Malamaal Weekly
2006 film by Priyadarshan
Malamaal Weekly is a 2006 Indian Hindi-language comedy film written and directed by Priyadarshan starring Paresh Rawal, Om Puri, Riteish Deshmukh, Arbaaz Khan, Rajpal Yadav and Asrani. The film received mixed reviews from critics, but was successful at the box office, grossing ₹42.7 crore against a budget of ₹7 crore. Based on Waking Ned (1998), the film was remade in Telugu in the same year as Bhagyalakshmi Bumper Draw (2006), in Kannada as Dakota Picture (2012) and in Malayalam by same director as Aamayum Muyalum (2014).
Plot
The film takes place in the impoverished village of Laholi, where, following droughts, most of the villagers' possessions are mortgaged to the local Thakurani Karamkali. One of the few entertainments the villagers can afford is the lottery, Malaamal Weekly (malamal is Hindi for 'rich').
Lilaram is the only educated man in the village. He has the job of intermediary between the lottery organization and the village, for which he receives a commission whenever a villager wins; thus, he has a relatively good but volatile income. One day he reads the winning lottery numbers and realizes that one of the tickets has won the top prize of one crore (10 million Indian currency or about $160,000, a relative fortune in rural India). He devises a plan to obtain the winning ticket and present it to the commission as his own. He hosts a dinner (mortgaging his wife's beloved pet goat Gattu, who is like a child to her, to the Thakurani to pay for it) and invites all the villagers who play the lottery, but the man he is looking for does not turn up.
The public source identifies “Malamaal Weekly” as 2006 film by Priyadarshan. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Malamaal, Weekly and film.
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This entry incorporates text from “Malamaal Weekly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.