Learn TRIZ through Movies - 2

The art of framing a problem in the form of a contradiction (or a conflict of interest) is the core of the methodology of ARIZ (from the toolkit of TRIZ). Often times, the people whom I work with (be it students or employees) have a problem with understanding the concept. This series of posts is meant to clarify this for them. I have decided to use specific movie scenes for the purpose. I draw this idea heavily from a friend of mine (https://trizindia.org/2009/09/triz-in-films-ideas-for-fooling-filmi-ghost/). Today, we are going to use a scene from the movie “Dangal”.

Backstory

Mahavir Phogat is an amateur wrestler and is forced to become an employee in a government organization, because of the stability of income the job brings in. Already contradictory, eh? He still has this intense desire to groom a wrestling champion. He decides that he would train his son to become a champion.

Scene

Now, the scene. Mahavir desperately wants a son to be born so that he could realize his dream of winning a national wrestling medal through his son.

Now, the contradiction:

1. First identify the variable - to train or not to train his son
2. Let’s take one value of the variable - train - If Mahavir trained his son, Not possible, since he had daughters (bad thing), but medal is a possibility (good thing)
3. Let’s take the other value of the variable - not train - If Mahavir did not train his son, Possible, since he had daughters (good thing), but medal is not a possibility (bad thing)
4. Now, formulate the desired result - Mahavir wants a medal (good thing) and he had daughters (good thing).

Pictorially,

So, what does our hero do? He does what only heroic fathers would do. He trains his daughters, an unthinkable and revolutionary idea in his context, girls never wrestled.

Therefore, this idea becomes the central theme of the movie and the rhetoric byline - “Mhari Choriyan Choron se Kam Hain Ke?” (Are my daughters any lesser than boys?)

Video

Source (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-ll3CGh9Qw)

Source of Poster - By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51848719