ASIAN DELIGHT: Kim Hee Seon who stars in Jackie Chan’s The Myth

Beauty by numbers

Even by my deplorable standards this may seem like an excessively silly question but what does Aishwarya Rai have in common with the number, 1.618 033 988 749 894 848 204 586 834 366?

The answer is probably everything for it was the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci who came up with the concept of the “Golden Ratio” ? approximately 1.618 ? which defines things of great beauty in nature ? such as the pyramids in Egypt, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of the Mona Lisa, sunflowers, the snail, the pine cone and Aishwarya’s face.

As all of India must know by now, the former Miss World has been ranked ninth in a league table of the world’s most beautiful women compiled by Harpers & Queen magazine on the basis of the opinions of 1,000 experts from the world of fashion, arts and the media (since you ask, my opinion was not sought, otherwise one vote would have been cast for Nandita Das and another for the Korean actress, Kim Hee Seon, whom I also met at Cannes).

Aishwarya is preceded by Angelina Jolie, Christy Turlington, Queen Rania of Jordan, Sofia Coppola, Nigella Lawson, Uma Thurman, Emanuelle Beart and Kate Moss.

Salman Rushdie will be delighted that his wife, Padma Lakshmi, has mysteriously sneaked in at number 28. The last time I heard about Fibonacci was at a Cambridge seminar where I had gone with a friend of mine called Ellis, who worked as a booker at Models 1, a well known modelling agency in London. After she had spoken on what she looked for in “new faces” ? and at the time she was trying to recruit Indian girls ? a maxillo-facial surgeon said there was a remarkable degree of unanimity between cultures on what constituted a beautiful face.

He introduced the idea of the Fibonacci numbers, where each one consists of the sum of the two which precede it: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765 and so on and on.

Fibonacci numbers have an interesting property, it was pointed out. When we divide one number in the sequence by the number before it, we obtain numbers very close to one another. In fact, this number settles down after the 13th number in the series at 1.618 to three decimal places. This number is known as the “golden ratio” or “the golden number” or even “the perfect number”.

This is where we come to Aishwarya. Some golden ratios in the human face are: Length of face / width of face; distance between the lips and where the eyebrows meet / length of nose; length of face / distance between tip of jaw and where the eyebrows meet; length of mouth / width of nose; width of nose / distance between nostrils; and distance between pupils / distance between eyebrows.

I would be willing to bet that in Aishwarya’s case, the ratios will be pretty close to 1.618. So although it is still valid to argue that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are universal mathematical laws going back to Greek philosophy which determine what is aesthetically pleasing to the human eye.

CALLING THE SHOTS: Steven Spielberg

Director’s cut

Here is another list ? that of the world’s greatest film directors. One that does not include Satyajit Ray has limited value but I have to make cultural allowances this time for it is based on a poll of readers of Empire, a British film magazine.

Steven Spielberg (ET, Schindler’s List, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan) has been voted the greatest director of all time, followed by Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, Rear Window), Martin Scorsese (The Aviator), Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange) and Ridley Scott (Gladiator).

Then follow Akira Kurosawa, Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, David Lean, the Coen Brothers, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Sergio Leone, John Ford, Billy Wilder and Sam Peckinpah.

The only Indian on the list is Manoj N. Shyamalan, who is 37th, six places behind George Lucas.

The names are as valid as any picked by readers of, say, Filmfare. In this mainly American list, there is no room for Subhash Ghai, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Karan Johar, Raj Kapoor, Ritwik Ghatak or Mani Ratnam. Nor for Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta or Gurinder Chadha.

It is just that the Americans understand better than Indians that films represent not only money but also the power to spread their culture across the globe.

LESSON IN HISTORY: British author Adrian Fort

Holding the fort

If you have something to say on Lord Wavell, commander-in-chief of the Indian army from 1941-43 and Viceroy of India from the end of 1943 to March, 1947 (when he was sacked and replaced by Lord Mountbatten), prepare to speak now.

An important new biography of the man, Archibald Wavell: The Life and Death of the Imperial Servant, is being written by Adrian Fort, a British author who won the Biographers’ Club prize in 2001 for a book on Winston Churchill’s close friend, Frederick Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell.

Fort was educated at Oxford where he is a Clarendon Fellow.

In the spirit of true inquiry and anxious that his Wavell biography should not be British-centric, he would welcome advice and suggestions from people in India for the book, which is also being published by Jonathan Cape in London.

Fort feels Wavell’s period in India has not previously received adequate attention from scholars. He will look at Wavell’s relationship with Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru and any others that he is persuaded are important.

“I want to do no more than 1,20,000 words ? it’s not a cradle to the grave book ? but encompassing his time in India,” says Fort.

FREE LUNCH: Sunny Deol

Stage right

The Indian food business does not stand still. The Bombay Brasserie, the upmarket eatery frequented by Hollywood folk ? Tom Cruise ordered a takeaway for his private jet ? is putting together an exclusive ?9.99 meal box for two, for sale through the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain.

Incidentally, the restaurant discourages freeloading Bollywood stars.

“They don’t pay and they each bring 10 hangers-on,” complains general manager Arun Harnal. He is still waiting for one Mr S. Deol to settle the bill for the takeaway he ordered.

Tittle tattle

There was no magical one-liner from Srichand Hinduja in London after the Delhi High Court had dismissed the Bofors case. Nor can I say he cracked open bottles of champagne, for the man doesn’t drink.

So I fell back on the question journalists ask when they can’t think of anything intelligent to ask.

“So, how do you feel?”

“Well, the same as yesterday,” was his response.