While the film version of pink and sky-blue-hued Barbie is trumping Oppenheimer at the United States box office, it is Oppenheimer, the biographical thriller written and directed by Christopher Nolan, that is leading in India. The reference to a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita, the revered Hindu text that J Robert Oppenheimer read compulsively to overcome his moral dilemma of becoming the instrument of so much death and destruction, may have something to do with the interest in India. Both Robert Oppenheimer, a Jew, and Werner Heisenberg, a gentile, Lutheran Christian, set about building the world’s first nuclear bomb using...