A local triumph

Two fictionalised retellings, a film and a web series, cover the Indian Space Research Organisation or ISRO’S groundbreaking 2013 Mars mission. The 2020 film Mission Mangal takes the easy road. Director Jagan Shakti presents a reductive tale of a mission director who turns a punishment posting around, leading women scientists to execute a project literally out of this world. Of course, the women must balance science and home science; one breakthrough comes when one of the scientists is frying puris. They resort to jugaad to get things done. And the tech talk is no more complex than it needed to be.

Endemol Shine India’s 2019 web series M.O.M. - Mission Over Mars is the better watch. Eight episodes offer fictionalised accounts of the lives of the women scientists who worked on the mission. “The series focused on the novelty of seeing women scientists on screen – a woman’s brain is the last thing that gets highlighted in the mainstream media,” says Mrinalini Khanna, the company’s vicepresident. “They are women whose minds work at the speed of light.” They battle demons of their own — the pressure to be a submissive wife, a lack of confidence in their talent, a fear of one’s own ambition.

It streamed to critical acclaim mostly because, Khanna says, “we showed them as imperfect women who became a team of heroes — you respect them as you would any man.” The show presents a different India too. “The 2013 mission showed India what was achievable, and how much could be done with so little,” Khanna says. “India has always had thinkers and scientists. We’re now realising that a planet can influence our destiny in a whole new way.”