maybe it confused it with a scientific publication or worse, confused it with the number of gadgets that one has made or supervised (like the scooter powered grain huller, or manually powered shearer). For once I thought that maybe it was possible, after all he was portrayed as person with brain of Einstein and rebellious instincts of Bhagat singh, but than I thought of doing some research over the topic (this is what i have learned from engineering, always back your conclusion with maths else it becomes speculation, because speculations which maths present are always acceptable!). I thought that it would be interesting to present it here.
According to Data provided by department of commerce , government of India, in 2004 there were 6,406 active patents in India, If we assume that figure goes up dramatically to 10,000 in 2010, than out of it 400 are held by phunsuk wangdoo, i.e. 4% of all the active research is done by a single dude, who has his laboratories in ladakh and interestingly reads blogs and books! (I just hope he reads mine too and comments over it) Two conclusions could be drawn from this, first that Ladakh, the cold desert provides the best product development environment in the world and second that all the R&D labs and the spend on them is a waste as they are not even cumulatively able to do what phunsuk is doing with his Tibetan research assistants. The first conclusion results in another corollary, who so ever holds ladakh and surrounding areas, will be sitting over gold mine. Now I understand why Pakistan badly wants Kashmir even at the cost of their country's whole GDP, the would have known the strategic importance of the place.
Lets look at the documentation part of patents, generally a filling becomes a patent after a year of its filling. As per the time frame presented in the movie, Phunsuk did all this in 7 years. So on an average it turns out that he must have filed all the patents at least an year before. So 400 patents in 6 years, if we assume continuous rate, it turns out to be 66.6 patents each year. Over 12 patents each month or a patent every 3 day! I wonder how many researchers are capable of writing an original publishable material in 3 days flat, (the duration includes the experimentation, fabrication, testing etc ) and one has to maintain this pace for 6 years. Again if this is taken as true, than brightest of our researchers will appear to be blocked heads or researching at snail's pace, when phunsuk is on turbocharged 1000bhp bugati veyron.
Let as now take the cost aspect. According to estimates, the cost of patenting and maintaining it for a period of 10 years ,costs around 32,000 euros. So 400 such patents would have costed around 12,800,000 euros. That roughly translates into 83.2 crores rupees. To fit it into the time frame and making our estimates conservative lets consider just 30% of this value which is 24.9 crores rupees. Accumulated in 6 years, thus average earning per year becomes 4.15 crores! I think after seeing this, many of the wall street professionals would commit suicide as they could have hardly made money of this scale in just 6 years of their career, and this was Phunsuk's average annual spend in past years forget about his earnings.
I think instead of Chetan and Amir fighting over it, whole scientific community should sue whosoever came up with that idea, as by this portrayal they are indirectly proving each of them incompetent. Maybe they wanted to convey through this movie that all these scientists and engineers of the world or india at least are not in the profession which they wanted to be in, rather were forced into. What a message!!

PS: I do not have any rows with amir khan, rather definitely he is one the most sensible person in the industry, but one should always bash such idiotic ideas.