Page 8 - Ramanujan Yatra

 Preface 
April 26th 2020, exactly a hundred years after the great Mathematics legend Srinivasa Ramanujan passed away, a very small group of subject-enthusiasts reached Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu to kick-start Vigyan Prasar’s Ramanujan Yatra. In fact, a relatively big programme had been planned that day at Kumbakonam, but COVID-19 had struck! It had acquired the status of a pandemic. Lockdown had been clamped as a precautionary measure in the entire country and Kumbakonam, a taluk-town in South India, was not an exception. A symbolic short event with all that was possible was somehow accomplished at the birthplace of the legend for a very short time. All plans to host a bigger programme had dashed, and we had to be contended with whatever that could be done. Yet, the Ramanujan Yatra, by then, had already begun.
A group of mathematics enthusiasts came together in early January 2020 in Vigyan Prasar’s Prithvi Bhawan office to discuss ways to enhance the efforts to popularize mathematics. Newsletters, books, documentaries, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, seminars and conferences, expert lectures, quizzes, fairs, dramas, and much more were discussed. Amidst this, someone from the group reminded that this is the 100th death anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan. That very moment a set of thoughts emerged on the meeting scene. This moved the discussion to the time relevance of the 100th death anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Immediately, the period from April 26th, the death anniversary to December 22nd, the birthday was bracketed as a time-zone where a number of activities could be planned. This interval of almost eight months thus got the name–Ramanujan Yatra, during which a number of activities were planned all over the country.
Yatra, a Hindi word which means journey, chimed well with activities that had a planned start point and an endpoint–Kumbakonam to New Delhi during April 26th to December 22nd. With COVID-19 around, Team Ramanujan Yatra was restricted to organize web meetings and discourses. Thus started a series of discourses on various aspects of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Starting with its first discourse in Tamil in May, the Yatra began with one expert lecture in one Indian language per month. Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Bangla, Assamese, Odia, Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, and more were covered. Additionally, it was felt that there exists a big set of subject matter experts overseas as well that have been ardent fans of the legend. Thus, we added one expert lecture from across the national boundaries, from people of international repute to deliver their thoughts, that too one such discourse per month. While these discourses significantly added to a repository of valuable content, they also turned out to be a wonderful platform for a number of students to ask questions directly to people about whom they have heard or learned from books, magazines, or other sources of information. I distinctly remember that every web meeting had a large number of people attending them. The growing numbers of people attending thus indicated the growing popularity of these discourses, and in turn, liking towards the wonderful world of mathematics.