March 16, 2006 by Sanjay.

The announced cinematic collaboration of Dev Benegal and Stephen Fry on the Ramanujan-Hardy romance is one of those obvious-in-hindsight ideas that make you smack your forehead and go, “doh!” As Hardy himself might have put it, this improbable partnership has to be a true story because if it weren’t, nobody would have had the imagination to invent it. Short version:

In 1913, an unknown Madrasi clerk by the name of Srinivasa Ramanujan sends G. H. Hardy, the celebrated Cambridge number theorist, a laundry list of mathematical assertions without accompanying proofs. Hardy immediately recognizes Ramanujan’s incandescent genius and goes full-force into “developing” him both mathematically and materially. This nonprofit investment blossoms into a 5-year research partnership between the two. Ramanujan visits Hardy in Cambridge, drinks the water, catches God-knows-what, returns to Madras, and dies at 32.

If only Puccini subscribed to the Mathematical Intelligencer!

The spate of successful plays and films built around mathematics and science - Good Will Hunting, Beautiful Mind, Proof, and Copenhagen come to mind, as does Stoppard’s less well-known Arcadia - indicate audience readiness to nibble on difficult ideas (without jumping the high hurdles of systematic learning and independent discovery.)

Consider now the exotic locales, the period costumes, the trendiness of the subject, and the undoubted future backing of the full-on marketing cabal that the Indian chatterati have morphed into (”India Everywhere!“), the film practically pitches itself.

I’m plumping for the ever-fey Graeme Everett as the non-practicing homosexual (Littlewood’s words) Hardy and that hunky metamorph Russel Crowe as Ramanujan!

PS - Hardy’s influencial memoir is now online in PDF form.  If you liked What do you Care what Other People Think? or Adventures of a Mathematician, you’ll love A Mathematician’s Apology!

Posted in Snark | No Comments »

March 7, 2006 by Sanjay.

In a recent interview to the Columbia Journalism Review, Suketu Mehta says in a rather matter of fact manner that “… in India the problem isn’t getting people to talk, it’s getting them to shut up or to stick to the topic.” He isn’t being snarky, he’s literally correct.  This digressiveness is perhaps related to our love of complexity, or maybe it’s just a culturally specific type of ADHD.  But it’s certainly a defining feature of modern Indian life.

Speaking of Suketu Mehta, his book Maximum City, a love epic sung to Bombay, has rightly been called a revelation. My friend Ramarao confesses that he was “briefly obsessed” by the possible reactions of the book’s characters to its publication. What sets Maximum City apart from most travel journalism is precisely this immersiveness. A Paul Theroux approaches his subject with a post-postmodern ironic distance, a Jan Morris impressionistically, yet clinically.  On the other branch of the objective/subjective divide, a brilliantly naked memoirist like Lars Eighner is a better fit on Oprah than in Granta.  Naipaul’s travel writing, to pick another armchair philosopher favorite, is too intimately fed by the author’s id, albeit disguised by his formidable intellectual veneer.

Maximum City presents a different mode of travel writing: it’s an encystation induced by Mehta’s low-key ubiquity. In recording Bombayites’ stories he changes their lives, and his own. There must be damage, surely emotional if not social and professional.  (I don’t know if the last assertion is true, but read Mehta’s conversations with Monalisa and tell me if you don’t wonder about his wife’s reaction to the book!)  Mehta is a character in each story, but like Renoir’s river, the current goes on much the same when he leaves. The genius of this 500+ page book is how keenly we regret parting from his prostitutes, torturers, and thugs.

Posted in Criticism | No Comments »