Naseeruddin Shah mocks extreme method acting too much to pretend to be a medium channelising Einstein to caution us ‘Indian sub-continentals’ against our spirited nationalism. FYI, method acting demands actors’ immersion in their subjects’ lives. Not no-nonsense-Naseer! He’d pick science over séance any day. The down-to-earth legend, painstakingly, researched Gabriel Emanuel’s script and invited me — a former German exchange student — to be his accent coach to share in his charming first discovery of the historically-laden yet mathematical language. Imagine my astonishment at the alchemical transformation of a man magnanimous enough to treat me like he was my student into what seemed the reincarnation of Albert Einstein himself! Shah, a master craftsman without pretentious mysticism, metamorphoses into potbellied Einstein, touting suspenders, too-short trousers, and a mischievous dislike for socks. Naseeruddin Shah’s Einstein features in “Politweak” as a call to create a ‘theatre for peace’ to reclaim the narrative from nationalism’s ‘theatre of war and terror,’ where our patriotism is leveraged to wage murderous multilevel wars. Shah caricatures the benign Einstein’s monologue of humble and hilarious anecdotes. The movements of Einstein’s swan song outline the need for individual resistance to nationalism’s re-organisation of science to increase warring nations’ elasticity of impact. Through Einstein’s eyes, a key protagonist in both World Wars and the Cold War, the case is made to become conscientious anti-nationals. The nationalistic project, disguised as education to produce good citizens, is from cradle to grave and starts in government-controlled schools. It instils unquestioning acceptance of authority, kills natural curiosity, and the belief embryonic of the scientific temperament, i.e. “the universe is comprehensible [so] it is important not to stop questioning [as] all our knowledge is but the knowledge of school children.” Einstein recounts how school authorities convince his parents he’d amount to nothing due to autism; there is the loneliness of repressed genius as he is expelled from schools with Prussian discipline codes for asking too many questions and not maintaining kadavergehorsamkeit — corpse-like obedience. In an open, meritocratic education system, failure and healthy disregard for others’ opinions allows someone like Einstein, compelled to be an electrician, to find their niche. Nationalistic boundaries between countries and power relationships act like speed-breakers to scientific progress. Einstein’s triumphant revision of Newtonian physics was delayed because German scientists hoping to prove that gravity was a field and not a force during the 1914 solar eclipse were made prisoners of war by Tsarist Russia for being ‘the wrong nationality’. His discovery had to wait five years until Eddington, British, and able to lead an expedition to colonised Africa, demonstrated that gravity around the sun caused ‘star displacement’. Nationalism carps at the ‘discrimination du jour,’ its enemies decided by officials’ expediency masquerading as national interest. Although it would offend sensibilities today that the Nobel Laureate Einstein was considered a national traitor, his persecution is a study in another kind of theory of relativity. National machineries manufacture what we consider intuitive, so it mustn’t surprise you Einstein was considered seditious in three regimes in two different nations: German and American. During the WWI, Einstein faced flak from Wilhelm’s German empire for refusing to sign his colleague, Fritz Haber’s propaganda paper, “The Manifesto to the Civilised World,” which apportioned blame to allies UK, France and Russia for using chemical weapons first when Haber himself created mustard gas. Einstein refused to sit on the ethical fence, circulating his manifesto for abolishing war as mass murder. Europe’s anti-Semitism percolated into the new National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, where anti-nationals became those from ‘the wrong religion’. Trading the timber of his natural baritone for Einstein’s oddly winsome nasal, guttural speech, Shah confounds us with Einstein’s chilling retelling of the ‘accident of his birth’ into Germany in an epoch of violent discrimination and his aversion to nationalism predicated on community and country. Much before Hitler, his wife, Mileva, returning from a Swiss holiday, converted herself and their children to catholicism without any opposition because the cosmopolitan Einstein didn’t “feel particularly Jewish.” His was a pantheistic God unravelled by understanding nature. The anti-Semite nationalist, Deutsche Physik’s founder, Philipp Lenard, who was laughed at by the Nobel committee for alleging Einstein and other Jewish scientists “contaminated physics with their lies and smokescreen mathematics” and that Einstein’s “theory of relativity was a Jewish fraud,” gained traction at the helm of Hitler’s mobsters. Max Planck, not to cause any ripples in a nationalistic cesspool where might is right, accepted Einstein’s resignation from Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, hypocritically “in the name of science.” Risking his life, Einstein stood up to Lenard, and slow-clapped while he called for en masse expulsion of Jewish scientists at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall, silencing nationalist hysteria Lenard drummed up. Physically occupying a polarised space puts a human face on the hated and weakens the hater. Churchill, who on Einstein’s recommendation placed German-Jewish scientists at British Universities, attributed Germany’s defeat to the leaching of talents nationalists branded “enemies within.” Science to Einstein is logically understanding rules put in place by a “God who does not play dice with the universe.” It is knowledge-via-experience rather than religion’s militant commitment to first principles. Einstein’s assertion “scientists are the only truly religious people in these materialistic times” was rubbished by New York’s Bishop Fulton J Sheen as no one would “die for the Milky Way.” According to Einstein, nationalism militarises religion as it begs the belief “you cannot have a good religion unless someone is willing to lay down his life.” Even in his refuge, America, The New York Times dubs Einstein “enemy of the people” for advising a Brooklyn school teacher to go to jail instead of testifying in an evil anti-communist inquisition. Shah’s Einstein quips, “I just got finished being an enemy of the people, and that people was an enemy of this people. So many enemies for an old professor!” To protect individual inquiry and expression, Einstein warns us against fettering the fate of humankind to narrow, abstract nationalistic constructs, which require “enemies within” to keep governments’ ‘theatre of violent encirclement’ unquestioned. Mobilising collective narcissism, the ruling elite justify using force to confiscate resources and influence for ‘their community’ in the name of national identity. Nationalism thrives in the ‘theatre of war and terror’, compelling people to isolate themselves and weaponise science to protect ‘their people’. Fleeing systematic attacks on ‘Jewish science’ and witnessing the horrific holocaust of six million Jews, the scientist bears the burden of making difficult decisions during the WWII. He is cajoled by loved ones into protecting the new Jewish nation, which relies on him to provide them with nuclear deterrence and to parade his celebrity like ‘the great Jewish holy one’ to raise funds to build their homeland away from genocide. He consents despite not believing in national borders, being Zionist, nor accepting Ben-Gurion’s summons to be Israel’s president, although it might have made for an Israel that is kinder to Palestinians. The calculus of Einstein’s actions at curtain call leaves him in despair as inventing the atom bomb casts an ugly umbra on his life’s work. Not even his Nobel Prize is of comfort as Alfred Nobel created it to assuage guilt at inventing dynamite. Nationalism weaponises science because scientists are answerable to national governments that finance their expensive R&D. These governments are put in place by an international order assuming constant war; where human beings should necessarily be separated for their survival along the lines of geography, language, religion, ethnicity and a selective retelling of their history. Nationalism converts scientific developments for wellbeing into technologies whose proliferation hastens self-destruction because, in Haber’s words, a “scientist is expected to belong to the world in times of peace and to his country in times of war.” Einstein’s global government regulating nation-states is far off. But Naseeruddin Shah’s Einstein resounds beyond the theatre as it attacks nationalism’s pseudoscientific reasoning. It is a biopic of a violent world built and perpetuated in the image of nationalism, which can only be countered by building a theatre for peace to rework and subvert nationalistic narratives that encourage the arms race, for no nation keeps the laws of war. In Sheila Menon’s words, “Every objective endeavour has an underlying subjectivity that needs to be self-audited.&rdq