peepli live

Peepli live
A film by Anusha Rizvi
Co-directed by Mahmood Farooqui

Highly recommended by me.

Why i loved it so much?
1. It had cast by Naya theater. I had met Natha :). Yes, he was in NSIT during my final year as part of Naya theater. I had seen him before during a play (ponga pandit) at Indian Habitat center. It is so great to see him on screen.
2. Raghubeer Yadav. And yes, he is a Yadav, makes sense eh? (caste reference)
3. I did not knew that Des mera had such powerful lyrics. So true song about India. i am in love with that song now. And also about Zindagi se darte ho, see previous post. The local songs were also very good.


The subject matter. There are many important issues in this country. So many documentaries are made about farmer suicides but the idiots like me will never watch them. We are the "bigde hui bachche" of this generation who want everything in an accessible form. Documentaries are too heavy for us, reality of life is too much for us to handle. We prefer our virtual worlds, our facebooks, our blogs, our so-called social network which runs over a network of wires now; How do you make dumb-wits like us to know about farmer suicides, to know what happens in majority of India, to those who are making our food. P.Sainath has written a book (Everybody loves a good drought) and it has got 13 awards, everyone is calling it an excellent achievement, but why should we read it. It is going to be another diatribe about poor villages. Dude, India is shining, duh!!! The truth is that we middle class Indians, in our lives have stopped looking at the those poor people as human beings. They are like a different species, a different race which is also sharing the planet with us and it just happens to be a co-incidence. If you do not agree, just watch this hulu video and if you are able to watch it till the end, my respects to you. Farmers suicide has no relation to my life and there is also no relation between what happens in Kashmir. My life is a struggle in itself, why should i think about others? We belong to that generation who believes that there is no caste system in India, we who never say no to gifts during marriages, who always pretend that we are religious by chanting some mantras, who are ok with salty water in our taps as long as we have levis jeans and reebok shoes; the question is how do you make this generation aware about fundamental problems such as farmer suicide.

The answer to last question is Peepli live. And i thank Anusha Rizvi for making this movie. This movie is a fictional satire on farmer suicide issue. There is so many punch lines, so many rhetorics that you will laugh, you can not escape it. But there is a lot that is happening on the screen that you just can not avoid and that is not laughable at all. Soon, you have to question yourself, what are you laughing at, the movie or the society or is it this the laugh of shame on yourself. This movie is like what Jon Stewart does every weekday, present complex issues, stories in a satirical fashion so that we can understand what's so wrong with the system. My point is that it has to be done through satire, it has to be done by making us laugh. As the saying goes, a great man is one who can laugh at himself. And so it applies to society as well. If only we can laugh on ourselves, then only we can be great. Because behind those laughs, there is a pinch which is internal and the laugh is just the instantaneous gratification of delight but the pinch is long term and it definitely bites. Or may be we have just become such high degree consumers that for us to understand deep concepts, they have to sold to us and the packaging matters. We need Munna bhai to tell us that we should always speak truth, we need Larry Wilmore to address race issues between us. Peepli live does just that.

Moreover it is not just the farmer suicide issue that is dealt here. I love the fact that whenever bollywood decides to make films about indian villages, they always show the wife as a mature, sensible and responsible person as opposed to someone who just sits at home. (Another example - Ishqiya). Bollywood's contribution to women independence is indeed commendable. The movie also shows mother-daughter-in-law relationship where the daughter in law is always abused. It also talks about the liquor problem, caste issues etc.

One interesting thing is that it is also a big satire on Indian media. It is more notably so because the director comes from NDTV. But i did not find it as funny as others here. (Disclosure: As blogged before, i am a fan of Indian media now). I sympathize with Indian media. We laugh about the rat race between news media channels. But i ask, if the rat race was not there, then only one channel would have covered it, shouted about it but no one would have listened. It is because of the rat race, everyone covers the same story and hence it gets such a big attention. Think about it! Yes, rat race brings competition and thus comes the selling points and thus story hunting turns into a scavenger hunt. I am able to accept it as side-effects, but it seems that people are too obsessed with the side effects that they overlook the main advantages.


And it brings two more days of guilt in my life. Two days later, i would have forgotten all about it, i will be in my world again, Natha will be somewhere else, a different planet, a different century. Two days, thats all it takes now a days for me to forget about all this. Sad!