pi

i interrupt the history of my life and bring things back to the present...
just the other day, I was reading this excerpt of a letter from Srinivasa Ramanujan to GH Hardy... what struck me is not the mathematics (I cdnt figure out most of the arcane stuff) but the touching simplicity.....

I always found the story of Ramanujan inspiring and tragic... there is something quite romantic in a story of impoverished genius flourishing despite all odds....

Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as "startling."
Srinivasa Ramanujam's opening lines from his letter to G H Hardy.

anyway, I noticed this interesting piece of trivia...in most households (tamil at least), mothers tend to force feed ladysfinger to kids, saying that it makes them "brainy"....[i know at least 3-4 of my friends saying that it happened to them as well]....only later, when I was reading the biography of Ramanujan, I learnt that his favorite dish was made of ladysfinger...

who knows, this somehow passed into urban legend and made its way into my life as an old wives' tale...

One of my teachers said that Ramanujan's book was full of equations like these, all of them without proof. Only very recently, with increased computing power and new algorithmic techniques, we are able to provide proofs for some of those equations. Of course many of them are still unproven.

Legend has it that there was one equation written down in his book, which was scratched out... as if he had initially thought it correct, and later dismissed as inaccurate. The really interesting thing is that when mathematicians tried plugging in values for the variables in the equation, the equation was always true..this they tried for quite a lot of values and the equation always held...some of them started thinking that maybe Ramanujan was wrong to think that the equation was incorrect... When they went through the results once again, they realized that they had made a calculation error in one of the test cases, and there was an imbalance in the equation after all... in the thousandths' decimal place...

did Ramanujan actually realize this when he wrote it down? pretty awesome stuff, if you like that sort of thing.

where I'd rather be.

Ch 3 The name is Venkat, Mr.Venkat

It was during one of my trips to visit my grandma in Madurai, that an incident happened which provides startling insight into the kind of character that I would become later.

Madurai, as most of you would be knowing, is a city of temples, of centuries of tradition... and into this city, I entered, a product of the metropolis, and I guess, carrying some of the pretentious baggage of the Big City.

Opposite my grandma's place, was a small colony of huts- I recall a typical scene from a National Geographic documentary -walls smeared with cowdung (to ward off the innumerable flies that are part and parcel of any small city), thatched roofs, and inhabited by carefree, simple youth, uninhibited by notions of appearing bigger than what they really are.

The day I arrived there, I noticed that there were a few of them, all engrossed in a game of lagori (7-stones), and I desperately wanted to join in the fun, with a notion of "teaching the country bumpkins of how the game is played in the big city".

There were quite a few of them, so we started off with the introductions.....They started the ball rolling.

"En paer Muniyandi" , "I is MuthuKaruppan", and such... Finally, it was my turn...

I dont know what provoked me to say it, possibly a hangover of a James Bond movie that I had seen lately, but I said the following in, what I assumed, was a Sean Conner-ian drawl:

"My name is Mr.Venkat".

The spontaneous reaction to this statement was unilateral and unequivocal... and shamefully embarassing. Howls of derisive laughter would be an understatement. To say that I had made their day, and provided them with humorous fodder for a long long time, would probably be nearer to the mark.

They were rolling on the roads with laughter, and to state the painfully obvious, that was all for the game that day, ... and introductions was as far as I got with that gang.

I still have memories of them gathering outside our home every morning, to greet me with howls of "Mr Venkat! Mr Venkat!, teach us englees" or "foreign mappilai veliya vaa" (hey foreigner dude, come outside)...I would have to sneak through the back door if I ever had to go out. It was via one of these backdoor escapades, that I made a relatively safe trip to the railway station and back to Udaipur...

A few days later, I got a letter from my grandma telling my mom, that some of the neighborhood youth were disturbing her with "cries of Mr Venkat! in all odd hours of the day".

I dint care to explain why, of course.

Ch 2 Rajasthan!

The milectric and the chapraasi

Our nomadic wanderings in India once took us to Udaipur, Rajasthan, where we stayed for a few years. Udaipur had an aura of timelessness that still lingers with me- it almost seemed right out of a Satyajit Ray story....what with its ancient palaces of the Rajputs, numerous lakes and gardens, Udaipur was (and I guess, still is) ethereal.

In fact, my school (Maharana Mewar Pratap School), was on the banks of Lake Pichola and was a part of the palace of the Udaipur royal family! We used to remark that they changed a few wings of the royal prisons to make way for the school.... I still remember being spooked out by the dark, dilapidated elephant stables faintly reeking of centuries-old dung,....

In family news, my kid sister had jst reached the talking age and had quickly picked up Mewari, the local dialect. She had probably inherited my mom's polyglot genes.

It was here that I met my arch-enemy, Anil Mehta a.k.a Pappu. Pappu's family owned an apartment in Udaipur, where we moved in (one of the few modern looking buildings there). I remember that he was the youngest of a family of 6-7 kids- all his elder siblings were girls. I wasnt at the age yet to appreciate this piece of good fortune (that there were so many possibly good looking girls in my neighborhood), so we'll pass over that. And being the only boy in his family, he grew to be quite a spoilt prat.

When he spotted this other kid in his agegroup wandering into his coterie of fawning women, he naturally had to jealously mark his territory and channelised his energies into making life quite miserable for me. The routine usually went like this. He used to peep into the window wailing piteously about how we was so bored and wanted to play. I, being the idiot that I was [Ed: am?], naturally went out. Then he would start pummelling me, wring my neck...the usual bully routine. I dunno if he was threatened by the fact that I could speak English, but he always had this line that he used to say whenever he saw me..

"Main bada hokar milectric banoonga aur tu chapraasi"...which roughly translates (from what i think was Hindi) as "When I grow up, I will be a military officer and you will be an office boy/peon"..
[Ed: Chapraasi is a term born out of the typical Indian Government office . A Chapraasi occupies the lowest rung of the govt babu world- His primary function is to be the receptacle of the abuse from the civil servants above him. When a govt babu takes flak for slacking, he vents it on the chapraasi. In his own unique way, a chapraasi 'spreads sweetness and light' by providing his ass as a whipping ground for all and sundry. He also is: a doorman/teaboy/general office gossip/coolie-(someone had to move the files from in-tray to out)/and the frontman to collect the officer babu's under-the-table earnings, all this, for a commission, of course.]

A funny thing happened when Pappu tried to be sweet to my sister once. She sent him away with the choicest of mewari invective. I think Pappu was quite civil to me for about a week. She is protective of me that way.

Many years down the line, it still amuses me that this kid had to go through such lengths to feel better about himself. But I went out to play with him anyway... It was kinda fun, though exasperating for my folks.

I havent met him in years, but its my fervent hope that his wish to be a 'milectric' officer comes true and he gets posted in the more perilous kind of 'sting' operation... And for all those readers who are dying to know if the other half of his prediction was fulfilled.... No, I dint end up a chapraasi, after all.

Ch 1 The early years (contd.)

Catch the baldie!
Before the euphemestically named "New Water" in Singapore ravaged what I once fondly referred to as my flowing mane, and left it in the sorry state that it is in these days, I had a shock-full crown of curly hair.

It was during this time that my parents subjected me to the ritual tonsuring of the head that every kid is put through in South India. We happen to be an ultra conservative-South Indian Iyer household..wake up to MS subbulakshmi's suprabhatam, filter coffee, the venerable Hindu newspaper..you get the general idea. Consequently, my parents went overboard with the tonsuring ritual. If they saw a microscopic growth of hair follicle, they shipped me off to the nearest temple to emerge all shiny-headed.

It was during a trip to Pazhani, a place made famous for offering the best tonsuring services for all your divine needs, that the next incident of my juvenile adventures took place. There was a shop on the Pazhani hill selling something..I think it was ghee, but my memory deceives me often in these advanced years, so I cant guarantee that. These boxes of ghee were arranged in some sort of pyramidic structure- inherently unstable. I am told there were a good 100 boxes that day (business was not very profitable, I presume). As a kid, I loved to play the house of cards game, where you remove the card in the foundation of the structure and the whole thing collapses. I mistook these ghee books to be an extension of my plaything and yanked off the box in the lower most rung. Gravity took its toll, and the boxes scattered in all directions.... Of course the happy-go-lucky rowdy youth around that place made away with most of the scattered boxes, but most of the shopman's ire was directed towards the newly-tonsured-me. I did the only manly thing at my disposal, and made for the nearest exit...

Unfortunately (quite luckily for me), the unthinking shopkeeper yelled "Mottaiya pidinga-da!!", roughly translated as "Catch the bald goon!"...Pazhani being the place it is, does not have a paucity of tonsured heads...While the intervening good-samaritan-chase-party (read idle youth looking for a piece of action) was trying to figure out which one of the gazillion baldies the shopkeeper was referring to, I made my escape.

I always had luck in such matters. But then again, maybe my current hair-loss is a strange karmic-payback for this long forgotten childhood incident.

Ch 1 The early years

They say kids have poor memories. I don't know whether I was the exception or otherwise. Can't remember which.

What I definitely do not remember is the actual process of transformation of my thought process- that is, the age when I upgraded from pure imagery to MPEG4 memories with dolby surround (and subtitles). I take it for granted that my cognitive abilities improved as a result of this [Ed:We shall soon find that out, won't we?].

My origins were humble enough. I was born to an incurable optimist of an accountant (dad) and an incredibly intellectual physics professor (mom). Both have climbed up the ladder of success in leaps and bounds since. Of course, I don't claim credit for this.

Madurai & Bombay
I was born in Booma Nursing Home in Madurai on May 17, 1982. There was no loud fanfare, no frankincense and myrrh-laden magis, or on the upside, no greeks bearing gifts either. But I assume that there was general good cheer. My parents' prayers were answered, and I was given the name of the Lord of the 7 hills.

Sometime after this, we moved to Bombay, that great heaving hulk of a metropolis. Everything appeared huge to me, probably because I was so small in comparison- I can only recall fleeting images of the layout of our house, the incredibly tall buildings , the camels on Juhu beach, but nothing more.

I was rumored to have asked some pretty profound questions then. Here is a sample.
"Amma, how can we see big-big things with our little eyes?" I definitely cannot recall the answer.

I dumbed down somewhere along the way.

It was at this time, that I was introduced to alphabet. The curious thing about this was that I could only recite it in a sing song manner. If you were to ask me what the individual letters were, I would not know. Or for that matter, ask me what came after T, I had to start the song from A.

I was caught out when I neared the "ellomennopeeq" bit of the song. I was genuinely under the impression that O appeared twice in the alphabet- ....L O M N O P Q...

Another lasting memory from this period was an incident with my friend Bharghav. There are a lot of open drains in Bombay, teeming with all manner of fauna. One day, when our parents were in deep discussion on whatever things parents talk about, Bharghav pushed me into one of these open drains. I emerged head to toe in black. I think I may have swallowed some of that stuff. And I dont know if this is a product of a hyperactive imagination, but I can recall very tiny fish swimming in the drain as I went down... Apparently someone rescued me.

I bore Bharghav no grudge of course. I would do the same for him any day.
(....to be continued)

The story so far

Foreword
It's fairly accurate to say that this is my first attempt to put my mostly obtuse thoughts to paper, or if you are particularly pedantic, to html.
Ok. The use of the word pedantic was a blatant attempt at impressing you, gentle reader. I'm very much of the opinion that any vapid, careless reader would be amazed at the linguistic wizardry and gloss over semantic inaccuracies, spelling errors and circumlocutory sentences astrewn all over this text. [Ed:This is a common technique used by most authors and is totally inspired from the Great Automatic Grammatizer by Roald Dahl.]
For all this and more dear reader, I apologize. Kindly bear with us. We are like this only.

Any genuinely interesting/brilliant/witty ideas expressed herein can be explained by pure beginners' luck. Chronological misalignment of events is almost certainly guaranteed. I was never good at remembering dates. Offhand, I can accurately estimate the beginning of time ( 1 Anno Domini is easy, I admit) and the year that I first made an appearance on this blue green rock (1982).

The rest is ambiguous and should be taken at face value at your own risk.