nagasaki: Hiroshima, Nagasaki this week, shall we?

As funny goes, funny comes in many shades. Some funnies come even in hues that don’t come across as particularly comic – until one peers at it very close and realises that funny isn’t always ha ha hilarious, but can also be strange, even tragic. Funny way of talking, funny way of things ending, funny that you should say so, funny about him having no one….

…Funny how between yesterday, Sunday, August 6 and Wednesday, August 9, most people will go and watch Christopher Nolan’s searing, radioactive film, Oppenheimer, without realising that 78 years ago this very week, Robert Oppenheimer and Co’s creation had one tribe of humans practically wipe out two cities belonging to another tribe. Funny that Nolan’s film has elicited debates on the ‘glorification’ of a mass destructor, rather than point to an old wound called Hiroshima-Nagasaki. Such pointing is important lest we forget. Oppenheimer may be a ‘fictionalised’ biopic, but unlike those historic-horror B&W photos of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki moonscapes, the film is in relatable, palpable colour. It is important to realise that the atom bomb did not destroy abstract, historical, but flesh and blood humans. While neither Hiroshima’s nor Nagasaki’s cinemas are showing Oppenheimer yet, here’s the funny thing: the Japanese will see Oppenheimer in halls soon. Flinching more than others, perhaps.