Peepli [live] 2010

The hoopla surrounding Aamir Khan sometimes has adverse effects. Every loud news channel turns louder about the impending release and you are inundated with repeated clips and sound bytes. But this time, unusually I must say, the hype was warranted. The only downside I could think of was that the calculated brilliance and charisma of the producer overshadowed the actual talent of Anusha Rizvi, the director. Set in Mukhya Pradesh and centred around a poverty stricken farmer family with two brothers. The older one smart, the younger one, not so much, his sharp tongued wife, sharper tongued mother, kids and a few goats. Satire rules the story with the driving plot centered around the government policy of "rewarding" the family of farmers who commit suicide. But thrown in are other barbs like the various government policies named after dead prime ministers that as is hilariously shown, do not always work. Every character is brilliantly caricatured yet seem so real. I was especially taken by Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Rakesh, a local journalist and the conscience pointer in the story. Of course the main characters of Budhia and Natha played by the always brilliant Raghubir Yadav and the much celebrated Omkar Das Manikpuri also deserve to be mentioned for their brilliance. They absorbed the audience into their plight. An audience that was watching this slice of rural India from an air conditioned multiplex theatre in a metro where hunger is understood only by the upper middle class women on a diet and farming is a distant concept. They laughed along (so did I), were disturbed by some of the messages, agreed with most of the accusations against our system and walked out shaking their heads and saying "someone should do something" while throwing the plastic coffee cup or water bottle out of the car window , "our system is so corrupt" while paying the traffic policeman outside a 100 rupees instead of the fine for talking on the mobile phone, explaining the movie to a colleague or even going back to a nice cup of tea prepared by the 11 year old girl from their village.  After all, living in the city, you cannot do much about farmer suicides. 


8/10