Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s most recent movie, has been earning large money at the box office and receiving praise from critics all around the world. But in India, a few of the movie’s sequences have stirred up a little bit of debate because they both feature the Hindu sacred book Bhagavad Gita. Now, these difficulties have been addressed by Robert J. Oppenheimer’s own biographer.
The nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, commonly considered as the Father of the Atomic Bomb, is the subject of the book Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer claimed in interviews conducted after the Trinity Test that he had been reminded of a verse from the Gita when he first saw the explosion. “The glory of the Mighty One would be comparable to the brightness of a thousand suns bursting into the sky… According to the famous words of the American physicist, “I am now Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
Many Indian academics have refuted this interpretation, nevertheless. Speaking to Hindustan Times about the controversy, Kai Bird, who co-wrote Oppenheimer’s biography, said, “And that famous line that he used to describe what he thought when he saw the Trinity explosion — ‘I am death, destroyer of the world’ — some Sanskrit scholars, as I understand it, think that the more accurate translation would be ‘I am Time, destroyer of worlds’. Being a quantum physicist, he is attempting to understand time and space, which are problems that the Gita inadvertently sort of addresses.
Despite the controversy, Oppenheimer received overwhelmingly favorable reviews upon its release. The majority of critics have commended the performances, especially those of Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Robert Downey Jr.