After conquering Netflix, omnipotent Minnal Murali wows Kerala engineering question paper

The questionnaire themed on Minnal Murali (left) was prepared by Dr Kurian John (centre) of Mar Athanasius College of Engineering, Kothamangalam. Director Basil Joseph shared it on his Instagram (right).

Basil Joseph stopped being an engineer to follow his passion, movies. Thanks to his career switch, Malayalam had its first superhero movie, Minnal Murali, which has scaled the popularity charts since its Netflix release in mid-December, 2021.

The director, who left engineering for good wouldn't have guessed that one day his movie would inspire an engineering paper.

The third-semester examination paper on 'Mechanics of Fluids' prepared at the Mar Athanasius College of Engineering (MACE), Kothamangalam was themed on Minnal Murali.

From Murali to his nemesis Shibu to Josemon to even the setting of Kurukanmoola feature in the science paper that had eight questions for a total of 50 marks.

This is the paper on 'Mechanics of Fluids' that has caught everyone's attention.

The effort has been widely appreciated and even Basil himself added the questionnaire to his Instagram stories.

"Exams are stressful, so I wanted to ease that a bit," said Dr Kurian John of MACE, who prepared the questionnaire.

Dr John, who is in quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19, couldn't see the 'look' on the faces of his students as they sat for the exam held at the college on Tuesday, but he has been receiving calls and texts from all corners appreciating the idea.

Dr John says he was inspired by his research guide, Dr C Rajendran, who used to model his questions on certain characters or events. "So even if you are not able to answer the question you leave the examination hall with a smile," says Dr John.

Since joining MACE in 2016, the professor has been trying to adopt the same philosophy for internal examinations, while adhering to the pattern advised by the university.

"Whenever I get time I try to prepare questions that make exams interesting for the students. After the floods, I used that as a theme for one of the papers. I also used the students as the characters in a questionnaire once," said Dr John.

"But this time I used Minnal Murali as a theme because it is quite popular and I felt the students, being youngsters, will find it interesting."

A native of Pallikkaa near Kakkanad, who did his Ph.D. from IIT Madras, Dr John is an advocate of making learning fun.

Soon after its release, Minnal Murali had become a sensation and featured in the top 10 of most watched non-English movies/shows on Netflix.

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