Daydreaming and gambling have become coping mechanisms for millions living on the economic margins of Mumbai. Sangram S’s Marathi short film Yatharth, explores this reality through Shambhu, a struggling fisherman whose imagination offers him escape from debt and uncertainty. While his wife Saraswati labours to keep their household afloat, he clings to memories of a whale encounter that symbolize the dignity he has lost. The film shows potential with its rooted performances and insight into precarious livelihoods in India’s fishing communities. However, its pacing issues and reliance on a familiar poverty narrative hold it back. Despite its shortcomings, 'Yatharth' signals a promising filmmaker with an eye for Mumbai’s overlooked dreams.
In Mumbai, where millions navigate daily life on the margins of opulence, daydreaming can be a form of survival instinct. Sociologists have observed that fantasies of a better future often offer psychological relief amid precarious work conditions, cramped housing, and financial insecurity. On construction sites, in traffic-choked auto-rickshaws, or during long commutes on overcrowded local trains, the imagination soars towards better futures that reality refuses to fund. These dreams are not merely naïve escapes but a coping mechanism against systemic inequalities — a reminder that aspiration itself has become a privilege for many in India. In a nation fixated on productivity and upward social mobility, the simple act of zoning out has become a statement: if opportunities remain unevenly shared, hope will find its own informal economy.
Sangram S’s Marathi short film 'Yatharth (As It Is)' situates this tension in the life of Shambhu (Vitthal Kale), a furloughed fisherman who clings to a spectacular story — an encounter with a whale that left him partially deaf and unable to return to the sea. For Shambhu, the story is both trauma and a ticket to fame: proof that he was once someone extraordinary. Yet now he drifts unmoored, gambling away his meagre earnings from odd jobs, while his wife, Saraswati (Rajshri Deshpande in another powerful performance), makes ends meet by selling fish in the local market and borrowing money from her parents to keep their son Ritik in school.
As the story unfolds, we follow the lives of these characters from the underbelly of urban Mumbai. Aditya Pawar’s performance as Ritik injects the film with youthful wonder — a stark counterpoint to his parents’ fraying hopes. There’s a poignant metaphor at play here: the whale symbolizes the respect that Shambhu yearns for and is also a cosmic reminder of how far a man can fall from his dreams.
Yet despite its promising premise and rooted social realism, Yatharth struggles to match the emotional force of the tradition it draws from — the likes of Bimal Roy’s 'Do Bigha Zamin', Ritwik Ghatak’s 'Ajantrik', or Shekhar Kapur’s 'Masoom'. Its pacing falters, stretching a lean 27-minute runtime into something that feels overlong, and its narrative focus leans a bit too heavily on the well-trodden 'poverty plot', without bringing something new to the genre. There is undeniable heart here, and moments of genuine insight into the insecurities of India’s fishing communities — their vulnerabilities to addiction, debt, and vanished livelihoods. Even if Yatharth ultimately falls short of its own ambitions, it still marks Sangram S as a filmmaker to watch, specifically with regard to his curiousity about the seemingly invisible margins of a booming city, and attuned to the fragile dreams that keep its people afloat.
You can watch ‘Yatharth’ here:
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