Srinivasa Ramanujan and Lessons for Today's India

Today, April 26, 2020, marks the centennial death anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the self-taught math genius born into a poor family in Southern India in 1887 under British colonial rule, who conjured theorems and formulas in his short 32 years of life that continue to intrigue and challenge mathematicians to this day.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

The anniversary comes at a tragic time for India. Sectarian and police violence have claimed many lives, mostly Muslim, following the passing of a discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 aggressively promoted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indians of all faiths have been demonstrating against the law, although the coronavirus contagion has halted it for now. (But the pandemic has added its own macabre twist to the story. Reports are now emerging that right-wing fanatics are attacking and killing Indian Muslims for spreading the virus!) The original Citizenship Act of 1955 guaranteed citizenship to every Indian irrespective of religion, reflecting the aspirations of a secular, democratic nation. The amended bill favors all major religions of South Asia except Islam, a blatant discrimination against India’s 200-million Muslim community.

Remembering Ramanujan against today’s India offers lessons about the insidious ways by which bigotry and injustice can erode the soul of a nation and stifle the flowering of its geniuses.

Ramanujan would have withered away as a shipping clerk in Madras (now Chennai) had it not been for the patronage of an Englishman. In 1913, the same year that Rabindranath Tagore, another son of India, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ramanujan wrote a letter to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy to rescue him from oblivion. Trying to digest the 50 or so theorems included in the letter, Hardy realized he was dealing with a rare phenomenon. The mathematics seemed so sublime that Hardy was convinced “the results must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.”

Ramanujan's Letter to Hardy

G.H. Hardy

Hardy managed to bring Ramanujan to England through a grant, giving him an intellectual home at Cambridge where he flourished for five years, producing pioneering work in such branches as number theory and partition function that secured his reputation as among the greats of mathematics. The serendipitous discovery of Ramanujan’s “Lost Notebook” by Wisconsin University Mathematics professor George Andrew in 1976 that included calculations involving “mock theta functions,” 56 years after he worked them out in India, has added to the enigma and the otherworldly genius of Ramanujan. The late physicist Freeman Dyson (1923-2020) aptly summed up Ramanujan’s achievement: “That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover … I have intermittently been coming back to Ramanujan’s garden. Every time I come back, I find fresh flowers blooming.”

From Ramanujan's Notebooks

Ramanujan’s theorems are now applied in fields ranging from particle physics and statistics to cryptology and computer science. His approximation for pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, finds use in today’s fastest algorithms in computing the irrational number to trillion decimal places.

Ramanujan was lucky. (So was Tagore. Had not the Irish poet Yeats championed his work in the West, the Bengali poet would unlikely to have won the Nobel.) But for every Ramanujan who succeeded, how many Ramanujans must have died on the vine when the British ruled the Subcontinent for over a century? Colonial powers by their nature subjugate, exploit and massacre. But when the oppressors are one’s own leaders, what’s the excuse? Modi and his BJP passed the Citizenship Act to marginalize Muslims or drive them out of India. Such overt discrimination affects not only the target population but the entire nation, preventing potential Tagores and Ramanujans from ever seeing the light of day.

The human potential of India is incalculable. We get a sense of it by the disproportionate number of Indian American engineers and CEOs keeping hi-tech companies humming right here in Silicon Valley. Brain drain from India and other countries will continue so long as the West offers better opportunities to immigrants. While India cannot provide such opportunities for all, passing discriminatory laws against a segment of its population diminishes the nation and shackles its geniuses, be they Hindu, Sikh, Christian or Muslim. When a government becomes tyrannical, the creative vitality of its people seeps away as from cut flowers in a vase.

Ramadan in the Time of Pandemic

You can read a slightly different version of this in the San Jose Mercury News

This year’s Ramadan (April 24 to May 23) comes at perhaps the most challenging time of our lives. A killer virus is advancing like wildfire across the globe, leaving heartbreak and death in its wake. Confined to our homes, we are stressed and uncertain of the present and the future.

But hope is native to our nature. The Quran, the Islamic Book of Divine Guidance, instructs us never to give in to despair. Certainly no one despairs of God’s Mercy … (12:87)

When we become complacent and think that we can dictate our destiny, God warns us: And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient, who, when disaster strikes, say, “Indeed we belong to God, and indeed to Him we will return.” (2:155-156)

But God also assures us that Surely with hardship comes ease. Indeed, with hardship comes ease. (94:5-6) 

In this trying time, Ramadan reminds us to slow down, to pause and reflect on life’s big questions of meaning and purpose. So, where are you going? (81:26) asks the Quran. We must ask ourselves: Where, indeed, am I going with my life? Is it aligned with God’s expectations of me as defined by God, or am I going astray from a combination of ego, ingratitude, impatience, forgetfulness and other assorted flaws?

As we Muslims welcome Ramadan into our lives, we must remember the many in our community who have lost their jobs - cabdrivers, office assistants, caregivers, domestic help, daily wage earners, and others. They are among the more than 22 million of our jobless fellow-Americans facing a frightening future. We are traditionally most generous during Ramadan, and we pray that we can be even more generous during this Ramadan. Charity, the Quran tells us, is for the neediest, regardless of religion, particularly those who do not ask for help due to modesty or embarrassment. We must find and help them without in any way hurting their sense of dignity and self-respect

The doors of our mosques are closed, as are the doors of churches, synagogues, and temples. But thanking God for His blessings, mercy and forgiveness in the sacred days and nights of Ramadan can open windows in our hearts. Never for a moment should we forget that repentance can lead to redemption and remembrance of God to renewal. The dark shadow of life’s pain will, God Willing, be dispelled soon by the bright sunshine of life’s promises.

As it happens, today, Wednesday, April 22, 2020, is Earth Day. Fifty years ago, it dawned on us that there was no Planet B, that the Earth was the only home we had, and unless we cared for her, we were doomed. The forced isolation of the coronavirus has done one good thing: with little pollution defiling Mother Earth, the sky looks clearer and the vegetation pristine. Covid-19 pandemic has taught that we are not really the masters of the universe that we think we are. We know very little and our capacity is extremely limited. We have been committing crimes against nature, against animals, against all the sentient beings that we share the earth with. A single novel virus has collectively brought us to our knees. To survive, we must replace our hubris with humility. Repentance can lead to redemption and responsibility to renewal. That is also the lesson of Ramadan.