Language: Hindi
“Do you not believe in the cause, sir?”, a 20-something Vikram Sarabhai (Ishwak Singh) asks a 30-something Homi Bhabha (Jim Sarbh) in the first episode of Rocket Boys. The year is 1942, and there’s only one cause: India’s freedom movement. At this point, Sarabhai has been assisting Bhabha in IISc (Bangalore) for a year, when he requests for a leave so he can participate in Mahatma Gandhi’s call for a nationwide demonstration on 8 August, 1942, which we later learned was the Quit India Movement. Bhabha is too self-centred and pragmatic to have anything to do with ‘patriotism’, so he lightly mocks Sarabhai for his sentimentality. It’s a great early hint of the friction between two scientists, who went on to be at the helm of a few programs in a newly independent India that proved critical in the technological development of the country.
The 1940s was a decade of stunning contradictions. The air carried a whiff of freedom, and it was primarily optimism and adrenaline that was driving a newly-born nation. While most of the London-returned echelon of Indians sensed opportunity (like Bhabha and Sarabhai), the rest of the country was in its worst shape (probably ever). There was widespread communal tension, life expectancy was at its lowest, and a large part of the country didn't have access to basic necessities like electricity or clean water. And yet, the show underlines how the establishment led by Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru not only had the enviable task of providing for its citizens, but also to keep up appearances that India was ready to match steps with the First World, if need be.
Directed by Abhay Pannu, the show winds the clocks to an era when there was remarkably little in terms of resources, and still a limitless ambition for a nation that had been held back for nearly two centuries, and was now raring to go. However, what was even more interesting was that within this tussle for a country’s soul, there was another conflict brewing between the ideologies of two of India’s most brilliant scientists. Homi Bhabha wanted to harness the nation’s atomic energy to build a bomb to deter neighbours like China from what they did in 1962, while Sarabhai is initially hesitant about joining the nuclear arms race. Being a follower of the Gandhian way of life, Sarabhai disagrees with Bhabha’s plans of a bomb on a fundamental level. And that’s something that the show seems to have down pat: a righteous conflict between two people with an equal degree of conviction in their respective cause.
However, the rest of the show seems to have failed to fully digest the personalities of both Bhabha and Sarabhai, to come up with anything interesting to say about their lives, apart from throwing empty adjectives of praise towards their intellectual superiority from time to time.
Both Singh and Sarbh seem to be adequate actors to a point, but Rocket Boys tends to over-rely on their fresh faces. Their dynamic is shown to be almost like Jai-Veeru, constantly bickering next to one another, but also expressing their admiration for one another in front of everyone except each other. There are two fascinating personalities to be cultivated here - to make the conflict even more compelling, but the showrunners infuse just about enough of the generic outlines for the two characters, to even find something remotely compelling.
Sure, Bhabha is shown to be the Tony Stark-like pragmatic scientific brain, who trusts his own instincts better than to make peace with the snail pace of development of India at that point. Sarbh plays the character using his customary awkward delivery, which partly works for his Parsi character, and dials up the charm and irreverence to 11. But Sarbh never quite becomes the compelling character that is promised at the beginning of the show. Similarly, with Ishwak Singh, the character of Sarabhai is ultimately bland. Pannu alludes to Sarabhai’s socialist mantras, where he works on scientific proposals to better the lives of the workers at his father’s mill in Mumbai. Sarabhai is convinced that scientific progress needs to alleviate the country’s most needy, while Bhabha seems too focused on his own personal glory at the time. Both Sarbh and Singh are decent for their parts, but the series doesn’t deliver on its kicker conflict.
What seems almost criminal after the conclusion of the eight-episode series, is just the sheer wastefulness of it. There’s an inordinate amount of time spent on both Bhabha and Sarabhai’s love interests: Pipsi (Saba Azad) and Mrinalini (Regina Cassandra) respectively. While Homi and Pipsi’s romance remains fresh for a long time till it doesn’t, Vikram and Mrinalini’s brief courtship and eventual marriage makes some progressive noise – especially the way she fights for her career as a Bharatnatyam dancer. But Cassandra’s big, beautiful eyes are wasted for a character that seems to be underwritten in the end. It’s a shame because both Azad and Cassandra can seem more compelling than their male counterparts, in more than one scene.
There’s a supporting cast around Sarbh and Singh, which has become a trademark for Sony LIV originals. Rajit Kapur does his best Nehru impression here where he speaks in a high-pitched, almost nasal manner. It’s inconsistent, but a far more grounded version of the character grappling with the pressures of a newly-independent state. And in a time, where every other film/politician/bystander seems to be blaming Nehru, Kapur’s portrayal hits the right balance between making him human, while also doffing one’s hat to one of India’s greatest visionaries.
The best part in Rocket Boys belongs to Dibyendu Bhattacharya as Raza Mehdi, the perpetual ‘outsider’ in his own country. Too Shia to be spared by Sunnis, too Muslim for his primarily Hindu neighbours in Kolkata, too rough around the edges to invite the admiration of his more-polished colleagues like both Bhabha and Sarabhai (and even Nehru) to become a golf buddy of theirs. Bhattacharya seems to be the only actor willing to build a character from the ground up in the show, and it’s fascinating to watch until even he gets drowned out by the two leading men. There’s an unnecessary part featuring APJ Abdul Kalam (played by Arjun Radhakrishnan) which does little apart from being a ‘tribute’ to one of India’s most loved presidents.
Rocket Boys needed a bit more focus and pointed purpose – it feels too motivated by generic and half-hearted anecdotes. While Harshvir Oberai’s sepia-tinted frames are opulent enough to suggest ‘period piece’, it’s also reflective of the excesses of a show that could have (ironically) reined in its ambition from time to time. The series includes an espionage track late in the latter episodes, which seems like director Pannu and creator Nikkhil Advani throwing the kitchen sink at the audience to get *some* reaction from them. Not only is it too late, but the tone feels too conspiratorial by now. Not all rockets become stratospheric successes, some implode during a launch - Rocket Boys is more emblematic of the latter.
Rocket Boys is streaming on SonyLIV.
Watch the trailer here
Tatsam Mukherjee has been working as a film journalist since 2016. He is based out of Delhi NCR.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/rocket-boys-review-jim-sarbh-ishwak-singh-in-an-unfocused-document-of-an-intriguing-period-in-indian-history-10347291.html
