Alter Ego Blog

Pakistan Cabinet ministers have agreed to lift corruption charges facing exiled opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, paving her way for a return and possible power-sharing alliance with President Pervez Musharraf, one minister told CNN.
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Exiled former Pakistnani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has pledged to return if charges against her are lifted.

Bhutto last week had said she would return if charges against her were lifted but indicated a widely discussed plan to shore up Musharraf's weakening power base was a non-starter unless the president abandoned his military role.

As per CNN >>

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From Tariq Ali on the role that Mark Tully, the veteran BBC journo covering South Asia had on the BBC censorship story.

"A week later Mark Tully, the veteran BBC journalist based in Delhi rang me up. He too had read the scripts and wanted to discuss it over a drink. I was advised by Robin Midgley to take this meeting very seriously and not be to provocative."

Tariq writes that Mark Tully and he met and Tully came straight to the point. He had been asked by Alasdir Milne to read the scripts. But Tully said that here was one problem. "Tully said that in the third episode " Two men, one coffin" I had alleged that the USA had given green signal for Bhutto's hanging. He said that he was in Rawalpindi at that time "and I could find no evidence of US involvement".

Tariq says, "I explained that the US embassy and its Saudi surrogate were all powerful in Zia's Pakistan and any senior military officer would confirm that Zia consulted them before hanging Bhutto." Tully disagreed. Finally, he said, "What if I tell you that if you took that section out of the series the BBC would definitely go ahead." Tariq says that he decided to tell BBC that he would scorn the idea and that was the end. BBC took the serial off air "because of libel risk."

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Jawed Naqwi writes:

IT WAS way back in 1985 that the BBC commissioned Tariq Ali to write a TV play — The Leopard and the Fox, A Pakistani Tragedy. As rehearsals were about to begin, it was agreed that Zia Mohyeddin would play General Zia, and India’s Naseeruddin Shah would play Z.A. Bhutto. Then suddenly, under pressure from the British Foreign Office, the BBC decided to cancel the project.

I got my hands on it recently when Seagull Books in UK finally published what comes across as a fairly credible dramatisation of Zia’s coup and Bhutto’s dubious trial and execution.

The play runs into 106 short scenes. But in today’s context, with one former prime minister dispatched to a second exile in Saudi Arabia (an old Muslim habit, considering what Emperor Akbar did with Bairam Khan, his once trusted aide) and another bracing to wade into Pakistan’s political quagmire, perhaps the most important scene to ponder in the play is Scene 20.

It opens in Gen Zia’s office at the military HQ. It shows Zia involved in a serious discussion with General Azad, evidently an officer whose name the author has changed because of the BBC’s libel policy. The men are sipping cold drinks, just to give a flavour of the times, with Zia exuding a friendly demeanour.

Azad: In 1971 the army was finished. Finished! If Bhutto had hanged 20 generals in public, the people would have applauded.

Zia: You think I don’t know what Bhutto did for us? But it is no longer a private matter. Americans are very angry because of nuclear programme.

Azad: We pressured Bhutto to start our nuclear plans. Zaman (another changed name) said, ‘Sir, we cannot sit back, while India tests nuclear devices.’ So Bhutto told the world.

Zia: Correct. But what worries Pentagon very much is civilians controlling nuclear weapons. Unstable. Unstable. In Fort Bragg they made it very clear that even their president in the White House was not completely independent. He is always flanked by military advisors. General Barnes laughed and said to us: ‘You see, we have a permanent semi-martial law in our country. No one objects.'

More on Jawed Naqwi's article in the Dawn >>

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BENAZIR Bhutto, the former and likely future prime minister of Pakistan, has snagged a book deal with HarperCollins, believed to be worth $500,000.

"Pakistan is an increasingly volatile place, and Bhutto's book is an eye-opening look at the mistakes we've made in the region and what we can do to correct them - as well as what the consequences will be if we don't," said HarperCollins Executive Editor Tim Duggan.

Read more >>

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In an interview with NPR, Benazir Bhutto stated that she would return even if a deal with President Pervez Musharraf did not work out as she expects that many Pakistanis would welcome a return a democracy.

"I expect to be received by a lot of Pakistanis, who think that my arrival will signal a shift in Pakistani politics, will make a break with the past of the dictatorship and help facilitate my people's aspirations for democracy," she said.

Read more>>

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Nawaz Sharif, the former Prime MInister of Pakistan, was detained at Islamabad airport for a few hours and then sent back to Saudi Arabia.

This is a clear indication as any that President Musharraf is going to be a tough act to get on board in this power sharing deal that is being brokered by Washington between Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf. The army chief distrusts both politicians deeply but the locus is different for both politicians.

Nawaz Sharif was the prime minister who was ousted in the coup orchestrated by Musharraf in 1999.

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The political circles are a buzz with a purported power sharing deal which will see the return of both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from exile. So has Musharraf started looking towards a legacy as a benevolent dictator. No, not really. This deal is being brokered by the US and the State Department as insurance to keep the General in power as he has been seriously weakened by the constiutional and judicial crisis in Pakistan which is just a few shades removed from emergency rule.

The move is considered as a way of broadening his appeal that is being eroded rapidly. The US fears that he might be ousted and replaced by a leader who might be less favourably deposed towards 'freedom lovers' and less inclined to help them in their GWOT.

The deal would involve in broad strokes Musharraf's continuing as the military ruler to make way for Benazir's return as Prime Minister, depending on whether the PPP will win next month's elections, which is looking increasingly likely. The US hopes that this arrangement will give legitimacy in the largest cricles in In return he will have to give up the Army Chief of staff position. Benazir will endorse his candidature for the Presidential elections. At issue is a law that bars former PMs of Pakistan to seek re-election. Benazir has to convince Musharraf to overturn that law. This has led to a backlash by the PML who are the governing party who see Musharraf as conceding too much to keep his hold on power.

This looks like a convenient deal brokered by the US to protect their interests. But will this be a liveable arrangement for Pakistan. Both Benazir and Nawaz Sharif have a long history of nepotism and corruption and enriched themselves when they were in power. There was very little outpouring of sympathy or support for Nawaz Sharif when he was ousted by Musharraf. Most Pakistanis will agree that democracy is a utopian dream that has benefited few and Army backed rule has actually seen their country's best growth. At the same time there is a vibrant press and a vociferous judiciary that seems to have found its foothold who are clamoring for change.

Sharing power with Musharraf of course, ensures that Benazir will have to temper populist anti US rhetoric for which her father was famous for.The army is much more notoriously subservient to US interests. However, dealing with the army as an inevitability in the political frame is something that most Pakistanis have gotten used to. It is the sudden rise in the hitherto quiescent Islamic clergy, into the political spectrum, in the last six years of Bush's GWOT and Musharraf' s rule, that needs to be of prime consideration in this power arranging deal. They are considered by many on the street as a bulwark against the US as an anti Muslim entity. To try and marginalize them would be folly.

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Tom Stoppard once wrote, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else”, which is a tongue in cheek way of saying that there are opportunities everywhere. I first came across Stoppard in his wondrously zany play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and then by and by got more familiar with his work through my friend and the notorious raconteur Anuvab Pal, a staple of the New York theater scene, rotund in his grubby, coffee stained Thomas Pink shirt and spats. Pal worked ostensibly for Reuters during the day but in the twilight, in dimly lit, urine reeking hallways (he had fallen back on his rent), worked feverishly on his plays, many that Alter Ego produced and none that made money. His father visiting him on those days that Pal habited an apartment was very fond of saying that he would end up like the mad Jesus freak with wild eyes on the 1 train ranting for hours about the world coming to an end. Pal’s father had unsurprisingly chosen not to read any of Pal’s verbiage. Otherwise the similarities would have been fairly clear; both wanted annihilation of the world by different means.

But Alter Ego has made a career of Stoppard’s adage. Legend has is that Puja Ogale and Seema Malik, two Alter Ego members got a blind man to donate his Braille books (a prop essential to a play), after promising him a pair of free tickets to the play. The origin of Alter Ego grew out of a drink fueled conversation between Bhavna Thakur, a transaction lawyer and collector of rare vegetables and Nilay Oza, a toy train addict and an MIT trained architect at a friend’s loft. Bhavna performed a skit of Lady Godiva on horseback that evening, with Nilay clearing the way for her by shoving his host’s dinner table out of the way and rearranging the furniture. Bhavna instantly appreciated his set design skills. The two decided that the next play had to be a horse based one. Fortunately, Peter Schaffer’s Equus lost out to Hayavadana, the talking horse play by Girish Karnad. This was back in 2002. Since then we have been on a tear, averaging one play a year.

Along the way, we have produced Anuvab Pal’s Chaos Theory, a play about the imperfect physics of love and delusion but mostly delusion; Tom Stoppard’s NY premier of Indian Ink, a play rarely performed by theater companies and thus a treat for all Stoppard fans; Israel Horowitz’s The Indian Wants The Bronx, which featured the smarmy Dell computer kid; Anuvab Pal’s Fatwa, a play about two cranky old men eating lots of kebabs; and a reading of Anuvab Pal and Shourin Roy’s Who’se Afraid of Vijay Tendulkar?, a tribute to India’s foremost playwright, in the presence of the eminence gris himself. I have a feeling that he was not impressed by our efforts because he has never returned our calls or emails.

The NY premier of Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink, produced by Alter Ego, an Off Off Broadway theater company and not by the Lincoln Center was considered a major coup in NY theater circles. It had Samuel French, Stoppard’s literary agents in a tizzy. In the end it helped that the company comprised of members of the South Asian diaspora who felt that they were equally competent in deciphering a play that was based in their backyard. A point that was driven home by Nilay Oza, Indian Ink’s producer. In the end Nilay’s persistence paid off. It took the personal intervention of Stoppard in giving us the rights to stage the play. He was supposed to have come across the pond for the opening but a bout of food poisoning brought about by the consumption of a plate of chicken tikka masala at a pit stop near Holborn kept him away. He did make it a year later but that was for a NYT sponsored conversation with the late Mel Gussow. We had gone for it but never quite screwed up enough courage to ask him about Indian Ink and what he thought of the itsy bitsy teensy weensy theatre company that had beaten back the Lincoln Center to produce it.

Such was the buzz on the play, that our publicity team thanks to the crystal clear Sprint service on their cell phones had gotten wind that Bob Dylan would be coming for the play. Bob Dylan?? Robert Zimmerman?? Was he considering a career change in Off- Off Broadway productions or Just Blowin’ in the Wind? In the end it turned out to be Matt Dillon, who is a lot easier on the eye than Bob Dylan. No offence to Bob but the last singer who tried his hand at acting was Kris Kristofferson, at present seen on ESPN late night peddling hair products amongst TV ads that promote penis enhancers.

The anecdote serves as a reminder of the pulling power of playwrights such as Tom Stoppard. You just have to mention his name and reviewers and celebrities will fall over themselves to come see the play, of course unless you are from the NYT or the New Yorker. Then it depends on the play and the theater company. In most other instances as revealed in a workshop that I attended thanks to a timely call by Reshma Patel, an unflinching Amitabh Bachhan lover, and together we were supposed to do the Bunty and Babli dance number at Bhavna’s marriage last year, till saner counsels prevailed, is that reviewers consider themselves omnipotent. Their egos need to be regularly massaged and with lesser known playwrights and smaller theater companies, it becomes almost impossible to get a Ben Brantley to review. Thus, let us not berate lawyers too much, the theatre reviewer is equally despicable in many instances. Along the way, Alter Ego has learned that you may get the play, but not necessarily, the review.

This brings us to our forthcoming production, David Freeman’s A First Class Man, a play about the Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan and widely considered one of twentieth century’s towering geniuses and his complex relationship with the Cambridge don Professor GH Hardy, his mentor and discoverer, who brought Ramanujan over to Cambridge in the early 1900’s. David Freeman had read Robert Kanigel’s book on Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity, considered the definitive biography by many mathematicians, and it provided the inspiration to dramatize Ramanujan’s life. His early attempts were work shopped by the Lark Theater Company and the play took shape through many iterations.

The story of a simple man with a genius for coming up with mathematical theorems and with little formal training is fascinating because amongst the sciences, mathematics demands the most rigorous proof that is extensively peer reviewed. In contrast, the process in biological sciences is based on empirical evidence. In the face of the overwhelming rationalism seen in mathematics, the stories of Srinivasa Ramanujan and John Nash, Jr, the Nobel Prize winning discoverer of game theory and the protagonist of Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, stand out starkly. In Ramanujan’s instance each theorem was the result of divine ordination, the family deity, the goddess Namagiri: Schizophrenia in John Nash’s lifelong battle with the disease. The work of Ramanujan and his body of more than 3000 theorems have consumed the likes of Professor Bruce Berndt at the University of Illinois who has spent almost three decades deciphering Ramanujan’s handbooks, the ones that he scrawled his equations on a century ago. Springer Publishing, publishes the Ramanujan Journal, the foremost journal on number theory that has 25 editors on the board, representing universities from the USA to Japan. The SASTRA institute in Thanjavur recently instituted the SASTRA prize, in remembrance of Ramanujan. The prize is given to mathematicians under the age of 32 years (the age at which Ramanjuan passed away) for their outstanding contribution in number theory. Manjul Bhargava and Kannan Sounderrajan were the first recepients of the prize at a function held in Ramanujan's hometown of Kumbakonam.

For mathematicians everywhere, deciphering Ramanujan’s compendium of theorems has proved to be immensely challenging and rewarding. But what is there for the non-mathematicians? Well, the equally important task to take Ramanujan out of the ivory tower. We forget that Ramanujan was not just a mathematician, although he happens to be one of the few definitive ones, in the lines of Euler, Fermat, and Poincaire, he was also a human being of flesh and blood. Mathematics proved to be a giant source of sublimation for this apparently simple man making choices that he did not have control of; his education, work, and marriage. His unhappiness in having these choices made for him, drove him from India, much against his religious beliefs to find validity in his passion, mathematics: To Cambridge and GH Hardy, bearing miserably cold winters, starvation, and a society that understood very little of him, to sickness and finally, death. In his short span of 32 years, he lived in those days, a remarkable life. A life that apart from a few of us, know very little of, because so far we have books. And who reads those? But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. A First Class Man, spearheads a line of future productions that are coming out on Ramanujan. Next year, Stephen Fry, a fellow Cambridge alumni and Dev Benegal are bringing out a movie on Ramanujan, followed by Warner Brothers and their picture on his life based on Robert Kanigel's book. If rumors are to be believed, Johnny Depp is playing Ramanujan. I think it probably would have brought a little smile to Ramanujan’s face, to think that the hero of the Pirates of the Caribbean would be playing him.

As for Alter Ego, as we said before, we have found opportunites at every exit. Especially at exit 6 of the NJ Turnpike, where Amit Nerurkar found a discarded toy horse head that served as the main prop in Hayavadana, our first play. We have moved along and are now looking for a serving dish that holds meat, the fancy ones with a retractable cover. We still have about 12 more exits to go. Knowing Alter Ego, we will find it.

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Sendhil Ramamurthy joins NBC's new ensemble drama series "Heroes" as Mohinder Suresh, a genetics professor at the University of Madras in India whose father's disappearance leads him to uncover a secret theory - there are people with extraordinary abilities living among us.

Sendhil played Nirad Das, the Indian artist in Alter Ego's Production on Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink, with a appetite for Impressionists and intimate conversation with Flora Crewe on the nine Rasas

The blurb on Heroes:

From creator/writer Tim Kring (NBC's "Crossing Jordan") comes "Heroes," an epic drama that chronicles the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities.

As a total eclipse casts its shadow across the globe, a genetics professor (Sendhil Ramamurthy, "Blind Guy Driving") in India is led by father's disappearance to uncover a secret theory -- there are people with super powers living among us. A young dreamer (Milo Ventimiglia, "Gilmore Girls") tries to convince his politician brother (Adrian Pasdar, "Judging Amy") that he can fly. A high school cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere, "Ice Princess") learns that she is totally indestructible. A Las Vegas stripper (Ali Larter, "Final Destination"), struggling to make ends meet to support her young son (Noah Gray-Cabey, "My Wife & Kids"), discovers that her mirror image has a secret. A fugitive from justice (Leonard Roberts, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") continues to baffle authorities who twice have been unable to contain him. A gifted artist (Santiago Cabrera, "Empire"), whose drug addiction is destroying his life and relationship with his girlfriend (Tawny Cypress, NBC's "Third Watch"), can paint the future. A down-on-his-luck Los Angeles beat cop (Greg Grunberg, "Alias") can hear people's thoughts, which puts him on the trail of an elusive serial killer. In Japan, a young man (Masi Oka, NBC's "Scrubs") develops a way to stop time through sheer will power. Their ultimate destiny is nothing less than saving the world…

Joining Kring as executive producer are Dennis Hammer (NBC's "Crossing Jordan") and Allan Arkush (NBC's "Crossing Jordan"). David Semel ("House") executive-produced and directed the pilot. The drama is produced by NBC Universal Television Studio.

Heroes airs Monday on NBC at 9:00 PM

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Sylvia Nasar is John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University, and the author of A Beautiful Mind, the story of ProfessorJohn Nash Jr., who won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for his contribution to game theory and his battle with schizophrenia.

David F Gruber, is an oceanographer and science journalist. In January 2006, his first book, Aglow in the Dark, was published by Harvard University Press. The book, co-written with Vincent Pieribone, a medical professor at Yale University, traces the discovery of bioluminescence and fluorescent proteins and their impact on biology.

MANIFOLD DESTINY
A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it.
by SYLVIA NASAR AND DAVID GRUBER
Issue of 2006-08-28
Posted 2006-08-21

The new issue of The New Yorker, in its annals of mathematics, has published Manifold Destiny, an article on the fascinating story of mathematic's struggle to prove the Poincaire conjecture, a century old mathematical puzzle, the solution that has finally been credited to Dr Grigory Perelman, of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, Russia, for which he was to recieve this years Fields medal, that he turned down. The story is intriguing, because Perelman is a reclusive mathematician, working alone, who published the proof online and not in a peer reviewed journal. The way the proof appeared suddenly, after years of indifferent contact with Perelman and the mathematical fraternity, took them all by surprise. Many now recognize that the Poincaire conjecture is close to being solved, and efforts to explicate Perelman's proof are being undertaken by groups of mathematicians.

Mathematics is probably the only branch of science in which rigorous application of proof is so central to establishing the validity of a theorem or conjecture, it is that definite. It is either there or not there. In other branches, the process is less structured allowing for a scope of further investigation. Thus, the proof of a long standing mathematical conjecture like the Poincaire, that has long baffled many, becomes an indicator of scientific purity and mathematical prowess; of bragging rights. Such a definite solution also leaves many who have spent years trying to prove the Poincaire conjecture with less to do, with many tieing up loose ends, or now looking for the next big puzzle to solve. For the many who have contributed to the understanding of the Poincaire, at last count, it had led to three Fields medal, is their place in scientific history. A history we will see as we read A Manifold Destiny depends on who is writing that history, a scientific Rashomon.

Manifold Destiny >>

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Would Dr Grigory 'Grisha' Perelman, the reclusive math genius, who solved a central part of a century old puzzle called the Poincaire conjecture, attend the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Madrid, to receive his Fields medal?

The Fields medal is awarded in recognition of work in mathematics to recepients who are 40 years or younger. The Poincaire conjecture, stated by Henri Poincaire, in 1904, postulates that any shape that does not have any holes and fits within a finite space can be stretched and deformed into a sphere. That is true for any two dimensional surface in a everyday three dimensional world. The conjecture holds that this is true even for a three dimensional surface in a four or more dimensional world. The published proof to the Poincaire conjecture carries a one million $ prize awarded by the Clay Math Institute, Cambridge, Massachussettes.

As it turns out Grisha Perelman in keeping with his previous history of declining awards and offers of tenured positions from Princeton, Stanford, and other universities, was a no show at this years Fields award, adding to his already legendary status. Even the way he announced his proof - which took eight years to complete - was unusual. Rather than publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, he posted three manuscripts in an online archive of maths and physics papers. Dr.John Morgan of Columbia and Gang Tian of Princeton have followed Dr. Perelman’s prescription to produce a more detailed 473-page step-by-step proof only of Poincaré’s Conjecture. “Perelman did all the work,” Dr. Morgan said. “This is just explaining it.”

In the late 1970’s, Dr. William Thurston of Cornell, extended Poincaré’s conjecture, showing that it was only a special case of a more powerful and general conjecture about three-dimensional geometry, namely that any space can be decomposed into a few basic shapes.

Dr Richard Hamilton at Columbia, set about investigating the Thurston conjecture, using the Ricci flow, a technique established by Hamilton, to investigate the underlying shape of an spaces borrowing mathematical concepts that underlie Einstein's theory of relativity and string theory. Hamilton's technique makes use of the fact that the metric, a quantitative measure, can be used to determine the distances between two nearby points in space. Using the mathematical technique of the Ricci flow to the metric, Hamilton was able to smooth away the bumps and curves of a surface, to reveal the underlying shape. Just like a hair dryer is used to shrink wrap plastic. It worked well on fairly round surfaces but in more complex surfaces with edges, pinches or kinks with infinite density, called singularities, would occur. The problem was then that the underlying surfaces of more complex surfaces became difficult to ascertain unless toplogists (scientists who study the shape of surfaces), 'surgically' removed these singularities.

It was Grisha Perelman again, who proved that these singularities were of no consequence and themselves turned into the shape of a sphere or tube in finite time after the Ricci flow began, and could be removed by toplogists to reveal the underlying spherical nature of most surfaces.

Dr. Kleiner of Yale and John Lott of the University of Michigan have assembled a monograph annotating and explicating Dr. Perelman’s proof of the two conjectures.

Little is known about Dr Perelman, who refuses to talk to the media. He was born on June 13, 1966 and his prodigious talent led to his early enrolment at a St Petersburg school specialising in advanced mathematics and physics. At the age of 16, he won a gold medal with a perfect score at the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad, a competition for gifted schoolchildren. After receiving his PhD from the St Petersburg State University, he worked at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics before moving to the US in the late 80s to take posts at various universities. He returned to the Steklov about 10 years ago to work on his proof of the universe's shape.

Amongst his interests are walking in the woods outside the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St.Petersburg, picking mushrooms. He is described as painfully shy and polite and has no interest in worldly or material wealth. No one knows when they will make contact with Dr Perelman as he steadfastly refuses to meet or keep email contact.

Articles by Grisha Perelman

1.The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and its Geometric Applications, arXiv.org, November 11, 2002.

2. Ricci Flow with Surgery on Three-Manifolds, arXiv.org, March 10, 2003.

3. Finite Extinction Time for the Solutions to the Ricci Flow on Certain Three-Manifolds, arXiv.org, July 17, 2003.

Detailed Expositions

1.A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and Geometrization Conjectures - application of the Hamilton-Perelman theory of the Ricci flow, by Huai-Dong Cao and Xi-Ping Zhu, Asian Journal of Mathematics, June 2006.

2. Notes on Perelman's Papers, by Bruce Kleiner and John Lott, arXiv.org, May 25, 2006.

3. Ricci Flow and the Poincaré Conjecture, by John Morgan and Gang Tian, arXiv.org, July 25, 2006.

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George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The father of solipsism, George Santayana, was never more correct when he said this. However, taken literally only amnesiacs would get in trouble. The vast majority of us through the ages have wilfully tried to disregard or manipulate this adage to rewrite history. From Nero to present day George W Bush. Of course, GWB was invoking Santayana when he made the equivalence of the UN's (read Hans Blix) so called prevarication dealing with Saddam, to the time that Neville Chamberlain, appeased Hitler and the Nazis on their war designs, which of course led to World War II. But if GWB was a more astute student of history he would have also read the historical tracts that said that the Middle East, including Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, were ungovernable by any colonial power, including the British. A tract written by none other than Sir Richard Burton, a soldier historian, who lived for decades in the Middle East, unlike GWB and his group of neocons.

So here is Stephen Fry on Why History Matters: A moving and very poignant reminder.

Why does history matter? A better man might be able to answer with far more questions than answers. Whenever the importance of history is discussed, epigrams and homilies come tripping easily off our tongues: How can we understand our present or glimpse our future if we cannot understand our past? How can we know who we are if we don't know who we were? While history may be condemned to repeat itself, historians are condemned to repeat themselves. History is bunk or possibly bunkum. History is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. History is written by the victor. Historians are prophets looking backwards. Or we could paraphrase EM Forster on the novel. 'Does history tell a story? Oh, dear me yes, history tells a story.'
Historians, more than any other class, spend a great deal of time justifying their trade, defining it and aphorising it, seeming to lavish more attention on historiography than history. After all, is there such a thing as history or are there only histories? For all the oddities of some arcane scientific research, we all know that science eventually leads to making light bulbs work, car engines run and failed hearts pump again. Can we test the value of history in the same way? Can we prove that a politician, a financier or a spot-welder is better, happier or more fulfilled for possessing a feel for history?

But ... isn't history now just point of view, tribal assertion, cultural propaganda? After all, the days of Burke, Macaulay, Gibbon, Trevelyan and Froude are over. Historians are no longer grandees at the centre of a fixed civilisation; they are simply journalists writing about celebrities who haven't got the grace to be alive any more. Certainly, some people sense in our world, even if they can't prove it, a new and bewildering contempt for the past. In the high street of life, as it were, no one seems to look above the shop-line. Today's plastic signage at street level is the focus; yesterday's pilasters, corbels and pediments above are neither noticed nor considered, save by what some would call cranks and conservationists.

There are those who wonder if the whole of history is now valuable only as a politically correct lesson in the stupidity and cruelty of monarchs, aristocrats, industrialists and generals. Stern, loveless voices tell us that history as we know it is an irrelevance, with its obsession with dead white men, or with Judaeo-Christianity, or classical antiquity, or the West, or enlightenment, or wars, dynasties and treaties. Marxists, Althusserians, formalists, revisionists, historians of Empire or against Empire - forget them all. You don't even have to dignify it with ideological abstractions any more; history is really the story of a series of subjugations, oppressions, exploitations and abuses.

Or history is heritage studies: cotton mills, marshalling yards and collieries smartened up as 'resources' for school trips; take the kids into the kitchens and servants' quarters of the stately home and ignore the saloons and great rooms above stairs for fear of giving offence. British culture, besieged on all sides by guilt: guilt at empire, guilt at English domination of the United Kingdom, guilt at slavery, at industrial wage-slavery, at Boer Wars, Afghan Wars, mutinies, massacres and maladministrations.

History, then, as one long, grovelling apology or act of self-abasement and self-laceration. A history in which historians have to stand on one side of an argument or another, for, in between, they are nothing but dry-as-dust statisticians. Or we see historians as creepy hindsight critics who can, in the safety of their studies, point out to Alexander the Great and Napoleon where they went wrong and how they would have done it better.

And yet, against this, we measure the exponential growth in the public appetite for history. Has it ever been a better time to be a historian? In publishing and in broadcasting, history is a phenomenon that continues to exceed expectations. Enthusiasts bounding about from battlefield to palace and castle and back again, filling more air time then ever before. From Melvyn Bragg's matchless colloquies on Radio 4 to documentary series bearing the proud epithets 'landmark', 'flagship', 'prestige' 'must-see', 'event TV' and 'water-cooler moments'. Just recently, we've had themed evenings on BBC 4 on the 18th century as well as documentaries and big news items on the Somme. Certainly, history is popular in grand traditional forms, but new subgenres of history have, for the last 20 years, exploded in popularity, too. The history of science, philosophy and thought: sidelights are more popular than floodlights - small histories of the cod, tulips, salt, sugar or the pepper gardens of India, little books with names like 'Darwin's Walking Stick', Newton's Trousers' or 'Brahi's Nose'; whole genres on voyages of discovery, at least 10 books on Joseph Banks of the Endeavour and Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle, books on the transit of Venus and longitude and Sumerian counting systems all seem to be flying off the shelves.

Family history has exploded in popularity, too. I was involved in the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? programme and received more mail and feedback from that one programme than from anything else I've ever done. 'I never knew what the Holocaust meant until I saw your programme,' one viewer wrote to me. We might find this a little odd, but it tells us that many people cannot see links between facts and historical narratives, unless those facts are brought absolutely to life, mediated by personality. Is that cheap celebrity culture at work or is it the perfectly human truth that while the slaughter of a nameless six million is hard to fathom, the murder of a named and delineated family can move us inexpressibly?

After all, isn't that what poetry and novels show, that humanity is best comprehended by understanding humans rather than ideas? But for some, this leads to the worry that history can now only mean witness. And some of us fear that even the most respectable documentary programme now cannot get through two minutes of screen time without some preposterous reconstruction involving wigs, candles, actors, ponderous music, scratching quills and even more wigs, so afraid is television of telling without showing.

Might this lead us to suspect that the history phenomenon is akin to that of television cuisine? More and more of us watch cooking, yet fewer and fewer ever wield a skillet in anger. Such a suspicion doesn't really make sense. You can cook, but you can't history, can you? You can carry what you learn of history inside you, at least. You can connect. And that's the point. We can never measure how much history has penetrated the consciousness of the nation.

We all know the cliches; the middle-class man reads biography and history, especially military history; the wife carries on reading novels, because men 'get' abstraction, numbers and grand strategy and women 'get' relationships. Men do seem to like history; history becomes their bedtime reading, their sitting-down version of golf, dare one say?

For men, history can seem to be a kind of Higher Sport (no coincidence perhaps that we still talk of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton and still describe the little 19th-century dance between Russia and imperial Britain over India as the Great Game. Napoleon should have played with two up front; we didn't win the war, but we saved the follow-on). At the dinner table, the wives break up the boy-girl, boy-girl placement and gather down at one end to talk about friendships and books, while the men stay up the other end to discourse on von Paulus's surrender or Clive at the Battle of Plassey. Very NW3, very dinner party, but, in the meantime, what about the young? Is history like Radio 4, something you only turn to when you are middle-aged and middle-class? Are the young too busy living to look back?

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen.

No, it isn't exactly political correctness that dogs history; it's more a pernicious refusal to enter imaginatively the lives of our ancestors. Great and good men and women stirred sugar into their coffee knowing that it had been picked by slaves. Kind, good ancestors of all of us never questioned hangings, burnings, tortures, inequality, suffering and injustice that today revolt us. If we dare to presume to damn them with our fleeting ideas of morality, then we risk damnation from our descendants for whatever it is that we are doing that future history will judge as intolerable and wicked: eating meat, driving cars, appearing on TV, visiting zoos, who knows?

We haven't arrived at our own moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles; we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering, as all human things and human beings are. This does not stop us from admiring and praising the progressive heroes who got there early and risked their lives to advance causes that we now take for granted.

In the end, I suppose history is all about imagination rather than facts. If you cannot imagine yourself wanting to riot against Catholic emancipation, say, or becoming an early Tory and signing up to fight with the Old Pretender, or cheering on Prynne as the theatres are closed and Puritanism holds sway ... knowing is not enough. If you cannot feel what our ancestors felt when they cried: 'Wilkes and Liberty!' or, indeed, cried: 'Death to Wilkes!', if you cannot feel with them, then all you can do is judge them and condemn them, or praise them and over-adulate them.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

The bizarre but wonderful William Gerhardi wrote a polemical introduction to his book, The Romanovs, a foreword he called a 'Historian's Credo', a series of furious and marvellously eccentric aphorisms. One paragraph reads: 'History must at last convince of the uselessness of insensate mass movements riding roughshod, now as ever, over anonymous suffering and claiming priority in the name of some newly clothed abstraction. If it does not teach that, it does not teach anything.'

It was appropriate to write that as he did in 1939, and it is appropriate for us all to remember it today.

Stephen Fry and Dev Benegal are in the midst of producing and directing About Ramanujan, a feature film about the Indian mathematical genius.

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Remember Rob Morrow from The Quiz Show? He is there too.

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NUMB3RS is a drama about an FBI agent who recruits his mathematical-genius brother to help the Bureau solve a wide range of challenging crimes in Los Angeles. The two brothers take on the most confounding criminal cases from a very distinctive perspective. Inspired by actual cases, the series depicts how the confluence of police work and mathematics provides unexpected revelations and answers to the most perplexing criminal questions. A dedicated FBI agent, Don Eppes (Rob Morrow), couldn't be more different from his younger brother, Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz), a brilliant mathematician who, since he was little, yearned to impress his big brother. As a seasoned investigator, Don deals in hard facts and evidence, whereas Charlie, a math professor at a California university, functions in a world of mathematical probability and equations. Now, despite their disparate approaches to life, Don and Charlie are able to combine their areas of expertise and solve some killer cases.

Navi Rawat as Amita Ramanujan

Of interest is that Navi Rawat who acted in Houses of Sand and Fog (starring Ben Kingsley) and as Theresa in The OC, plays the character of 'Amita Ramanujan', a reference to our hero Srinivasa Ramanujan.

The CBS TV show NUMB3RS, airs on Fridays, at 10:00 PM EST/PT

It seems like an interesting show and looking at Navi, I have suddenly gotten infinitely interested in partition numbers. She does have quite a 'number' theory on her.

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After seeing the tip of the iceberg on Ramanujan, here are the thoughts that I have:

The story of Ramanujan is a fascinating tale of extra-ordinary happenstance, a mathematical genius, with so many what ifs, what if GH Hardy and J Littlewood had dismissed him as a quack, what if Ramanujan's mother had not had those vivid dreams of her son in Europe, what if Ramanujan had succeeded in committing suicide, what if Ramanujan's illness had been correctly diagnosed, what if GN Watson had not kept those papers in a box, what if after his death those papers had been burned, what if George Andrews had not stumbled upon those papers after 50 years, and understood their import, what if Bruce Berndt had not been inspired by spending the next thirty years pouring over those theorems, what if Richard Askey had not responded to Janaki Ammal's plea for recognition of her late husband, what if........ what if...... it is an infinite series of what ifs.

What if Ramanujan had been born in England with the mathematical abilities he had. He would have been hailed for his work but his life would have been an unremarkable life of finite what ifs. Even the famous taxi cab number incident could not have occurred.

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Van Vleck Hall, Mathematics, University of Wisconsin-M

There are individual contributors whose invaluable work has gone a long way in understanding Ramanujan but it would not be amiss to say that Van Vleck Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is probably in the US, where the pioneering work on Ramanujan's work, and that of his life, began. These were largely the efforts of Prof Richard Askey (PhD, Princeton, 1961) who joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Wisconsin in 1963, retiring in 2003 as Professor Emeritus; Prof Bruce Berndt (PhD, UW, 1966), who is now the Michio Suzuki Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois Champaign; and Prof George E Andrews (PhD, U Penn, 1964), the Evan Pugh professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

Prof Askey recounts those days in the 1970's.

" In the 1970s the University of Wisconsin played a role in the Ramanujan story. Professor George Andrews of Penn State University was brought to Madison for the academic year 1975-76. While Andrews and I worked in different areas, there was a field in the intersection of our interests which was starting to have applications to algebraic coding theory. Both of us wanted to learn what the other knew, so Andrews and I ran a joint seminar two days a week.

That spring Andrews went off to France for a meeting. Since he was not teaching that summer, he had time to extend his stay; and after spending a week in Strasbourg and Paris, he went to Cambridge to see what old manuscripts he could find.

One discovery was a box labeled "G.N. Watson" which contained 120 loose sheets in Ramanujan's handwriting. Andrews was uniquely well qualified to find these sheets; I doubt if anyone else would have recognized that about 5 percent of the work dealt with mock theta functions, the functions which Ramanujan had discovered after returning to India. What Andrews had come upon was the only record that has ever been found concerning what Ramanujan did in India in the fifteen months between the time he left England and his death. Ramanujan's widow said that he continued to work until four days before he died.

These sheets contain gems more valuable than anyone suspected, as well as just ordinary, good work. Very little of the mathematics on these sheets had been rediscovered by others during the more than fifty-five years from Ramanujan's death to the discovery by Andrews.

How did these sheets get into a box labeled "G.N. Watson" in the Wren Library at Trinity College? Around 1930, G.N. Watson had given his presidential address to the London Mathematical Society. It dealt with mock theta functions. He had spent up to two years working on these functions, and he had been able to prove some of the claims made by Ramanujan. After Watson's death, J.M. Whittaker was asked to write an obituary of Watson for the Royal Society. He contacted Watson's widow and asked if he could examine Watson's papers. He was invited to Watson's home, and after lunch her son took him to the study. Here is what he tells us about the papers he found there:

They covered the floor of a fair sized room to a depth of about a foot, all jumbled together, and were to be incinerated in a few days. One could only make lucky dips and, as Watson never threw away anything, the result might be a sheet of mathematics but more probably a receipted bill or a draft of his income tax return for 1923. By an extraordinary stroke of luck one of my dips brought up the Ramanujan material which Hardy must have passed on to him when he [Watson] proposed to edit the earlier notebooks (Berndt and Rankin).

It was decided that it would be best to store this material at Trinity, where both Ramanujan and Watson had been fellows."

George Andrews is now working on a multi volume study of Ramanujan's 'lost notebook' with Bruce Berndt, with the first volume out in June 2005. Richard Askey with S Chandrasekhar were responsible for commissioning the busts on S Ramanujan.

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Freeman Dyson, the famous theoritical physicist, who discussed everything under the sun, on those evening strolls on the grounds of Princeton with Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel, while at the Institute for Advanced Studies, retained his interest in number theory and Ramanujan. Dyson graduated from Winchester College, Cambridge with a BA in mathematics in 1945, and then went to Cornell in 1947 for his postgraduate studies, working with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. His biggest contribution was the unification of three models of quantum thermodynamics proposed by Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, and Sin- ItiroTomonaga, who went on to win the Nobel in Physics in 1965, for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles. Hans Bethe won the Physics Nobel in 1967 for his work on nuclear reactions.

Dyson subsequently worked on nuclear reactors, solid state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.

This is his prescription for those suffering from the blues, malaise, and headaches:

Freeman Dyson, another retired professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, was a third-year high school student at Winchester in England when he won a school mathematics award and chose Ramanujan's Collected Papers as his prize. By the time Dyson entered Trinity College, he was able to conjecture a combinatorial reason for the divisibility by 5 of the number of partitions of 5n+4 (see sidebar). Throughout Dyson's distinguished career as a physicist, he has retained his interest in mathematics and in Ramanujan. Dyson once wrote that whenever he is angry or depressed, he pulls down the Collected Papers from the shelf and takes a quiet stroll in Ramanujan's garden. He recommends this not only as good therapy for headaches, but because of the beautiful ideas which may lead one to more interesting mathematics.

Freeman Dyson is now retired, lives in Princeton, and is a favorite on the lecture circuit. Dyson is one of the world's leading advocates for nuclear disarmament* and a peace activist. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2000.
He has written many books including, "Imagined Worlds," published by Harvard University Press, 1997 and "The Sun, the Genome and the Internet," published by Oxford University Press, 1999.

* Most of the leading nuclear physicists, such as Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, and Freeman Dyson, became strong anti-nuclear weapon advocates during the time of the Cold War The exception being Edward Teller, the H bomb pioneer, whose controversial testimony against Robert Oppenheimer in 1954, assumed political significance, and whose subsequent strong advocacy of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the 80's, probably did more to seal the myth that Ronald Reagan was the architect of Communism's fall. The current perception that Republicans are much better at national security began then, and now with their preventive policies, a reversal of the containment policy advocated by Democrats George Kennan and Dean Acheson in the '40s and '50s. Meanwhile the SDI has wasted billions of dollars producing virtually nothing in the process.

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S Chandrasekhar, Prof Richard Askey (UW-M), Prof George Andrews (PSU)

Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars. He is best known for his celebrated discovery of the Chandrasekhar Limit. He showed that there is a maximum mass which can be supported against gravity by pressure made up of electrons and atomic nuclei. The value of this limit is about 1.44 times a solar mass. This was derived by Chandrasekhar in 1930, when he was a student. The Chandrasekhar Limit plays a crucial role in understanding stellar evolution. If the mass of a tar exceeded this limit, the star would not become a white dwarf. It would continue to collapse under the extreme pressure of gravitational forces. The formulation of the Chandrasekhar Limit led to the discovery of neutron stars and black holes.

However, S Chandrasekhar, was also known for his philanthropic gesture towards keeping Ramanujan's mathematical legacy alive, played an instrumental role in establishing the Ramanujan Institute of Mathematics at Madras University in the late 1940s and when the Institute was facing financial crisis he took up the matter with Nehru. He also managed to get an increased pension for Ramanujan's widow who was living in abject poverty.
In an appreciation of Ramanujan, S. Chandrasekhar wrote:

It is hopeless to try to emulate him.
But he was there, even as the Everest is there.

S Chandrasekhar along with Profs Richard Askey, George Andrews, and Bruce Bendt at the Univ of Wisconsin, Madison were responsible for commissioning the 11 busts of Ramanujan from the only authentic photo of his, his passport. Here is the story of how it all came to be:

Ramanujan's bust sculpted by Paul Granlund (Photo: Bill Fritsch)

Janakiammal was receiving a pension from the University of Madras since 1920, the year of her husband’s death. This amount was then only Rs.20 per month and it gradually rose to about Rs. 500 per month, at the time of her passing away. In interviews which appeared in newspapers, soon after the “Lost” Note Book of Ramanujan was discovered by George Andrews in 1976, Janakiammal lamented the fact that a statue of Ramanujan had never
been made, although one had been promised. Prof. Richard Askey saw these newspaper interviews and decided that a bust of Ramanujan was long overdue since Ramanujan’s widow wanted one and that In Ramanujan’s case a permanent memorial is appropriate: one which can be appreciated by those who do not understand his mathematics should be added to the memorial Ramanujan made for himself with his work. So, garnering the support of a hundred mathematicians, including Profs. George Andrews, Bruce Berndt and S. Chandrsekhar, Prof. Askey commissioned a bronze bust, from the only authentic passport size photograph of Ramanujan, by Paul Granlund, sculptor-in-residence at Gustavus Adolphus College at Saint Peter, Minnesota in U.S.A. A copy of the bust was presented to Mrs.Ramanujan in 1985 at a formal function in the University of Madras.

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This article has been posted up on behalf of Deepanjana Pal

"I've always been fascinated by the Ramanujan story, hasn't everyone?" asks Benegal. Probably not. For a country credited with discovering zero (I mean the number, not the concept), our interest in mathematical geniuses isn't necessarily overwhelming. As was obvious when an interviewer was more eager to know whether Stephen Fry's "discovery" of his own homosexuality was the reason to work on a screenplay about Ramanujan (Fry blinked uncomprehendingly for a moment and then politely said that he didn't see the relevance). It would perhaps been more pertinent to ask about Fry's years at Cambridge, which was when he first came across Ramanujan. He had been thinking about writing the story of 'the man who knew infinity' since then but had held back because he hadn't
found the right Indian to co-script and co-produce the project. Along came Dev Benegal.

Benegal, Fry and Gina Carter (of Sprouts Production) were in India to talk about the film, which begins shooting next year. Benegal said he was hoping to meet the Prime Minister (a Cambridge alumnus) and the President (who was born near Erode where Ramanujan was born) with Fry. I'm not sure how they can help with Ramanujan's story but Benegal looked immensely happy at the prospect of meeting them and contactmusic would have us believe that President Kalam is "working with" Fry.

Srinivas Aiyangar Ramanujan: a college drop-out, a mathematical genius, a homosexual, an Indian and dead by the age of 33. This could almost be more interesting than Jack the Ripper, especially with Stephen Fry doing the
writing. The multi-million dollar film will be directed by Dev Benegal and will be jointly-produced by Tropic Films and Sprouts' Productions. It will be filmed in Erode, Kumbakonam (Tamil Nadu) and Cambridge. No actors have been cast yet but Benegal promises us that it's not going to be the likes of Shah Rukh Khan or Aamir Khan. The focus will be on the relationship between Srinivas Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy, who would many years later describe Ramanujan as the only romance of his life. Now who thought anyone would say that about an Indian man from Kumbakonam whose idea of a love letter possibly involved partition numbers?

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Comedy gold! "The flying shards of a better tomorrow." Enjoy.

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A Certain Kind of Indian
Posted on Behalf of Anuvab Pal

Playwright and Screenwriter Anuvab Pal recounts his experiences with the Mumbai blasts and compares them to his time in New York during 9/11.

A Certain Kind of Indian

Being in New York during 9/11 and being in Mumbai on 11th July, 2006, was very different. And also not. Some of the more harrowing (and uplifting) moments came back – the cell phones jamming; friends, enemies, well wishers et al from around the world desperately trying to get through; chaotic hospitals filled with hundreds of victims and thousands of well-meaning, confused volunteers; relatives, photos in hand, on a mad search for loved ones; photos strewn for the missing across public places; gory first-person accounts of dismemberment, media frenzy around human stories of tragedy and survival; random acts of kindness (which contrary to what Readers Digest will have you believe, is a Mumbai routine during disasters). And in homes, seated around shocking, flashing images and foolish reporting (long live Fox News , available here in 3 incarnations - NDTV, CNN-IBN and Times Now) eager discussions on a certain kind of fundamentalism (both inquisitive and accusatory).

And yet, something was different. Not from the obvious nature and form of the attacks but in how I felt about the whole thing. When I initially moved from New York, I was gregarious and curious and engaged with my environment. I would claim New York does that to you - arms you with a sense of balanced, erudite, socio-economic analysis, especially when visiting other places not like it.

As the months passed, natural expatriate processes ensued. I settled-in, lost intelligence, found logical argument absent and all argument replete with bias. I declared public transportation to be medieval, finagled a car (with driver), found most 'ordinary' people lacking in basic decorum and politesse, fashionably complained about the city's ethos at art openings drinking wine ("Mumbai trains go to and from where?", a Mumbai socialite once asked innocently about the city's commuting lifeline). I made friends with other irony-loving, complaining, foreign folk or colonial remnants and found myself comfortably enveloped in the stereotype of the Bombay, upper middle class, English-speaking elite. This meant I was haughty, feudal, dismissive (of popular Hindi speaking culture), hierarchic, rude (especially to people I perceived to be in the service classes) and totally disconnected with the everyday realities of the city.

This wonderful attitude helped me conclude that I had very little in common with average Mumbaikars – a rude, savage, illiterate, superstitious, caste-ridden, trading people. I despised things claiming to be the highlights of the place - I didn't like the romanticism with the underworld, I found dance bars and the women in them, dirty; I hated Bollywood movies; didn't read the drivel passed off as journalism in local English dailies; wasn't aware of books in local Indian languages; discovered the ideas in the local theatre to be about a 100 years behind; found Indian TV dramas laughably melodramatic and distrusted anything said to me by a fat man with a moustache using bad grammar and worse syntax (that's about 10 million people).

Clearly I had much more in common with those suffering during 9/11. After all, I watched Meet The Press with Tim Russert with gravity and belief, discussed Charlie Rose guests at West Village dinners, loved the movies of Woody Allen, devoured the novels of Philip Roth, read the New Yorker religiously. I often thought my life was Sienfeld-ian, and that New York, the cosmopolitan mix of everything, home to Mira Nair and Opus Dei, was the greatest city in the world. Like many middle class Indian immigrants, I was a self-proclaimed "democrat" because I enjoyed Clinton's articulation and because most people in Manhattan were (an immigrant's first need, over food and oxygen, is fitting in). Surely, I was more like them. A dignified, graceful educated people mourning when it was time to do so, like a dignified graceful educated people.

On 9/11, when people died, the survivors quoted poets and writers I knew. People experienced a range of mature emotions I could understand, funeral proceedings I could appreciate and would myself partake in. Everyone functioned on a higher level of intelligence - we were clever together. Surely this must be home, I thought. I was moved by moments that were expected to move and saddened by sad moments and felt and mourned. There was an assumed shared aesthetic, regardless of an actual union. At some distance and experienced alone but shared nevertheless, however cerebral.

Then I saw Mumbai and the death and blood and twisted metal. Constant footage of the kind of people I had decided to dislike, some dying, many helping. I saw scores of people near railway stations throwing open their homes for relief and shelter, thousands of low-income housewives with water along the major streets, handing them to people in cars (the same elite who scoff them). I saw thousands of Muslim men at the end of the day's prayers rushing (at the risk of arrest) to help the wounded and dead, even though the police had declared the railway tracks as cordoned-off zones. I heard from a tea vendor who lives on $2 a day deciding to run around all night serving tea to the distressed at the distinct possibility of devastating his lifelong business. I saw penniless students skipping critical examinations and cooking to feed people who couldn't get home to the suburbs. I saw beggars and homeless people carrying the wounded to hospital. I saw people who hadn't eaten for days delivering hot food to the injured. I saw people who had no business and no position to give anything, give and give more. Then, I cried. Simultaneously, I discovered this thing called a gut instinct. For years I had displayed an almost stoic, near-Scandinavian sense of restraint. I was secretly proud of this almost Western value of emotional stillness. I had never cried at any set back in my life, I had never cried at a loss of a family member. I had never cried during 9/11. But here I was, a temporary resident of a city I hate, watching a TV channel I hate, watching people I hate (and share nothing in common with), crying inexplicably for the first time and feeling the saddest moment I have ever felt.

I wondered later if this is what nationality meant. This gut instinct. A reaction wholly from the heart and free of the head. One that (no matter how many books I had read or commonalities I had shared or sophisticated opinions I had formed with a wonderful, literate, accepting nation), could come only with watching the suffering of one's own people. Whoever and wherever they may be, however different they may be.

Somehow, on 7/11 (as the media here, in some bizarre and silly correlation to the US, calls it) there is something higher at work; much more intrinsic, more knowledgeable, much more tuned into the pulse of this city. Something much angrier at India's economic boom (Lashkar E Toiba, the Kashmiri militant wing, has denied involvement) and equally conscious of the affluence and education of those that might take a first class train along the western line.

Some may say that the first class is easiest to get on with an explosive-filled suitcase but I would still argue that with those eight bomb blasts on 11 th July a demographic was being targeted, as much as mass casualty. That demographic being the architects of modern India . Young bankers, salesmen, software engineers, print journalists, TV actors, call-center employees, web designers, ad film makers et al. I am not suggesting that these people are being targeted as individuals. The idea that they stand for is being targeted. The idea of an affluent, educated, young, skilled workforce that is the backbone of India's economic transformation

It was also about killing a certain kind of people that might send a message to certain other kinds of people like them. Perhaps this isn't true in terms of individualistic specifics but if one was to generalize, from Dadar to Borivali, all the stations at that hour carry the commuting milieu that could be the perfect representative sample (and explanation) of India's rise. A consumer class of ambitious, literate, work-driven, under-45, set of men and women with disposable income. The new middle class as the papers keep saying. Many rent, many are breaking traditional notions (and real estate frameworks) of joint family systems, many refuse arranged marriages, many are single. Many are immigrants (increasingly from around the world).

As the (new and rapidly expanding) real estate that lines and surrounds these stations suggest, they are people who are changing the very nature of India's social ethos and thereby the nature of the city that houses them. Bandra, Khar, Santa Cruz, Andheri, Borivili are constantly evolving and advancing townships and the people who live in them are constantly evolving and advancing economically and intellectually as well. Lots of young couples live there. One can tell by civic amenities, restaurants, malls etc that keep popping up in these suburbs. The idea of south Bombay being the nerve center of the city is recently dead and city-dwellers have known this. This is information about the underlying trend within a city's pulse - recent news, often changing within a day, road gossip, stuff you overhear at bars or dinners or the Midday rag or from drivers and dabbawallahs (Mumbai's famous food delivery men).

Clearly these people who put these bombs stayed here long enough to understand trends and to feel Mumbai almost as a 20-year resident would. Could it be that these killers factored it in while planning? These bombs are much more than just a strike at the heart of Mumbai's suburbs; they are a strike at the heart of a new India. An India a lot of people under 40 are trying to create, an India their parents never knew or expected. An India busy with new corporations, new ethics and skilled labor, free of cheap religious strife or ignorant feudalism. An India with young love and unlimited energy, free of nonsense casteism and ignorant racism. A melting pot of bureaucracy-free achievement, hard work, entrepreneurial innovation and new, relentless dreams. Whoever did this, doesn't like where India is going, as a young, hopeful, confident, people.

It seems by getting on those trains the day after the attacks these same young hopeful people, (who perhaps can afford to miss a day's work though most companies recorded 90% attendance), collectively seemed to say, "Hell with you - we've got a materialistic, capitalist fun country to build because we're real tired of the old socialist one. Take your bombs and keep exploding them, we've got cell phones to buy, girls to date, malls to shop in and job interviews with multinationals which will triple our salaries. No matter what the you do Mr. Terrorist Person, we'll be out and about - the new India is here and you can't stop us".

Anuvab Pal is a playwright of Indian origin based in New York City. He is currently living in Mumbai for a year working on the production of 2 Independent films he has scripted.

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Ken Ono is the Solle P. and Margaret Manasse Professor of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
His email address is ono@math.wisc.edu.

JUNE/JULY 2006 NOTICES OF THE AMS 641

In December, 2005 number theorist Ken Ono undertook a trip to India to the land of Srinivasa Ramanujan, ostensibly to attend the SASTRA University's conference on Number Theory and Computational Physics, where he was to give his lecture on Mock Theta Functions and Maass numbers and hear his student Karl Mahlburg give his first plenary lecture. Another highlight was to attend the SASTRA Ramanujan award for young mathematicians working in research influenced by Ramanujan's contribution to number theory, being awarded to his friends and fellow number theorists, Manjul Bhargava (Princeton University) and Kannan Sounderrajan (University of Michigan). His deeper and a more personal purpose was to understand better the legend that was Ramanujan. It was a pilgrimage to the home of an enigmatic genius whose work in number theory is still being deciphered even sixty years after his death and which has fascinated Ken Ono ever since he embarked on his career as a mathematician.

Ken Ono is a good friend of Bruce Berndt, the number theorist at the University of Illinois (Urbana- Champaign), who has spent three decades studying Ramanujan's theorems from his notebooks. One of Ken Ono's collaboration with Bruce Berndt, was deciphering Ramanujan's work on partition numbers.

Here is Ken Ono reminiscing about that momentous visit and his own interest in Srinivasa Ramanujan. His father is an eminent number theorist, Takashi Ono, at Johns Hopkins. At that time Ken Ono was a teenager more interested in bike racing. He recounts his first experience with Ramanujan.

I first heard the story of Ramanujan when I was a reticent teenager obsessed with bicycle racing. It was a beautiful spring day in 1984, and my mind was on an important bicycle race in Washington D.C. when a letter adorned with Indian stamps arrived. The letter was dated 17-3-1984, and it was carefully typewritten on delicate rice paper. My father, Takashi Ono, a number theorist at Johns Hopkins University, was deeply moved by the letter which read:

Dear Sir,
I understand from Mr. Richard Askey,
Wisconsin, U.S.A., that you have contributed
for the sculpture in memory of
my late husband Mr. Srinivasa Ramanujan.
I am happy over this event.
I thank you very much for your good
gesture and wish you success in all your
endeavours.
Yours faithfully,
Signed S. Janaki Ammal

My father explained that Dick Askey, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had organized an effort, on behalf of the mathematicians of the world, to commission a sculpture of Ramanujan. This initiative was in response to an interview4 with Janaki Ammal, Ramanujan’s widow. She lamented, They said years ago a statue would be erected in honor of my husband. Where is the statue?

Financed by Askey’s efforts, artist Paul Granlund rendered a sculpture based on Ramanujan’s 1919 passport photo, and he produced eleven bronze casts, including one for Ramanujan’s widow. My father happily contributed US$25, and hence the letter. Upon hearing this explanation, I asked, “Who was Ramanujan?” “Why would you give $25 expecting nothing in return?” That was when I first heard Ramanujan’s story.

It was a singular moment in the young Ken Ono's life at a time when he was not really interested in pursuing a career in mathematics.

" As it was, the romantic tale made a lasting impression, and, thanks to my choice of career and the passage of time, has become one of my favorite stories."

Twenty years later, after that first encounter with Ramanujann, Ken Ono was on a plane to India reading GH Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, wrestling with Hardy's words in the Tercentenary lecture at Harvard that he delivered in 1936.

"I am sure that Ramanujan was no mystic and that religion, except in a strictly material sense, played no important
part in his life. Could this be true? He also proclaimed (see page 5 of [17]), There is quite enough about Ramanujan
that is difficult to understand, and we have no need to go out of our way to manufacture mystery."

Is it possible to rationally explain the legend of Ramanujan?

I arrived in Chennai at 8:45 a.m. on December 19, 2005 from Mumbai.

Imagine Ken Ono's delight that the work that he did was mentioned at the Sarangapani Temple at Kumbakonam where Ramanujan and his family visited daily for their prayers. The temple has numbers scrawled on the walls.

" I excitedly searched for 1729, the taxi cab number. I never spotted it, but to my amazement I found 2719 prominently etched at eye level. For me this number plays a special role in the lore of Ramanujan, not only as a permutation of the digits of 1729, but for its connection to his work on quadratic forms. In 1997 Sound and I proved [21], assuming the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, that 2719 is the largest odd number not represented by Ramanujan’s ternary quadratic form

x2 + y2 + 10z2.

I was delighted to see it near where Ramanujan worked a century ago."

In the end did Ken Ono's pilgrimage help him to understand the legend of Ramanujan? Not really, but his explanation would have gladdened the hearts of many authors of magical realism, from Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, to Yann Martel, and their followers, of the infinite powers of the imagination and the mysteries of the human heart.

" For me, there is a poetic resolution to the question of whether one can rationally explain the legend of Ramanujan: this true story is one of magic. Ramanujan was an untrained mathematician, toiling largely in isolation, whose work was born entirely out of imagination. He was a pioneer and a self-taught anticipator of great mathematics, and
this is indeed magical. After all, great mathematics is magic, something we can understand but whose inspiration we cannot comprehend. Ramanujan was a gift to the world of mathematics."

In similar fashion that so many in the theater world undertake the journey to Stratford Upon Avon to pay homage to the Bard of Avon, this is Ken Ono's moving and touching account of his journey to Ramanujan's home in Kumbakonam.>>

(Ken Ono, Honoring a Gift from Kumbakonam, Notices Of The AMS, Volume 53, Number 6, June/ July 2006)

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