Marathi cinema has always had a knack for drawing stories from ordinary life and giving them extraordinary meaning. 'Ata Thambaycha Naay!' continues that tradition, but with a rare sharpness: it asks us to look at the very people we pass by every day — the sweepers, the drain cleaners, the ones fixing a broken water pipe — and see their humanity.
At the heart of Shivraj Waichal’s debut lies an unlikely classroom. It's filled with men and women whose hands are calloused from years of sanitation work under the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. Their decision to return to school is about reclaiming a sense of dignity that society had denied them. This simple act of picking up a textbook challenges the assumption that education is a privilege reserved for the young, and that working-class lives are meant only for toil.
What makes the film stand out is its rootedness in Mumbai’s everyday chaos. Shot in actual chawls and lanes without cosmetic gloss, the city looks both brutal and beautiful: garbage piled up in corners, drains overflowing, but also laughter echoing through cramped corridors. In this setting, the film’s humour grows out of the resilience of people who have long learnt to laugh at their own struggles. The comedy is never at their expense. It is, instead, their survival strategy.
There is also a political undertone that cannot be ignored. The sanitation workers belong to caste communities historically pushed into this work. The film shows them as complete individuals rather than victims.
The performances seal the movie's emotional honesty. Bharat Jadhav’s portrayal of a drain worker with failing health is both tender and painful, while Siddhartha Jadhav embodies the frustration of a man mocked for being “uneducated” despite his hard-earned wisdom. Ashutosh Gowariker, playing the officer who initiates this experiment, avoids the trap of being a saviour. Ata Thambaycha Naay! is a love letter to Mumbai’s invisible citizens. It acknowledges the stink of the drains and the stigma of the broom, yet says that the same hands that clean the city also have the right to hold a pen, write an exam, and dream of something larger. Above all, the film’s title says it best. Don’t stop. Not when you’re mocked, not when you’re tired, and not when society writes you off. For these workers, education is proof that dignity is never out of reach.
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