DOCUMENTARY (NERO'S GUESTS)

P Sainath in the documentary started off with a brief explanation about why it had been named “Nero's Guest”, a parallel that is drawn between the famous Roman Emperor Nero and his guests and the ruling class in India. The documentary compared the happenings of the garden part with the then current situation in india. He also questioned about the large amount of suicides by farmers in India and how it had a huge impact on the rural community and despite all this how the matter had not been taken up by the authorities or the media. He then made it his business to increase awareness of the victims ( both the farmer and their families) by publishing their stories in the day to day newspaper The Hindu. He also went to say, “Not a single newspaper in this country has a correspondent working full time on poverty.” Filmmaker Deepa Bhatia, follows journalist P Sainath where he visits the needy farming families and directly talks to the camera, from his home, where he brings from the documents photos of the people who have passed and to the well attended lectures where he repeatedly exposed the distressing lack of social justice in India and the hypocrisy. One is affected as you can see him talk to the hopeless folk like the woman farmer who committed suicide, and whose family was ineligible for compensation from the government because the state did not recognize females as farmers- women could only be the wives, mother, sisters, daughters of male farmers. He tells us, as he shows a photograph of a mother and son, of the emptiness in the boy’s eyes after the father committed suicide. He talks of the feeling of humiliation and helplessness he feels when he faces desperate farmers and knows that there is nothing he can do to erase their troubles. He tells with visible emotion of the cold fact that when he meets the family members of the deceased he can see that they are planning the same fate for themselves, such is the desperation. In this film the farmers relate to their woes. With the cost of farming gone up and the returns meagre in comparison farmers find it hard to make ends meet, and are often indebted to corrupt moneylenders. With debt increasing and no ray of hope in sight for farmers are committing suicide. In the documentary, Sainath visits a local village hospital and while he is there, two men bring in a third who is violently throwing up after consuming pesticide. Sainath, talking into the camera between the shots, without any pre-rehearsed lines and expressions immediately connects with the audience through the interactive viewing and strong storyline. This film/documentary is a narration of facts and situations in rural India. Sainath believes there could be more than one way to solve the agrarian crisis but it is the apathy and inaction towards farmers committing suicide that actually brings him to this business.