etcetera

Enig­matic. Idio­syn­cratic. Bril­liant. Genius. Words used to describe the life of Srini­vasa Ramanu­jan. Robert Kanigel’s out­stand­ing biog­ra­phy of the Indian math­e­mati­cian makes you real­ize that all these adjec­tives fall flat on their (type)faces when faced with hav­ing to describe his life.

Born into poverty in an obscure cor­ner of British India and sti­fled by an edu­ca­tional sys­tem that stressed con­for­mity over cre­ativ­ity, he man­aged to break free and went on to become one of the pre­em­i­nent math­e­mati­cians of his time. Over time, the same cir­cum­stances that helped him get fame and recog­ni­tion – his dom­i­neer­ing and per­sis­tent mom, intense cre­ativ­ity and a ten­dency to work, work and work, all the rest be damned – con­trived to kill him early.

But the out­lines hardly cap­ture the essence of Ramanu­jan — a man full of out­ra­geously con­trast­ing streaks: Genial and gre­gar­i­ous, boor­ish and cranky. Hum­ble and brash; supremely con­fi­dent yet in con­stant need of approval and val­i­da­tion. He could also be called hyper­sen­si­tive, but that would be under­stat­ing it. When a cou­ple of his guests at Cam­bridge refused a third help­ing of his rasam, Ramanu­jan left home abruptly and didn’t return for four days. He was also mad­den­ingly stub­born and fatal­is­tic. When on his deathbed, when a doc­tor sug­gested he go to Than­javur for fur­ther treat­ment, he refused, pun­ning instead that – “He wants me to go to Than (My) – Savoor (City of Death). A pot­pourri of odd ingre­di­ents that some­how ended up brew­ing a genius. Or a magi­cian, in the words of Mark Kac,

An ordi­nary genius is a fel­low that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times bet­ter. There is no mys­tery as to how his mind works. Once we under­stand what he has done, we feel cer­tain that we, too, could have done it. It is dif­fer­ent with the magi­cians. They are, to use math­e­mat­i­cal jar­gon, in the orthog­o­nal com­ple­ment of what we are and the work­ing of their minds is for all intents and pur­poses incom­pre­hen­si­ble. Even after we under­stand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is com­pletely dark.

A magi­cian with a brain wired to invent, and invent fever­ishly. When he came across an obscure book of for­mu­las designed to serve as a cheat sheet for British stu­dents tak­ing math­e­mat­i­cal exams, he set out try­ing to prove some of the the­o­rems, and ended up con­jur­ing hun­dreds of new iden­ti­ties. When he wanted to send some of his results to other math­e­mati­cians, he started copy­ing the results to another note­book – a fair copy – but as he was writ­ing, he would invent a few more new results. He relied on intu­ition and dis­dained rigor — fre­quently, his proofs were ama­teur­ish and wrong, but remark­ably enough, the the­o­rems were right. How? (Kanigel puts forth the­o­ries that include divine inspi­ra­tion, and intu­itive leaps of faith, though Hardy stub­bornly refused to accept that Ramanu­jan was wired any dif­fer­ent from the rest)

His was a lucky genius too – it found British math­e­mati­cian G.H. Hardy – pos­si­bly the best British math­e­mati­cian of his time — a charm­ing young h athe­ist, a “non-practicing” homo­sex­ual and a lib­eral in the best sense of the word. A man who was open to the pos­si­bil­ity that brown can some­times do good things. Ramanu­jan wrote Hardy, beg­ging to intro­duce him­self and coyly stat­ing a few intrigu­ing results with no proofs. Unlike his con­tem­po­raries who had seen the results and dis­missed them as worth­less, Hardy rec­og­nized the let­ters as the work of a math­e­mati­cian of con­sid­er­able abil­ity, and nur­tured Ramanu­jan for the next few years – bring­ing him to Eng­land, and gen­tly teach­ing him the virtue of rigor with­out damp­en­ing his cre­ativ­ity or hurt­ing his ego.

Mean­while, Ramanu­jan was start­ing to feel home­sick — and the war wasn’t help­ing. Get­ting veg­e­tar­ian food (pota­toes, but­ter) was prov­ing to be hard, and Ramanu­jan had to sub­sist on canned food -
some­times cook­ing the food in the cans them­selves. His pos­ses­sive, over­bear­ing mom would not let him bring his wife to Eng­land with him – deny­ing Ramanu­jan the one thing he missed in the most in Eng­land — com­pan­ion­ship — some­thing to dis­tract him from work, some­one to talk to, care for and be cared by. Lonely, he buried him­self in his work and neglected his health. Like all things in Ramanujan’s life, Hardy’s friend­ship was a dou­ble edged sword: it helped him gain world­wide recog­ni­tion, but Hardy might have pushed him too hard, and not cared enough for his per­sonal life which was unrav­el­ing rapidly. Kanigel dances around a lit­tle bit here (Hardy was too Eng­lish to pry into his per­sonal life), but it is fairly obvi­ous that Hardy comes across as uncar­ing in his (per­sonal) rela­tion­ship with Ramanu­jan. Even after Ramanu­jan attempted sui­cide by jump­ing in front of a train in Lon­don, Hardy stayed aloof – pro­fes­sion­ally he was invalu­able to Ramanu­jan, but as his only friend in an alien land he prob­a­bly let him down a lit­tle bit.

Ramanu­jan returned to India a sick man, and died in the next cou­ple of years. He was only 32. The cause of death is unknown, though Tuber­cu­lo­sis seems to be the widely accepted expla­na­tion. His cre­ativ­ity hit a peak in the years before his death, and his best work prob­a­bly was done as he was dying.

The soap opera didn’t end after his death, though. His wife left to live by her­self, and his broth­ers tried to get jobs using his fame, writ­ing let­ters to every­one who would read them, claim­ing they had wasted the last few years of their life car­ing for their brother, and accus­ing his wife of “steal­ing” all his papers.

A coun­try hun­gry for heroes lapped up his suc­cess, and the media was only too glad to overblow the case. Barely tan­gen­tial appli­ca­tions of Ramanujan’s find­ings were touted as his “inven­tions”. The truth though was that Ramanu­jan didn’t care much for appli­ca­tions of his the­o­ries – he just did Math­e­mat­ics. Hardy dis­dained applied Math­e­mat­ics, and con­sid­ered any­thing that could be applied to the real world infe­rior. India today takes immense pride in Ramanu­jan, though it is debat­able how much it con­tributed to his success.

“His life,” Kanigel says, “is like a para­ble.” You can infer what­ever you want from it. True. Could a bet­ter sys­tem of school­ing have helped? Maybe he would have learnt a lot of what existed with­out hav­ing to rein­vent the wheel. Or maybe it would have killed the genius in him.

At first glance, it appears that India did noth­ing for him. He pretty much made him­self, and it took an Eng­lish math­e­mat­i­can to tell the world how good he was. But then, could it have been his fatal­is­tic spir­i­tu­al­ity that led him to trust his intu­ition? Did his brain’s wiring have any­thing to do with his upbringing?

Mean­while, I think of Mr. Romald , who back in sixth grade used a wooden ruler to stun­ningly good effect when I added a cou­ple of dec­i­mal num­bers wrong. “Point under Point,” he screamed, let­ting loose a spray of spit­tle onto my dou­ble ruled note­book. I am pretty sure he killed my creativity.

“Sujatha” Ran­gara­jan, the most rec­og­niz­able Tamil writer around today, turns sev­enty next Wednes­day. In an evoca­tive, nos­tal­gic piece in Anandha Vikatan, he talks about his mul­ti­facted career and his legacy, sign­ing off wiith the “The love of my fans is my Nobel prize” line, stung per­haps by the lack of recog­ni­tion as a seri­ous writer.

Employ­ing a racy nar­ra­tive laced with dry humor and writ­ing in con­ver­sa­tional, easy to under­stand Tamil — a mix­ture that quickly became his trade­mark — Sujatha is a pro­lific writer. His works span dif­fer­ent gen­res: sci­ence fic­tion to mid­dle class angst; clas­si­cal poetry to court­room dra­mas. In a cul­ture full of home brewn cre­ators that pride them­selves on their indi­ge­neous­ness, Sujatha stood out for his use of West­ern style rhetor­i­cal devices and lit­er­ary tech­nique. A small town boy that grew up to be an engi­neer, well trav­eled, hard work­ing and no com­mu­nist lean­ings: Sujatha does not fit the pro­file of the aver­age Tamil writer. Con­tin­u­ing on the dif­fer­ences, he is well read — he can quote ancient Tamil poetry and Saul Bel­low in the same breath — and his books are always best­sellers. He dab­bled in script writ­ing too, writ­ing screen­plays and dia­logues for a few Tamil movies.

A sound knowl­edge of writ­ing tech­niques and the abil­ity to employ them well; a vora­cious lit­er­ary appetite; an immense love for his craft: Notwith­stand­ing all this, Sujatha’s works never rose above pass­ably good. Con­strained per­haps by writ­ing in a lan­guage whose pub­lic prefers mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers to seri­ous fic­tion, Sujatha sac­ri­ficed qual­ity for quan­tity: his books were inter­est­ing reads, but never great. Flit­ting from genre to genre, he mas­tered none, suc­ced­ing only partly in his attempts at strad­dling pop­u­lar fic­tion and seri­ous writing.

He did not win lit­er­ary awards, but he sold books. A lot of them. And that is noth­ing to sneer at, for not all Bel­low fans can be Bellow.

Link to the Bel­low trib­ute page at the New York Times through The Mid­dle Stage.