The very concept of space-time is freaking mind numbing, the fact that the 3 dimensions of space and the 4th dimension of time are not really disjointed, but are absolutely stitched together, is something which is hard for us to wrap our heads around. For simplicity’s sake, think about it this way, where are you? If I ask this innocuous question, you will probably give me your longitude and latitude position. Which is like X and Y dimensions of space. In case you are living in an apartment complex, you might give me a third dimension, Y, the height, like 8th floor. Now these 3 dimensions of space should be enough for me to know where you are, but then there is an implicit 4th dimension you have given me, that is of time. Which means this is where you are RIGHT NOW. Maybe you weren’t there an hour ago, maybe you won’t still be there 30 minutes from now, which means that to know your exact position, I need at least 4 dimensions, X, Y, Z, and t. Any dimension missing, and I won’t reach you, I won’t know where you are.
Space Time Fabric
Now all science purists must be cussing under their breath that this is not how you prove the space time fabric, and I know, but I am not proving, just explaining how intricately bonded these 4 dimensions are, so much so that rather than thinking about the shape of a Tesseract, an actual 4 dimensional object, you can imagine space time as a plain sheet of paper, or better still, surface of a trampoline, it’s going to come in handy, so keep this in mind.
Now is the right time to bring in a fundamental force of the universe, gravity. If these 4 dimensions are working so well, does gravity has any role to play here? And yes, it does, that too a big one on that. So, gravity doesn’t come into the picture by itself, it comes with matter. In the most simplistic way, matter is something which has mass, and has volume, for now keep this in mind, and take a step back. Think about your couch, no one is sitting on it, it’s empty, visualize it. What you see? A clean, smooth couch. Now you sit on it, what happens now, now there is a curve on the surface of the couch, since you are sitting on it, and the surface bends, or curves, due to your mass.
This is exactly what happens when a heavenly body of some mass appears on the surface of this space time fabric, the fabric curves, just like in you put a heavy object, or you yourself stand on a trampoline, the surface of the trampoline curves. And that curve, creates the force of gravity. Now anything small which gets into this curve will naturally falls towards the object at the center of this curve, hence the gravitational force towards the center of the mass.
It means that not just the space is getting curved, mind you, it’s the space time which is getting curved, the time is now not just on the linear smooth surface as we imagined it to be, but it is now having curves. If this makes sense, congratulations, because this is what Dr. Einstein explained in his general theory of relativity, and trust me, if Einstein was genius to come up with this, it takes a pretty bright mind to understand this as well, and I feel that you have actually wrapped your head around this. All this is something proven in experimental science, so nothing out of ordinary, you will have plenty of experiments that you can see on YouTube to see it in action, and they are all pretty cool.
Now let’s get into
the sphere of theoretical Physics, something which is not proven, but maybe we
can think and prove it in our minds. Let’s increase the mass of the object that
we have put on our space time fabric, the surface of our trampoline. As we
increase the mass, you can probably imagine that the ‘well’ where this object
is sinking is becoming deeper, and hence the curve is getting deeper. You keep
on increasing the mass of this object till the time you get a curve which is
more like steep hole, and suddenly you will see the space time fabric is now U
shaped, where in the center of the is that heavy object. So far so good, I hope.
Now let’s take the jump into the time travel machine, now, if you want to
travel the time, you can travel through edges of this U shape, or you can
travel across the vertical lines on this U shape, and that’s how you travel
time. Einstein’s theory postulates that due to so many curves in the space time
fabric some wrinkles have now appeared on this fabric, where we can find these
pathways to travel from one side to the other, and these pathways are called as
wormholes. And that’s it, this is the premise of JL 50.
The Wormhole
A flight on path to travel time through a wormhole. As a series it’s taught, it’s gripping, it definitely is engaging, science behind the scenes is pretty authentic, atleast the premise, though it kind of throws it out in the bin towards the end, because hey, it’s still Bollywood, right? But nothing takes away from the fact that this is India’s one of the finest sci-fi venture.
I saw the show for the cast that it has, and honestly, I think that it is probably one of the weakest part of the show. I mean, Pankaj Kapoor is brilliant, but his role, though is pivotal, but is more like a guest appearance, so it’s not saying by much. Piyush Mishra, again pretty much a guest appearance, doesn’t have anything, and infact I thought he overacted a bit. I mean, he has that tendency, since he is from theater, to become louder, so he always need a strong director to reign him, and from editing it did seem that some of his OTT scenes were probably chopped off as well.
Coming to the biggest disappointment, Abhay Deol, man, this guy is lazy. I mean, I know that present generation swears by Ayushman Khurana, but trust me, that Ayushman is probably doing what Abhay Deol was doing at one point of time. He has a stellar body of work, Socha Na Tha, Dev D (man, the best rendition of Devdas, EVER), Manorma, Ek Chalis ki Last Local, Ranjhana (for whatever glimpses that he had, he pretty much lit up the whole screen by his mere presence), but dude, in this one, he turned out to be so slow. You see his chase sequence and you will get what I mean, he just was lethargic. Rajesh Sharma though is the only spark in an otherwise pretty lazy cast, and after watching him in Paatal Lok, I am convince that this guy is absolutely fire. There’s another actress Ritika Anand, an important role, but horribly out of tune. There’s one more extremely important character of the movie, that I would want to talk about towards the end.
There’s not much in the story, I mean, trailers nowadays pretty much gives everything away anyways. An airplane crashed in some of the most beautiful hills of Bengal, which was earlier thought of another airplane, but then soon everyone understands that the plane that crashed actually is the one that was lost some 35 years ago. The case is handled by CBI, and as any logical, thinking, sane person will assume, is thought to be a conspiracy to diverge the intelligence agency from something bigger and more sinister going on. How come a plane lost 35 years ago, can crash now, and all recordings, architecture, technology, ID cards, everything showing that it was actually from that age and time?
Rest of the story is about hows and whys of this crash, which even seems stretched at times. The most beautiful aspect of the series is cinematography. I am a big fan of Santosh Sivan, and how he uses greenery of India, the luscious rivers, the forests, the landscape in general, and somehow I thought that cinematography of JL 50 was much inspired from Santosh’s work. I mean, even though based in Bengal, you don’t see the busy streets, the bustling traffic, the overcrowded transport system, what you get is a serene Bengal, a beautiful, pragmatic, intelligent, and again, extremely beautiful location.
And this brings me to the most important character of the movie, that is the city of Kolkata. There are many times that I have asked this question from movies, TV series, why was this shot in a place where it was shot? What was the purpose and impact of a movie based in Delhi or Mumbai or Goa. More often than not you don’t get a clear cut answer to this question, but then this changed when probably Dibakar Banerjee came on the scene with his Khosla ka Ghosla, still for me one of the movies that changed the Indian movie landscape in a way that it can’t even be imagined. For the first time probably I saw the impact of Delhi in each and every character, the storyline, the demeanor, language, behavior, everything. JL 50 takes the same culture forward, by ensuring that Kolkata is a part of the story just like the airline itself. There are some smart jokes as well, and you can see the stamp of the city on the writing in all these scenes. The narrow streets, those Durga statues, old buildings, women taking charge, the general aura of what you expect from Kolkata minus the claustrophobia.
JL 50 is definitely one of the shows that many of us have wanted from Indian storytellers and that too for a long time, and therein lies the problem of the same. When most of the audience has graduated to shows like Dark, or Stranger Things, especially for the connoisseurs of such content, where does it leave the projects like this? Anyone who has seen Dark will not be satiated by the content in JL 50, and for those who are still watching Kapil Sharma, would they like this? I don’t know, but for a country of the marasis, vidooshaks, raamlilas and raas lilas, the culture of storytelling, the art was lost for such a long time, and there finally are platforms where this art can be redeveloped, and this series is a step in the same direction. We need to support it without getting hung over the content produced by the world cinema. So, I would ask you to give it a try, without having any lofty expectations, without expecting a time travel which is as fun as Back to future, or as intricate as Dark, but the engaging story it is despite it’s numerous fallacies.
