The Bailgada Sharyat is a 450-year-old living tradition of the farmers of Konkan, western Maharashtra and Marathwada. Race day is not just a competition, it is a festival. Villages wake before dawn. Families travel hundreds of kilometres. The thunder of hooves, the roar of the crowd, the Khillari bulls, the cart, the charioteer, and the golden dust, together they represent the pride of Maharashtra, carried forward across centuries. Today, dedicated YouTube channels command hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Race videos rack up crores of views. Entire communities organise their calendars around it. The love is real. The audience is enormous. And it has been waiting, patiently, for someone to tell its story properly.

So why, in all these decades, has Bollywood or Marathi cinema never given it the screen it deserves? Only one or two significant films have attempted this subject, and beyond those, barely a handful of short films and documentaries. None of them captured the true thunder, the true emotion, or the true grandeur of what this tradition really is. The Bailgada Sharyat is not a background detail. It is an epic. It demands breathtaking cinematography, large-scale production, and Hollywood-grade VFX, the kind that makes a bull's hooves feel like they shake the earth beneath your seat.

That gap is exactly what drove Rahul Pokharkar to write NANDI. A man who spent years on the VFX teams of Dune, Ready Player One and Top Gun: Maverick, who understands at a cellular level what cinematic scale truly means, looked at the Bailgada Sharyat and saw what the world had been missing. The technology now exists. The craft now exists. The passion has always existed. For the first time, all three are in the same room, and the result is a Marathi film built to the standard this tradition has always deserved, but never received.