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  A beautiful mind: Stills from the film being made in India and (below) actor Abhinay Vaddi

  

An intrepid foreign tourist or schoolchildren might be the only visitors to a museum on the mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in Chennai on any given day. This modest museum housed in a small, low-roofed room is situated in a narrow, bustling bylane lined with garment shops in a commercial street.

The unique items on display here are two rare letters written by British mathematician Professor G.H. Hardy from England (one dated March 26, 1913) to Ramanujan, then an Indian Port Trust Office clerk, in response to his 'startling' work in mathematics. The rest (without descriptions or explanations) is meagre, consisting largely of portraits of people who had played a powerful role in his life. Chief among them is Ramanujan's mother, Komalatammal, whose strong hold over her son, making his young wife's life miserable, is well documented.

A facsimile of his horoscope which had foretold his short life span (he died at 32) and a letter penned in Tamil to his parents after he reached England might evoke mild curiosity.

But there's nothing here which even remotely provides a glimpse into the work of this self-taught mathematician whose obsessive work on the theory of modular forms in 1916 is now seen to be at the heart of mathematics and physics. His scribbling on his deathbed is often described as the beginning of the 'theory of mock modular forms', occupying the centre stage of mathematics in the 21st century.

But fans of the mathematician hope that two new films — one from Hollywood and the other produced in India — will spark an interest in him.

So far, the interest has been sporadic. Efforts to set up a Rs 50-crore Mathematics Museum in Chennai in his name are yet to bear fruit. The national organising committee set up to conduct the year-long celebrations for Ramanujan's 125th birth anniversary in 2012 got Union minister Kapil Sibal's approval for the idea. But the project has hit a roadblock.

'We have approached the Tamil Nadu government many times outlining the proposal and asking for an audience but we've got no response,' says M.S. Raghunathan, head of the committee, president of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society and the principal initiator of the project.

Raghunathan had imagined an interactive museum which would have been the first of its kind in the world. 'Subsequently, Tokyo and New York beat us to it,' he says, describing his dream of filling the sprawling rooms with charts, photographs, computing aids of the history of maths, constructing machines designed by mathematicians, rooms devoted to numbers, math toys and a room exclusively on Ramanujan.

'If we don't get land we shall move this project to another city,' he says, adding that the aim of the project is to coax bright young students scared of maths to enjoy the world of numbers.

Of course, not everybody believes museums are the answer.

'The homage India pays to Ramanujan will be measured not by museums and ceremonies but by the efforts it makes to find, cultivate, and encourage all the Ramanujans and other boys and girls, men and women, of talent and genius living in India today,' writer Robert Kanigel says in an email interview. The Hollywood film is based on Kanigel's Ramanujan biography, The Man Who Knew Infinity.

M. Ram Murty, a maths professor at Queen's University in Canada, who co-authored The Mathematical Legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan, agrees. 'The best way to pay homage to him is to study his work and develop it further and this is being done,' he holds. Though Ramanujan was a genius, he 'systematically studied maths' by frequenting the library and studying texts used in English universities, Murty adds.

Kanigel also stresses that it is important to see Ramanujan as a human being. 'It is easy to think of him as simply a genius, someone so different from the rest of us that he inhabits another universe,' he says. 'But Ramanujan... had drives and needs and hopes like the rest of us. He worked very, very hard; he wasn't afraid to give his all... to achieve what he did.'

Some of these characteristics are likely to figure in the screen persona of Ramanujan, portrayed by Abhinay Vaddi, in the bilingual (Tamil and English) film Ramanujan, to be released in 2014.

'Ramanujan was not understood, not treated right and suffered immensely. It was his sheer belief and his love for maths which drove him to pursue his dream,' says Sindhu Rajasekaran, co-founder of Camphor Cinema, which is producing the film, with crew and cast drawn from India and Britain. 'We hope to send out the message that India should celebrate its genius.'

The film, based largely on a Tamil biography written by Ragami or T.V. Rangaswami, centres on his journey from Kumbakonam to Cambridge.

Over the years, some tepid homage has been paid to Ramanujan. A stamp was released during his centenary birth celebrations in 1987, and every year on his birthday — December 22, declared the National Mathematics Day by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — seminars are held.

Madras University, which houses his original notebooks, holds quiz competitions. His house in Kumbakonam was very recently traced and spruced up by Sastra University in Tamil Nadu. Translations of Kanigel's biography in 10 Indian languages are on the anvil.

But all this just does not seem enough about the man who knew infinity.

Role of a lifetime

His lineage is impressive. His grandfather Gemini Ganesan was the legendary king of romance in Tamil cinema, while his grandmother, Savitri, was called the Meena Kumari of south Indian films. But Abhinay Vaddi, a 30-year-old management graduate and national table tennis champ, was not interested in joining the film industry. Then, three years ago, his wife unexpectedly urged him to give films a shot. He stepped into the Tamil film industry with the role of a lifetime — that of the tortured genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Excerpts from an interview:

What was your reaction when you bagged the role?

I got the role because the director felt I resembled Ramanujan. I was scared, I did not know what to feel. But it is the best thing that has happened to me.

How did you prepare for the role?

What helped me is that I like maths. The director (Gnana Rajasekaran) asked me not to read any other material on Ramanujan except the extracts he gave me from different books. He did not want me to cloud my mind with other references. I watched A Beautiful Mind many times and I modelled my character similarly.

What about his extremely religious side and the fact that his mother controlled his married life?

Well, I am an atheist and so it was tough to portray that side. I learnt all the shlokas and prayed and I felt good about that. On his married life, I just wish he had stood up to his mother and got his wife to come out to England. She would have looked after him and he could have lived longer. My mother does not interfere in my marriage and told us to live away from her (laughs).