Rating: 
Director: Anusha Rizvi
Starring: Omkar Das Manikpuri, Raghubir Yadav
This is an India we rarely see on our screens. It's not very far from where we live. It's inhabitants come to our cities and work in our homes, at our constructions sites, in our offices. It's an India where people ride four to a two wheeler. An India where a labourer can dig the same hole every day, where people puke while travelling in buses and others slip on cow potty. And it's an India that Anusha Rizvi has captured with imagination, irony and supreme intelligence. No one is safe from her wit and wisdom. The sneaky, oily politician played by Naseeruddin Shah who is worried that the star anchor is ignoring him. The tea drinking bureaucrat who wants a fact finding mission for everything. The chief minister with a pappu cant dance ringtone who is desperate before a by-election. The government machinery that provides a handpump but no money to fit it, that gives a poor landless farmer a TV but no food to eat, and that asks him to die so his family can at least claim the Rs 1 lakh compensation for families of those farmers who commit suicides.
It's a theme of government chicanery that was touched upon beautifully in Shyam Benegal's Well Done Abba Peepli Live is lighter on its feet. as well. But Rizvi's
And far far more authentic. Not just because it was shot in an actual village, Badwai in Madhya Pradesh, or because Rizvi and her crew spent 45 days just prepping for the film--so much so that her actors gave villagers their new clothes and asked them for their worn ones. But because Rizvi is such an acute observer. From the constantly working women to the men who are either smoking chillum or gossiping under a tree or eating eggs, she brings every stereotype of the village come alive. Not in Bollywood's favoured designer real way, with massive haveli peopled by evil thakurs oppressing farmers who live in aesthetically appealing mud huts and shed gycerine tears.
She takes on everyone. News channels who spend days covering "Shilpa Shetty's relationship with Prince William". The constant war between Hindi news channels and English channels, with its very recognisable stars. The big city star anchors who exploit their small town journalistic contacts, for whom a story is just that, a story. The appalling medical care that sees patients putting on the IV drip themselves. The schemes, from Lal Bahadur to Indira Yojana to Jawahar Yojana named after prime ministers of the past. The politicians, only too ready to play one against the other, Centre against state, one caste against another.
It's also about the price of fame in contemporary India. Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri), the farmer who is encouraged to commit suicide by his good-for-nothing brother (Raghubir Yadav) becomes a celebrity, his little home with the handpump in the centre, the focus of the media circus. So much so he cannot even do potty without being accompanied by guards. One party wants him to die and become a martyr, another wants him to stay alive. The city folk adopt him, staging candlelight vigils.
