Moreover, language in pre-Independence era was used to not just communicate but also differentiate, at times, subjugate - a fact this film doesn’t care about. Lines such as “Hi, I’m Ramanujan”, “We’re Brahmins, we’re forbidden to cross the sea” just don’t work, and keep drawing attention to the fact that a British filmmaker is trying to appropriate, even distort, an Indian story. Why not have them talk in Tamil? In a bid to make the film more universal, more palatable to a majority of audiences (thus increasing the chance of its box-office success) director Matthew Brown disconnects the characters from their own film. To begin with, the film’s characters, especially Ramanujan, his wife and his mother, talk to each other in English nearly all the time, in a strange, awkward accent (imagined by the makers) that sounds fake and unconvincing. These portions of the film - with stilted dialogues, one-note acting, and predictable plot points - prime us for a movie that keeps achieving different levels of mediocrity. The film opens in Madras of 1914, where young Ramanujan, working as a clerk, has recently got married and is looking to find an outlet for his mathematical ambition. And it’s this curiosity, this joy of finding something new in the familiar, that’s most lacking in The Man Who Knew Infinity. Part of our curiosity about mathematicians has to do with the nature of the subject itself: one that’s abstract, elusive, even bipolar, welcoming a select few, snubbing the rest. Indeed, men of numbers, especially those who can play with numbers, remain a mystery to us. One day, Hardy asks Ramanujan, “How did you know that theorem?” He replies, “It just came to me.” In a different scene, Hardy poses a similar question to Ramanujan, whose answer remains practically unchanged, “I don’t know. The trouble is Ramanujan has the results he just can’t prove them. Hardy (Jeremy Irons), a mathematics professor in Trinity College, has called Ramanujan (Dev Patel) to college so that he can help publish his mathematical findings. The Man Who Knew Infinity,the movie based on the life of Indian mathematician S. Nasar writes about that meeting thus, ‘“How could you,” began Mackey, “how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof… how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?” (…) “Because,” Nash said, “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. Sylvia Nasar’s book A Beautiful Mind, which chronicles the life of mathematician John Nash (his talent for numbers, his struggles with schizophrenia), begins with Harvard professor George Mackey paying a visit to Nash in a hospital.