Sixteen years after the blockbuster film 3 Idiots turned Phunsukh Wangdu into one of Bollywood’s most beloved characters, the question of who inspired him has flared up again, this time as a proper, multi-sided disagreement.
The rumour that Aamir Khan’s character was modelled on Ladakhi engineer and education reformer Sonam Wangchuk has followed 3 Idiots since its 2009 release. It resurfaced with real urgency in July, while Wangchuk was on an indefinite hunger strike at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, protesting the NEET question-paper leak. Omi Vaidya, who played Chatur in the film, posted an emotional video appealing to the public not to let Wangchuk’s health deteriorate further.
In it, he pointed directly at the connection that’s followed the film for years: “I’ve met this guy,” Omi Vaidya said, describing Wangchuk as humble and impressive, and urging people to support him regardless of where they stood on his politics.
Aamir Khan’s denial
The renewed attention eventually reached Aamir Khan himself, at a BFI In Conversation event in London held as part of the London Indian Film Festival. Asked by journalist Nabanita Sircar about Wangchuk’s hunger strike, Khan pushed back on the inspiration theory altogether, calling it a long-standing misconception. “I didn’t know about Mr Sonam at that time,” he said, referring to the period when 3 Idiots was written and filmed.
He went further, taking direct aim at his former co-star’s video: he’d seen Vaidya’s clip, he said, and Vaidya had got it wrong; neither he, director Rajkumar Hirani, nor writer Abhijat Joshi knew of Wangchuk while making the film.
Aamir Khan also added, “However, what Mr Sonam is doing is good work anyway. He doesn’t need to be based on the character of 3 Idiots for us to respect him and the work he’s done.”
Almost immediately, old footage complicated the picture. A 2008 video began circulating online that appeared to show Khan present at an event where Wangchuk was also there.
Sonam Wangchuk’s response
Speaking to YouTuber Prakhar Gupta on his podcast, Wangchuk had some fun with that footage. He suggested Khan might genuinely have forgotten their meeting, joking that he apparently had been dressed as his Ghajini character at the time (a role built around a man with short-term memory loss).
Underneath the joke was a more specific claim, and a more measured one than “the film is about me.” Sonam Wangchuk said plainly that the two of them “had met and discussed things in great detail” — directly contradicting the idea that there’d been no contact whatsoever. What he stopped short of saying was that Phunsukh Wangdu was drawn from him wholesale.
He wasn’t calling it a biography, he said, or claiming Khan had “based” the character on him in any formal sense. “And I wouldn’t say that he based it on or made a biography of… this is what you call inspiration. He had a script, so he must have added to it. Perhaps his co-writers or directors didn’t realise that he had added an idea he had picked up somewhere, after meeting someone or having a conversation. It doesn’t make any difference to me. Let it go”, Wangchuk said.
Not a new position
This is, in fact, roughly the same position Wangchuk has held for years, well before this week’s back-and-forth. On the popular quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati in 2023, he addressed the question directly, and Aamir Khan cited those remarks in his own BFI comments.
“The right word is that it may have been inspired or influenced,” Wangchuk had said then, adding that he wasn’t especially proud of the association if it were true, and wouldn’t be bothered if it weren’t.
He made a similar point earlier, telling an interviewer in 2018 that 3 Idiots was never his biopic, only something loosely inspired by him.
What 3 Idiots is, for anyone who needs the reminder
Directed by Rajkumar Hirani, 3 Idiots remains one of Bollywood’s most loved coming-of-age films. Released in 2009 and starring Aamir Khan, R Madhavan, Sharman Joshi, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Boman Irani, it follows three engineering students navigating academic pressure, friendship and the demand to succeed on the system’s terms rather than their own.
