On the verge of losing their family farm to the bank, brothers Budhia (Raghuvir Yadav, 1942: A LOVE STORY) and Nathas (Omkar Das Manikpuri, MONSOON SHOOTOUT) learn that the families of farmers who have committed suicide are compensated with 100,000 rupees. With his invalid mother (Farrukh Jaffar), Nathas' harridan wife Dhaniya (Shalini Vatsa), and his two children to consider, Nathas decides he will be the one to commit suicide. When ambitious reporter Rakesh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, NEW YORK) overhears Nathas' plans in the village and impulsively prints the story in the paper, he and his editor (Masood Akhtar, CITY OF JOY) are reprimanded and their paper loses its news license; however, the story reaches the ears of ITVN Delhi news anchor Nandita (Malaika Shenoy, OFFSHORE) who contacts Rakesh and shows up in Peepli with a news crew. The story proves damaging to Chief Minister Ram Yadav (Yugal Kishore) who is basing his upcoming election campaign on the prosperity of farmers, and he presses tries to quench the bad publicity through ineffectual aide programmes (the local magistrate presents Nathas with a water pump, but no funds or labor to have it installed) and local bigwig Bhai Thakur (Sitaram Panchal, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) uses force to silence Nathas and Budhia; however, Yadav's local opponent Puppulai - the so-called "Messiah of the Backward Castes" - wants to hold Nathas and his suicide up as a symbol of the ruling party's failures (and proves to be just as out of touch by gifting Nathas a television, even though they have no electricity). ITVN's rival station anchor Deepak (Vishal Sharma) also heads down to Peepli with an interest in televising a live suicide, and is followed by a horde of reporters who turn the village into a media circus (which actually proves profitable to the locals). Yadav and Puppulai form an alliance and try turning the blame to the federal government's agricultural ministry and minister Salim (Naseeruddin Shah, MONSOON WEDDING), who has been trying to pass off a great number of the farmer suicides as natural deaths. Meanwhile, Bhai Thakur is beginning to feel edged out by Yadav's alliance, and decides to play both sides by threatening Nathas that he better follow through with the suicide while telling the media that the government cannot sit back and let this happen. When Nathas mysterious vanishes, the media is rife with speculations of cowardice on Nathas' part, government conspiracies, Islamic terrorists, or American covert intervention, and whether Nathas ends his life or not may no longer be his decision.

Although fairly epic in scope, PEEPLI [LIVE] will not be what international audiences are expecting of a Bollywood film. The songs are few and far between, and there are no elaborately choreographed numbers. The broader elements of comedy clash with the more understated, and some very pointed social and political commentary sometimes gets lost among the more obvious skewering of ravenous television news media (the reporter psychoanalyzing the varied hues of Nathas' feces after his disappearance falls somewhere in between, but Salim's idea of a "Nathas card" to give aid to families of famers "desiring to commit suicide" that passes on the question of how to fund it to the state governments is politics as usual). With so many characters, relationships are bound to suffer, so we really get little sense of the whys of the enmity between Nathas and his wife, Budhia and Nathas' wife, and the subplot attraction between Nandita and Rakesh (and Rakesh' souring journalistic ambition) is so sparsely addressed that details of the cynical ending might not be clear to viewers the first time around. Technical credits are top notch with striking cinematography, detailed sets, colorful costumes, rich music and sound design. Producer Aamir Khan's previous international success was the Academy Award-nominated LAGAAN (2001).