Thaindian News

Star cast: Raghubir Yadav, Malaika Shenoy, and Naseeruddin Shah
Director: Anusha Rizvi
Producer: Aamir Khan Productions, B. Shrinivas Rao
Music Director: Mathias Duplessy, Indian Ocean

‘Peepli Live’ is a small budget film that has managed to hold its own against other big budget releases and emerge as a hit. It is a moving and in-your-face story about the aspect of the trivialization of news. How non-news become a sensational and breaking news item, due to the mushrooming of so many news channels. It also deals with the issue of farmer suicides. In Andhra Pradesh and so many other states, the farmers take loans but are unable to pay them back, so they are left with no other option but to end their lives.

In the film, debutant actor Omkar Das Manikpuri and Raghubir Yadav are brothers who are unable to pay off a bank loan, so the bank is about to sell off their farming land to recover the dues. They ask for help from all quarters but none is forthcoming. One guy talks about some state government scheme in which the government would give Rs. 1 lac to the farmer who commits suicide, as he is unable to pay off the bank loan. This gets the brothers thinking and they decide that Omkar would commit suicide, so that his family would get the money. He mentions his intentions to a couple of people, from where they are picked up by a local newspaper reporter who creates it into a sensational bit of news. And from there it is picked up by the innumerable TV channels who land upon his village and camp in front of his house waiting for him to commit suicide so that they can report it as a ‘live suicide’ and also garner some much needed TRP’s in the process for their channel.

Omkar and his family’s life are transformed totally and the political parties also come into the picture to get some much needed publicity for themselves. The politicians, bureaucracy, news reporters are not at all bothered about the plight of the innocent and hapless Omkar, but rather they are bothered about how the ‘live suicide’ would aid them in their professional front.

It is a light-hearted movie with a strong and stark look at the going-ons of the political and the bureaucracy machinery. The end is poignant and forces the user to think that even more than six decades after the independence, the nation is yet to be free from the clutches of poverty, hunger and corruption.