February 19, 2008 by Sanjay.

I recently mentioned the redundancy of fiction in our hyper-absurd “real” world . As if one needed further proof, along comes a story of a Bush-appointed federal judge in drag arrested for DUI.

Needless to caveat, I fully support everyones right, regardless of birth sex, to don “a black women’s cocktail dress, fishnet stockings and high heels” as the mood strikes. But a conservative bankruptcy judge? Could even Roald Dahl have made him up?

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June 1, 2007 by Sanjay.

If, like me, you have obsessively rotated through all the cringe-inducing images of Old Men Crying and now you hanker for fresh meat, this is your lucky day! The Silicon Valley gossip site ValleyWag has posted a video of legendary venture capitalist John Doerr choking up when talking about the greatest peril faced by his daughter: Global Warming! First evangelicals, then President Bush, and now a man with the word “capitalist” on his business card. It’s safe to say that the Global Warming bandwagon is now officially more popular than The Beatles!

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January 15, 2007 by Sanjay.

In a CBS poll last year, over one-third of Americans confessed to bringing “teachings or philosophies from more than one religion into [their] own practices.” My own interest in cross-religious borrowing was piqued by the oft-invoked promise of 72 virgins that jihadis are apparently promised in a Muslim paradise. Recently though, my incipient aspirations to immortality have been seriously dampened by reading that (strangely like the Mars Rover accident) the whole virgins thing is probably one giant translation cock-up.

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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!

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December 28, 2005 by Sanjay.

I just heard a Chinese-American on the telly characterize the Mainland as “materially toxic”. Funny, that’s exactly the right label for today’s India.  Despite the malls (”just like in the US!”) and  flyovers (i.e., overpasses, still considered an amazing feat of civil engineering) and buildings that look like they’ve been teleported from Shenzhen, there probably isn’t a kid in Delhi that doesn’t have asthma.  The smog is not even remarked on any more.  Well, that isn’t really true - every second person, on learning that you don’t live in Delhi, avows, “the pollution has gotten so much better!”  Kids that have grown up in Delhi and never travelled up to the hills probably don’t know that the sky is not supposed to be blue-ish.  Still, being in Delhi remains a delight. More on that another time…

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