I am an accidental filmmaker. I neither trained nor ever wished to make films before the story of Peepli Live came to me in a flash. Some stories have a tendency to appear in the most unlikely places, this one appeared when I was watching a TV news capsule on farmers in India, some five years ago. It is a different matter that it took me one whole year to write and rewrite the script and to decide whether I wanted to direct it! But there it was in its entirety and something needed to be done about that. I was immensely fortunate therefore that Aamir Khan took this unconventional film on board without any hesitation and has supported it to the hilt.

I was clear from the beginning that the film had to grow outwards from the people and the village rather than being an imposition of an outsider’s vision. I wanted to capture reality rather than to create it. I am overwhelmed and humbled by the hard work that the entire unit, including all the background artists, put into achieving that. The lightmen who stood for hours as policemen, to the media extras who ran for hours on end for that perfect shot, the set decorators who fed the animals, this film is their achievement and I am proud of being part of their team. And this to my mind will always remain the strength of this film, the people in it and behind it.

Peepli Live is a personal film. And I say this with full recognition of the fact that the script that was written and the film that was made is from an outsider’s point of view. Born and brought up in New Delhi, I am an outsider to the rural scene. Yet the characters are people who I have known and interacted with, laughed with or laughed at, eaten, observed and sang with. These are people that I have known in a deeply personal sense and in that sense this film is almost a sum total of my politics, personal and professional.

None of this would have been possible without Mahmood, my husband and co-director and key collaborator from the first stage to the last, in what has been a very long journey for us both.