Koi bhi desh perfect nahin hota... usey perfect bana na padta hain”.
Ajay, a young fighter pilot played with flair and feel by R. Madhavan, delivered this memorable line in Rang De Basanti, a film that’s perhaps more relevant now than it was then.
“Kisi desh ko mahaan rehne ke liye usey mahaan bana ne waalon ki kadr honi chahiye”.
In Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, released in theatres yesterday, this line is once again delivered by R. Madhavan, slipping into the shoes of Nambi Narayanan, a real-life maverick scientist wronged by the state. Sixteen years may have lapsed between the two films, but the emotions evoked by these lines — not very different from each other in meaning and spirit — hit the high notes every time.
Even if Rocketry, as a whole, struggles.Truth is stranger than fiction. If one didn’t know better, one would be compelled to think that this saying was inspired by Nambi Narayanan’s life. Get a load of this — a largely non-conformist Indian Space Research Organisation scientist, Narayanan’s unorthodox ways of work, with the single-minded focus of making India a space superpower, see him embark on one mission impossible after another.
Whether it’s gaining admission into the solid fuels programme at an Ivy League University and working his way into the liquids course, whether it’s ‘smuggling’ in 52 of his colleagues into France to work on a space programme there, whether it’s charming the pants off the Rolls-Royce honcho (who nurses a soft spot for India) and making him part with 400 million pounds worth of equipment or even making a run on a snowmobile through Russia, with the Americans hot on his heels, in a scene straight out of an espionage thriller.
The disclaimer at the beginning makes it clear that some cinematic liberties have been taken, but Madhavan — who makes his directorial debut with Rocketry, and is also credited with writing and producing duties ere — has consistently claimed that all of this actually happened in Narayanan’s life.And then, of course, was Narayanan being labelled a traitor, falsely accused of selling information on India’s cryogenic programme to Pakistan in the 1990s.
That led to his incarceration and systematic institutional torture till the man was exonerated 75 court hearings later. In 2019, Nambi Narayanan was even honoured with the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian award.
A human story at its core, Rocketry has a lot going for it. Madhavan, who is obviously deeply invested in the story, takes on the responsibility of playing Narayanan and does well, both in terms of performance and prosthetics.
The film uses the framing device of having an aged Narayanan narrate his life story during a TV interview. The interviewer is Shah Rukh Khan, who being on screen almost four years after Zero and sporting his Chak De! India look, is an event in itself.
For the record, Suriya slips into the same role in the film’s Tamil version. Despite the rich material at its disposal and a dedicated team at work, Rocketry has the predilection to slip into hagiographic territory — Narayanan is constantly hailed as one of the visionaries of India’s space programme, the others being Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, the latter being Nambi Narayanan’s mentor.
The first hour is solely dedicated to documenting Narayanan’s brave escapades, many of which will raise eyebrows because they do require a suspension of disbelief. That Narayanan would have such carte blanche powers to make decisions even keeping the head of ISRO in the dark is a little difficult to wrap one’s head around.
Rocketry — The Nambi Effect (U/A)
- Director: R. Madhavan
- Cast: R. Madhavan, Simran, Rajit Kapur, Sam Mohan, Shah Rukh Khan
- Running time: 158 minutes
His fellow scientists, meanwhile, are largely given screen space to function as his cheerleaders.The bigger problem , however, is how Rocketry makes science inaccessible to the common viewer. While much of the story is made over simplistic, there is no attempt to simplify the science at the core of the story. Words like ‘Stability Margin’ ‘Altimetry Data’, ‘Viking Engine’ are thrown about with abandon. And in an age where content from all over the world is being consumed voraciously on streaming platforms with the aid of subtitles, Rocketry takes the inexplicable route of having all its actors speak in Hindi.
So you have an American professor talking in Hindi to a class full of Caucasians. “Saale kaminey Americans”, a Russian screams out in flawless (of course, dubbed) Hindi, while an American woman, at one point, makes a joke about firing a rocket out of someone’s “pichhwaada”. It’s truly, truly bizarre.
Rocketry has its heart in the right place. Nambi Narayanan fighting against all odds will definitely bring a lump to your throat, especially the tender moments that he shares with wife Meena (a fine act from Simran). But the rest of the film is so clumsily set up that it undoes much of the good work.For a first attempt, R. Madhavan takes on a difficult story and executes it with honesty and integrity. If only good intentions directly translated into a good film.