I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. The suit, the rockets, floating around in space and maybe even discovering a planet or two, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
That fascination never really left me as I grew up. It just changed shape, first into engineering and then years later, into Rocket Boys.
I never made it to space myself. But I got to spend years in the world of the men who quite literally built India's path there, and somehow, that felt like its own kind of win.
1 August 2026
Get the latest issue of Outlook Business
Starting out in a field as unpredictable as filmmaking, I found the ambition of Homi Bhabha (the father of the Indian nuclear programme) and Vikram Sarabhai (the father of the Indian space programme), genuinely inspiring.
Their lives were so rich, so full of drama and conviction, that as a storyteller, I had to tell their story.
I knew of them the way most of us do: as names from textbooks, filed away somewhere between formulas and dates. It was only when I started researching for the show that I began to grasp the true scale of what they had achieved.
That's what pushed me to make Rocket Boys. I wanted young people in India to know these men not just as scientists, but as people driven by immense ambition and knowledge.
Untold Stories
Additionally, as a writer-director, you're always looking for stories that haven't been told before. As an engineer myself, the world of science and technology was the one that I understood. Beyond that, there was something about the sheer spirit of Bhabha and Sarabhai that got to me.
It was the audacity of their ambition that felt cinematic to me. A good story is one where your protagonist has to fight hard to overcome the conflict, but a great story is one where the conflict seems almost impossible to overcome, and the way out feels like magic.
They were decades ahead of their time, they were nation builders and, at the same time, they were young men figuring out their place in the world. That contrast is what interested me even more was that their lives read like one long love letter to their country. That made it the most cinematic story ever.
Bhabha and Sarabhai weren't working with surplus. If anything, scarcity may have sharpened their belief
If there's one thing that stayed with me while working on the show is that how much of India's space story was built on scarcity, not surplus.
These weren't people working with unlimited resources and time. Yet, nobody treated that as a reason to dream smaller. If anything, scarcity seemed to sharpen their belief.
What the show revealed to me about India's space sector, then and now, is that it was never short on brilliance. It was short on almost everything else.
I discovered that most of what we take for granted today traces back to that time. The satellite television programme Sarabhai was piloting in the 1970s is part of the same lineage that put a TV screen in almost every home in India.
And the rocket programme he started out of Thumba became Isro— Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan, all of it grew out of that one beginning.
A quote from Sarabhai that still resonates with me is: "Failure is not about not succeeding. Rather it is about not putting in your best effort and not contributing, however modestly, to the common good."
When you're making something, you mostly just hope it reaches people and they enjoy it. With Rocket Boys, we've been lucky enough to get so much more than that. There have been countless interactions, in person and on social media, where people have reached out to say they feel a real sense of pride studying physics or pursuing atomic science.
The one that's stayed with me most is a parent telling me their kid used to say, "I want to work at Nasa." After watching the show, the kid started saying, "I want to work at Isro" instead.
Measure of Success
I still get messages and screenshots from friends telling me their friends listen to the title track to get motivated before heading into IISc [Indian Institute of Science] or Isro or BARC [Bhabha Atomic Research Centre]. However, you measure success, I'll take that as a win.
Additionally, I have grown as an admirer of all of Steven Spielberg's work, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There was something about the way he made you feel wonder rather than just show it to you that stayed with me. And then, years later, Interstellar had a great impact on me—how it made space feel emotional, not just scientific.
A good story stays with people. We can't really determine how or why a story influences someone, or what exactly it unlocks in them, all we can hope to do is entertain and take people to new worlds. And maybe that's the difference between a textbook and a story.
On screen, a scientist stops being a name you memorise and becomes someone you actually want to be.
To some extent, content in pop culture influences the country's temperament. We've moved away from monoculture, which means different people care about different things, which means more stories get room to be told, including ones about science that might not have found space earlier.
I wouldn't say pop culture single-handedly decides a country's scientific ambition. But it can absolutely shine a light on stories people hadn't considered before.
Stories of science and scientists can be just as exciting, inspiring and entertaining as any other story out there. That was always the hope with Rocket Boys—that kids would watch the show and decide they want to be a rocket scientist or an atomic scientist, not because they were told to, but because they saw, for themselves, how thrilling and how meaningful that life could actually be.
The writer is director of the television series ‘Rocket Boys’
