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Fearless Nadia Mary Evans was born in Australia and brought up in Bombay. Her bloodline was an explosive mix of a Scot soldier and a feral Greek belly dancer. She became famous as tinsel world’s Fearless Nadia – plump, blue-eyed, blonde sex-bomb. Thumbing her nose at uptight ‘intellectual’ film-critics, she merrily went on to play the female Robinhood’s role – becoming a heart-throb of film-crazy masses. Wenner rightly points out that Nadia’s characters represented the new woman for those hidebound times, epitomised by the golden-hearted whip-wielding Hunterwali. Married to filmmaker Homi Wadia, Nadia lived life to the full. Full marks to Rebecca Morrison, whose translation brings alive the sights, sounds and smells of the Bombay of yore.
Of mixed Irish-English stock, Annie Besant was born on October 1, 1847, in London. Her mother taught her that pain and suffering were preferable to disgrace. Fortitude and self-esteem helped her prepare for the "stormy, public, much attacked and slandered life". When young, she wrote pamphlets defending socialist and free-thought movements, and was closely associated with the Fabian Society. In 1889, she joined the Theosophical Society, serving as president from 1907 until her death in 1933. After moving to India, Besant organised the Indian Home Rule League, and was its president in 1916. She was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1917, and general secretary of the National Convention of India in 1923. She also founded Central Hindu College at Varanasi in 1898.
As
evidenced by recent media reports, this is one legend that continues to
grow. Ramanujan (1887-1920) was born in an impoverished Iyengar family
at Erode, Tamil Nadu. His genius for mathematics earned him scholarship;
but he forfeited it when he failed in FA. However, he continued to
pursue research in mathematics and published articles in mathematical
journals. His letter to the British mathematician, GH Hardy, earned him
a research scholarship at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Trinity
College, and in 1918 a Fellow of the Royal Society. Ramanujan’s most
remarkable results were in the partitioning of numbers. He also worked
on identities, modular equations, and mock-theta functions. This book
presents the great mathematician’s works preceded by a brief
biography. |
Annie Besant: An
Autobiography
Srinivasa Ramanujan