5 ideas
He runs the errands, bargains with caterers, handles the pandal, the invitations and the crises, and belongs to everyone's function without being central to any. Deshpande plays his frantic self-importance for laughs but shows that his whole identity rests on being needed, and that the families who depend on him give him bustle instead of standing.
A person without rank, wealth or a career can build a social identity by making himself the one who knows how things get done. The community rewards this with dependence and affection but not with real standing. The helper holds onto the role because being needed is the only form of importance open to him.
Each sketch first exaggerates a person's quirks until the reader laughs at them, then reveals the loneliness, poverty or loss behind those quirks. The reader who laughed is left complicit in the person's diminishment and closer to them. The method is to make the eccentric ridiculous first and then show why they are that way.
Sakharam Gatne is an earnest youth from a modest background who worships books. He speaks in the ornate, printed diction of Marathi literature because it signals the cultured life he aspires to. The adopted language becomes a costume of refinement that stands in for the experiences and security it was meant to describe, so it is both comic and poignant.
They are fixtures that a neighborhood organizes its talk, gatherings and memory around. Seeing eccentrics this way shows that a locality's character lives in a few irreplaceable individuals, and it is lost when they die rather than when buildings change.