From Bihar to Broadway
- New York-based lawyer directs play on Ramanujan
SANTOSH SINGH
Telegraph, Nov. 2, 2006

Patna, Nov. 1: New York-based corporate lawyer Bhavna Thakur is
equally at home at spinning a web of logic as she is pulling off a
stage act.

The 28-year-old legal eagle, who hails from a non-descript village at
Madhubani in Bihar, is now busy unravelling the method and the madness
of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the maths wizard, who clawed his way up from
the alleys of Chennai to being recognised as Fellow of Trinity and a
Fellow of Royal Society in England.

The "Bihari" at heart, who did her schooling graduated from National
School of Law India University in Bangalore, has donned the hat of the
artistic director of The First Class Man, a play on the Indian
mathematician who made clinching contributions to number theory and
modular functions.

Given to directing plays and acting since his school days, Bhavna, the
daughter of IAS Ajay Thakur, a planning board adviser in the state,
told The Telegraph in an e-mail from New York that a tale of John
Nash, another mathematics genius, acted as a trigger for her current
project.

"Ramanujan came into my mind when I saw A Beautiful Mind. I felt that
the Indian genius was unrecognised," she said. Around the same time,
Bhavna also read Ramanujan's biography The Man Who Knew Infinity
authored by Robert Kanigel. "It is cut out for a theatre," Bhavna
further said.

The play, she added, explores the complex quotient between Columbia
University mathematician G.H. Hardy's world of scientific orthodoxy
and Ramanujan's spiritual relationship with numbers.

Bhavna, the co-founder of Alter Ego Foundation, a non-profit theatre
company, produced the play after a conference at Columbia University,
her alma mater (she did her LLM from here), with top professors from
Princeton, New York University and Columbia.

Written by David Freeman, the 2-hour-20-minute play opened on October
5 at the 45th Street Theatre in New York. And it's already caught the
fancy of the audience in the Big Apple it seems. "The audience loved
it. Some, mostly Indians, had some comments on the costumes and the
accents but, that apart, we had an overwhelming response," Bhavna
said.