There’s a leader of the jhund, Ankush “Don” Masram (Ankush Gedam) and a young mother Raziya (Raziya Kazi) who walks out on her good for nothing husband, but Manjule doesn’t go into the minute details of most lives. No inner world revealed. No explanations given for why they are how they are. Are the motives needed? He may not justify the rowdyism—the ragpicking, the coal stealing, the mobile trading and chain snatching, the liquor brewing, the street fighting, the girl chasing, the whitener addiction—but he also doesn’t render the kids as out and out apologetic offenders. What he offers is a social sketch, the milieu and the divides that fester there—bird’s eye view of two different kinds of playgrounds separated by a boundary and judgmental players and officials of the privileged world who refuse to shake hands with the “other”. And you know in an instant then who the actual offender is. The discomfort increases, as fiction turns real with each of the kids narrating her/his stories of a horrifying life, like testimonials, while “Saare jahan se achcha” plays in the background. An attempt to replicate, though not as successfully, the national anthem moment of Fandry. Pedantic, perhaps, but on point, if not entirely powerful.

In this takeover of the subaltern and the dispossessed, the professor (played by who better than the once anti-Establishment, angry young man) is the rightful facilitator and ally, not the protagonist. Yes, he does get the crucial “speech in the court” moment where he talks about kids having to run away from injustices and how they have to struggle to live but it’s the kids (the characters as well as the actors who play them) who linger on, long after the film. Bachchan is relatively muted, and graciously so. And it’s amusing to see the how the untrained, untutored kids hold their own vis a vis him, never once dwarfed by the actor’s overwhelming presence, something that the most accomplished actors are susceptible to. Veterans like Kishore Kadam, Chhaya Kadam, the talented Arjun Radhakrishnan, Rinku Rajguru and Akash Thosar (Archi and Parshya from Sairat) and Somnath Awaghade (Jabya from Fandry) complete the picture.

Manjule does try to pack in too much in three long hours, tries to check too many boxes. He plays with skin colours—the fair-dark divide. He extends the boundaries of our own definition of cute—yes, a dishevelled street urchin could be sweet too and not just a chubby fair blue-eyed one. There are token nods to woman power. To broaden the parameters of the marginalised and the disempowered he willy-nilly also brings in the plight of the tribals, stereotyping of Muslims and the prejudices against a monolithic North-East into his frame. Yes, it’s about forming solidarities but also blurs the focus.