Sometimes a film, a book, and a bottle of vodka blend in ways so unexpectedly perfect that you feel grateful simply for having been present.
The blending began on a weekend. I had bought a bottle of Polish vodka whose USP, according to the internet, was that each bottle contained a blade of bison grass from the Bialowieza forest. This was no small thing. Bialowieza is one of the last surviving fragments of the immense primeval forest that once covered most of western Europe. To sip a vodka infused with its bison grass is, in theory, to slip through a tear in time—to be carried back to a continent before maps, borders or even civilisation itself.
But when I opened the bottle at home, I discovered a problem. It contained no grass.
I had chosen the wrong label. The bison grass belonged to a more expensive variant, not the budget bottle I had picked after a cursory Google search. It got worse. The bottle was only 700ml—50ml short of a proper Indian ‘full’—and the alcohol strength a timid 37.5% v/v, well below what any self-respecting Indian brand would offer. By every metric, I had made the wrong choice.
I drank it anyway.
I like to rewatch films when I am tipsy. The emphasis is on ‘re’. New films demand focus and discipline—qualities ill-suited to merriment. Rewatching is easier, like listening to a familiar song: you know the tune, but there is pleasure in catching notes that you missed earlier.
I wanted to watch the Dev Patel film in which he plays the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, with Jeremy Irons as his mentor, G.H. Hardy. The choice was somewhat deliberate. Earlier that week, I had discovered The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics by George Gheverghese Joseph, described by the publisher as a “pioneering critic of colonial knowledge systems”.
Joseph’s own life mirrored his argument. Born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, raised in Madurai and Mombasa, and trained as a mathematician in Britain, he identified with four heritages: Middle Eastern Christian, Indian, African and Western. “To keep a balance between my four heritages and not allow any one to take over permanently is important to me,” he writes in the preface to The Crest of the Peacock. Published by Princeton University Press in 1991, the book is a landmark study of mathematics in non-European civilisations—Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Mayan, Indian—written at a time when Europe still had a strong claim as the sole custodian of reason. By the time I brought the vodka home, it had become the highlight of my reading year.
Joseph opens the book with Ramanujan. A natural genius, “the like of whom could be found only by going back to Euler and Gauss”, Ramanujan was almost entirely ignorant of modern mathematical conventions. He scribbled endlessly on a slate, transferring only final results to notebooks. One such “Lost Notebook”, written while he was dying at 32, later prompted a mathematician to observe that Ramanujan had achieved in a single year what a great mathematician would in a lifetime.
This was why I wanted to revisit the film.
One of its most memorable scenes shows a brooding Hardy watching a restless Ramanujan. Despite producing work praised for its “richness, beauty, mystery—its sheer mathematical loveliness”, Ramanujan remained, to Hardy, a diamond in the rough. An Iyengar Brahmin, he credited many discoveries to Namagiri, his family deity, which was an embarrassment to Cambridge rationalists. Hardy believed Ramanujan needed to learn discipline by training in western proof.
“Mr Hardy,” Ramanujan asks, “why do we waste our time doing proofs?”
Because mathematics, Hardy replies, is an art. “Just as Mozart could hear an entire symphony in his head,” he tells Ramanujan, “you dance with numbers to infinity.” But without proof, and without something that enabled others to reproduce his dance, his discoveries would be dismissed as conjuring.
The film is titled The Man Who Knew Infinity. That night, however—vodka glass in one hand, remote in the other—I could not remember the name. I used the voice command and said simply: “Ramanujan.”
What appeared was not the Patel–Irons biopic, but Ramanujan—a 2014 Tamil film I had never heard of, which went on to win the State Award for Best Film.
The film runs close to three hours—well over an hour more than its English counterpart. It opens with a classroom scene in which a young Ramanujan confounds his teacher with a mathematical problem, before segueing into a devotional song praising Namagiri. Typical of the sensibilities of a south Indian film. Ramanujan is shown solving problems even in temples. In one scene, he tells a priest distributing peas as offerings that his stock will fall short: there are 142 devotees, Ramanujan explains, but the container can hold only 8,710 peas. If the priest continues to distribute fistfuls of pea, at least eight people will be left without prasad.
Ramanujan’s Cambridge years form the film’s core: cold weather, scarcity of vegetarian food, racism, homesickness, and the mathematical culture clash between western preoccupation with proofs and eastern faith in intuition.
Joseph delves deep into this friction in The Crest of the Peacock. Western mathematics, he writes, had declared itself “modern” by erasing its eastern roots, even though this “modern mathematics” was merely one way of doing mathematics. “We use the term ‘triangle’ (three angles) rather than the Babylonian ‘wedge’ (three sides),” he writes. The concept of an angle came with the Greeks, who absorbed Babylonian knowledge without giving due credit.
Ramanujan’s “sums”, apparently, belonged to a more embodied mathematics. Digits, after all, means fingers; the decimal system exists mainly because humans have ten of them. Its global dominance owes as much to cultural consensus as conventional logic.
Even bottles, I realised that night, carry such histories. Traditional glassblowers produced vessels of roughly 700–800ml because that was what a single lungful of air could manage. Metric standardisation later fixed this at 700ml, which explained my mild disappointment with the vodka.
Which is why the Tamil Ramanujan, for all its lack of subtlety, felt oddly truer than the restrained English biopic I had intended to rewatch. The Tamil film trusted intuition, faith and music to show how Ramanujan danced with numbers to infinity.
By the time the credits rolled, the vodka was nearly gone, like much of the bison grass in the old Bialowieza forest. But it left a heady feeling of realisation: knowledge, like art, does not travel a single road. But occasionally—by accident, algorithm or alcohol—it can blend together in exquisite ways.
And, when it happens, you feel grateful simply for having been present.