The article first appeared in The Indian Express on January 10, 2024
Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan — one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2023 — has all but swept the Golden Globes, winning five awards including for best actor, director and film. J Robert Oppenheimer, an American physicist, is considered the father of the atomic bomb. He was born into a Jewish family in New York. In 1927, he received his doctorate in Physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany. After working at various universities in Europe, and later at Harvard as well as Caltech in the US, Oppenheimer started teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. He had been interested in Indian philosophy for a long time. He studied Sanskrit with Arthur Ryder, a Professor of Sanskrit at Berkeley, so that he could read the original texts, instead of merely reading their translations. He was particularly fond of the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. He believed that the Gita was the most beautiful philosophical song that existed in any language of the world.