Early on in Samarth Mahajan’s documentary The Unreserved, there is a portion that perfectly encapsulates the absurdities of living in the world’s second-most populous nation. A middle-aged man, sitting on the edge of a seat in an unreserved train compartment packed to the gills, pours his heart out to Mahajan, who is interviewing him. A mason by profession, he travels to nearby cities for months at a time to work and save up as much money as possible. His reason for that is heart-rending: a 14-year-old daughter with a brain tumour, who is struggling to get better despite an expenditure of ₹3 lakh on treatment. As he spells out his agony — “I can talk right now, but I am crying inside,” he says, his eyes misting over — you’re distracted by the sound of an unconcerned vendor seeking customers for his biryani. The mason doesn’t seem to mind the seemingly insensitive intrusion. It almost feels like he accepts that his insurmountable problems are comparatively insignificant in the larger scheme of things.

This hour-long documentary — in which Mahajan, along with cinematographer Omkar Divekar and assistant director Rajat Bhargava, travel the contours of India as defined by her railway lines, tells many such stories of ordinary Indians. There’s a young man who talks with an un-ironic swagger about juggling two girlfriends. There’s a young woman, an aspiring nurse, who speaks with the slightest wistfulness about not being able to marry a lover who belongs to a lower caste. There’s an older gentleman who patiently explains to the camera why the concept of reservation needs reform. There’s the young Haryanvi man who speaks approvingly about dowry and the dominance of the rich with nonchalance and looks incredulous when an older Rajasthani gentleman challenges his views. And finally, there’s the young, mild-mannered Kashmiri man who supports Pakistan in cricket matches and seems genuinely surprised to learn that Muslims live in other parts of India (outside Kashmir) too.

In March 2016, the crew travelled for 17 days in 10 trains and clocked in 265 hours. They went to the furthest points served by the Indian Railways in every direction: Okha in the west, Baramulla in the north, Dibrugarh in the east, and Kanyakumari in the south. For 26-year-old Mahajan, the idea of undertaking this journey came from his experience of going on the 2012 Jagriti Yatra — a similar 15-day journey that aims to promote social entrepreneurship.

But it wasn’t the only reason he decided to do this. The film ends with a 1917 quote by Mohandas Gandhi, which says: “Let the people (…) who generally travel in superior classes, without previous warning, go through the experiences now and then of third-class travelling.”

“When looking up blogs that talk about travelling in unreserved compartments, I realised that no one actually travels by them unless they don’t have a choice,” says Mahajan, who is currently completing a year-long fellowship programme in liberal studies in Sonepat’s Ashoka University. “This and the fact that I could find no prior documentation of this kind made me want to go ahead with it, because these are stories we don’t ever get to hear.”

The process of planning the trip began in September 2015. Camera and Shorts, a Mumbai-based production house where Mahajan was working as a creative director at the time, was interested in the idea and once Divekar and Bhargava were on board, they began charting out the journey in earnest. They booked tickets in AC-three tier coaches, where they would keep their equipment and leave Bhargava behind to keep an eye on it; meanwhile, Mahajan and Divekar would wait for the first halt to get down on stations and enter the general compartments.

Unreserved compartments on long-distance trains are generally crammed and the two often wondered how they’d get people to open up. But to their surprise, after initial hesitation, people were astonishingly forthright. “Initially, the sheer number of people in any compartment would be intimidating,” says Divekar, 27, a freelance cinematographer. “But slowly, we figured out the unwritten rules of how to manoeuvre through the crowd and once that happened, they started helping us out. If one person spoke, the person sitting next to them would also be eager to speak... it got contagious.”

The journey was demanding, to say the least. A week and a half of subsisting on egg biryani from the railway pantry, not exactly the most hygienic or nutritious of meals — and interviewing people without breaks — took a toll on Mahajan, who passed out a couple of times and fell seriously ill for two days. In Kashmir, when they got off the train for a bit to travel by road from Banihal to Baramulla, the army presence unnerved them. At one point, an army officer nearly seized all the footage they had captured till then, until the crew managed to convince him that they were merely anthropology students working on a college project.

The Unreserved, which tells its stories out of sequence, starts by focusing on personal issues and eventually gets to people talking about religion, social issues, and politics. Its structure isn’t groundbreaking and one gets the feeling that the material has been watered down slightly, but the stories are undeniably real and, therefore, worthy of being told. Perhaps it’s fitting then that the documentary, which didn’t make it to last year’s Mumbai Film Festival, is available on Camera and Shorts’s YouTube channel for free.

Suprateek Chatterjee is a Mumbai-based writer and critic