Peepli Live is dark, multi-layered and biting satire at its best. Before watching the movie, I knew that it was about a desperate farmer,who decides to commit suicide so that his family can claim some compensation from the government. After watching the movie, I realised it is more about us, the city dwellers and about our attitude towards those who live on the margins in our villages. Peepli Live does not poke fun at Natha, the farmer but on venal politicians, the straw bureaucrat, the government’s welfare schemes and above all on our relentless TRP’s and breaking news focussed media circus.

As if the satire was not enough the movie also showcases the debilitating poverty in our villages. While a bewildered Natha watches the media and the netas and the district’s officialdom descend on him, another villager, a veritable bag of bones, who makes his living by digging the earth and selling it to a brick-kiln dies of hunger and no one notices. Everybody is far too busy trying to persuade Natha not to die.

The politicians too are caricatured brilliantly. Naseeruddin Shah as the suave and canny agriculture minister, a far more sinister and rustic chief minister and the local politicians who are village strongmen are caught superbly. The netas that we have are as different as our rainbow nation but they are all united in being scheming villains ripping off the nation at every opportunity. The District Magistrate is hilarious. The way he sanctions a ‘Lal Bahadur’ (hand pump) under government welfare schemes highlights how the bureaucracy treats the villagers as well as the government’s schemes. How the DM crawls and cringes in front of a powerful chief-minister and is imperious and rude with the village representatives is a sad commentary on how our elected politicians treat the civil servants and also probably explains why our best and the brightest are no longer as interested in the civil services as they probably were let us 20 years ago.

Where the movie really scores is in its stirrng portrayal of our testosterone driven, every thing as breaking news, TRP led news media. The media hounds discover Natha and Peepli and descend on it in droves. In their quest to out do each other, everyone in the village is fair game for them. Thus we have the spectacle of Natha’s thatched hut being overrun by camera and lights wielding eager journalists. His elder brother Budhia giving sound bites on Natha’s behalf who is too shell-shocked to say anything. Natha’s childhood friends, his harried wife even his old mother bound to her charpoy have a microphone thrust in their faces. The old woman, bed ridden and always cursing his daughter-in-law ( Natha’s wife) is played superbly by Farrukh Jaffer. The news hounds in search of the sensational and the bizarre focus on Natha and train their cameras on him even as he goes in an open field to defecate. That Natha still has to defecate in the open is not a story worth reporting but chasing Natha is an end in itself.

In the final analysis Peepli Live mocks us more than anybody else. It pokes fun at us, the slick city dwellers cocooned in our lives so far away from the real India, Natha’s India, where the reality of abject poverty, lack of education, healthcare, power and roads all conspire to keep Natha shackled. The local politician harasses him, the policemen and the lower level government officials rob him of his dignity as well as his subsidised rations. We believe that this world is far away from us. The reality is that it is just round the corner, not more than 50 miles outside of our cities. It is just that we choose never to see it. Anusha Rizvi in her directorial debut is superb. The casting is spot on. Omkar Das Manikpuri as Natha says a lot without saying much. The rest of the cast of mostly unknown actors (barring of course Naseeruddin Shah) dazzles. This is an impressive movie, layered with satirical humour, mocking yet scoring points, where it must.