on Laskar Pelangi - a humble review

It all begun with a dream. 10 kids - despite their parents' humble background as marginalised residents of a once glorious island of Belitong, who deprived their access to the island's very own abundant resources of coil - wanted to be more than just coil workers as most of their parents were. So they went to the least expensive primary school (I even thought that they paid no tuition fee afterall!) on the island, SD Muhammadiyah.

It wasn't with no difficulties at all. To them, the then so-called Laskar Pelangi (The Rainbow Army, literally), 10 is a magic number indeed. It is the minimum number of students a school should accomodate, so it wouldn't be closed down. (In the movie) The Rainbow Army itself is the last batch of the school. Despite the minimum number of students, and minimum number of teachers (only 3! One which then moved to another school, and the other one - the principal - passed away. So in the end the Army only had 1 teacher left), and minimum standard of buildings and books and chalks and uniforms and money and and and and.....the kids' will to study failed to fade.

The movie showed a lot of lost to the Army: Ikal (one of the main characters) lost his first love, the resignation of one of their teachers, their principal's death, and the most lost...Lintang, the smartest of all (a genius by nature, Ikal said), who never minded cycling back and forth to the school for 70km everyday, had to drop out from school after his father lost in the sea; the same day he brought the school a big winning on a local academic competition against the most favorite school on the island. Lintang had no mother, and he was the eldest of 4, his siblings were all girls....so the tragic path was clear to him and to all his friends and beloved teacher: he had to be the man of the family - when he was only 10.

A big lost indeed.

Although the movie showed only two significant winnings of the Army (1 in an Independence Day Festival, the other was the academic competition Lintang had won for the school), it highlighted the most winning of all: dreams do come true, when you're true to it. Lintang passed on his zeal in studying to his daughter, while Ikal fought for Lintang's dream also: to go to Paris, the most beautiful city of all, where scholars breathed it's inspiring air and drink its intoxicating wine of knowledge.

So Ikal went to Sorbonne for his masteral, then a few years after he went back to the country, wrote the story of the Rainbow Army.

This is a true story.

This could be your story too.

So see the movie. Or buy the book.