On The Trail Of Many Infinities And Ramanujan Narrative

On April 29, 2016, I did something I’ve never done before. Watched a movie first day, first show (FDFS). Where I come from, FDFS is a holy mission you usually reserve for Rajinikanth. I could never quite elbow my way in there, but managed to succeed with The Man Who Knew Infinity.

But then Ramanujan is the Rajinikanth of mathematics, an underdog who turned into a superstar. What he accomplished in maths is not too different from catching bullets with bare teeth or leaving messages for Alexander Graham Bell before he invented the phone.

In fact, Ramanujan did leave some formulas in his notebooks that mathematicians are able to make sense of only now, a hundred years later. It turns out these formulas are going to help better understanding of black holes – an idea that did not exist in Ramanujan’s time.

Besides, Ramanujan plays a pivotal role in my own thriller The Steradian Trail. The series is called Infinity Cycle and it’s kicked off by Book #0. So there was no way I was going to miss this movie.

I wiggled my way through the Friday evening crowd and sank into my seat, flanked by wife and son. We were among the earliest to arrive and there was still plenty of time left for the show. I could watch people trickling in in small groups.

They were mostly techie-types trudging in with their laptops like me and students strolling in in casuals. There were only a handful of families with kids. Everyone seemed to settle down in their seats with a palpable sense of purpose. It was obvious no one was here for mindless entertainment - I bet that this show rang up the lowest popcorn sales in the multiplex’s history.

I had seen the trailers before. Dev Patel seemed like an odd choice for Ramanujan and I was really dreading these Brits might have messed things up and I would end up having to trash the movie. My worst fears seemed to come true right in the intro scene when Ramanujan appears wearing something like a checked lungi. I found myself almost screaming, “Hey Costume Designer, Ramanujan would rather jump off a cliff than wear something like that.”

But these little distractions died down soon. I quickly made peace with Dev Patel too and got fully sucked into flow of the story. Once Ramanujan arrived at Cambridge, I was just riveted.

I have seen the Tamil biopic by Gnana Rajasekaran. It’s a faithful attempt to chronicle Ramanujan’s entire life and it succeeds in it charmingly. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in a full understanding of Ramanujan’s life and times. The look and feel of the period, the attitude and ethos of people are painted meticulously.

All main players in Ramanujan’s life and even minor incidents are captured diligently. The only issue I had was related to Ramanujan’s characterization. The Tamil version portrays him as a helpless weakling who keeps breaking down frequently.

My understanding of Ramanujan is that he had tremendous inner strength and resilience. He was fully aware of his special talents and was quite tenacious in going tooth and claw after his target for ten long years. I don’t think he could show such persistence if he was weak. In his early letters to his future mentor G H Hardy, he sounds quite confident of his discoveries, almost cocky.

And he had a wacky sense of humour too. Matt Brown’s characterization captures these different dimensions of his personality quite nicely. Dev Patel does not miss a single beat in bringing them to life: though he does not look like Ramanujan, he plays his role quite well.

One of the things that really stood out for me in this movie was the way they have handled Ramanujan’s religiosity. The strange connections between math, Hindu religion and Ramanujan is central to the crime in The Steradian Trail, so I was really curious how these British guys handle these themes. I must confess that they really pulled off a surprise here.

I cannot recall many English movies that present Indians and Hindu ethos as tastefully, showing them as they are without standing in superior judgment or glossing over those aspects that did not tally with Western worldview. I personally have a hard time accepting that Namagiri Thayar revealed theorems to Ramanujan in his dreams. But that is what he believed and it is depicted so in the movie without any attempt to varnish it over.

I believe it is G H Hardy who blazed the trail there a hundred years ago. A confirmed atheist till his very end, he never agreed with Ramanujan’s religiosity or mystical mumbo jumbo. But he did not let that deter him from taking sincere interest in him and working together.

In fact, it is Hardy who comes out as the bigger hero of the movie than Ramanujan. And rightly so. The way he put aside his personal beliefs and stuck his neck out for Ramanujan and came out enriched and proud from it all holds a message for all of us. And Jeremy Irons is the perfect G H Hardy to deliver it. Once again, not in terms of looks – the real Hardy was much younger – but in every other way. You could watch the movie just for him.

Another hero, completing the triangle, is mathematics itself. Again, I can’t remember another movie that presents complex mathematical ideas so accessibly and engagingly. Matt Brown and team could have easily presented the Hardy-Ramanujan story as just an inspiring ugly duckling tale and got away with it. But they go much beyond. They have taken great pains to bring out the power, beauty and philosophy of mathematics that lay at the heart of the story. And they do that without deviating from the main drama or losing the audience. And therein lies their success.

Any work of art, be it a book or movie, is only as good as its audience. It was gratifying to see that this celebration of one of the most unlikely and beautiful partnerships in history went down quite well with the FDFS audience I had for company. The thumping of desks on the screen when Ramanujan finally gets accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society was greeted with even more thunderous applause by the audience as if Rajinikanth had finally vanquished the villain. Three cheers to that.