Rocketry — A Tale of Two Slaps

Abhishek Sainani
Movie Over Matter
Published in
2 min readJul 4, 2022

Rocketry is a biopic about Nambi Narayanan, a genius rocket scientist who played a pivotal role in success of India’s space missions. Unfortunately, he was falsely accused as a traitor and he had to fight a legal battle for 24 years before the Supreme Court of India acquitted him of all charges. He and his family suffered immensely during the nearly two and a half decade long battle, and progress of India’s space program nearly came to a halt.

Photo Credit: IMDB

This movie has two different halves — the good days of Nambi and the bad days of Nambi. The good days part is highly technical, yet engaging and raises curiosity to find out more about the technology that goes into building and launching rockets. The bad days part is highly emotional, and makes us question about why we, as a society, so easily distance ourselves from someone whose contributions to the country were undeniable. Even terrorists have more supporters in this country than the falsely accused renowned scientist.

In each of the two parts, I noticed that Nambi gets slapped, for two different reasons. Each reason is compelling, and I feel bad for Nambi in both cases. Yet I felt a stronger impact of the one in the first half, and I believe Nambi might have felt the same (or maybe the sound of the slap was louder in this one). In the first half one, the emotions on both sides were strong and justified — the one slapping him was enraged and Nambi was feeling guilty. Also there’s proper build-up to the slap in this case. On the other hand, the slap in second half comes all of a sudden without any context. This confuses both Nambi and the viewers. This does raises our curiosity but fails to have any emotional impact. The details are shared later and we feel bad for Nambi but we have forgotten about the slap by then because much worse was done to him after the slap. This means that it isn’t the act in itself but the situation and the build-up leading to it that creates the emotional impact in the audience.

In conclusion, this movie shows us two slaps Nambi Narayanan got, one he deserved and one he didn’t. And for leaving him out in the cold to fight his own legal battle, we as a society deserve a tight slap. Thank you R Madhavan and team Rocketry for bringing this story to the world. To find out more about the two slaps, and why we should treat our scientists with more respect (instead of treating them worse than terrorists), watch the movie Rocketry running in the nearest cinema hall as soon as possible.

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Abhishek Sainani
Movie Over Matter

An aspiring writer who often juggles between his inner world, his dream world, and the real world. Writes poetry, humorous observations and opinion pieces.