India

Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no university education but I have undergone the ordinary school course… I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as “startling”. This was the opening of the letter written by the Indian maths prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan to Professor G.H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge in January 1913. The penny post was the first network

The recent Sewell report on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been much abused and little read. It is full of interesting suggestions, however. One, emphasising the shared history of modern Britain, is to compile ‘a dictionary or lexicon of well-known British words which are Indian in origin’. Actually, such a work already exists. It is called Hobson-Jobson, ‘a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive’. Edited by Colonel Henry Yule, Royal Engineers, and Dr A.C. Burnell, of the Madras Civil Service, it was completed in 1886. It is a large, fascinating book, half an hour in whose company is never wasted.

A leap of faith Sir: I live not far from the ‘London Temple’ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most summers, the local streets are trodden by American Mormon missionaries, polite teenagers who occasionally approach to ask if we know Jesus Christ. Some years ago, I read the book on which the new Netflix series Murder Among the Mormons (‘Latter-day sinners’, 3 April) appears to be based. So when I was accosted by a couple of missionaries, I was able to ask them why the practice of polygamy, so avidly promulgated by the founder of their church, Joseph Smith, had been abandoned. My interviewee explained that Smith

After the thrills and spills and last-gasp excitements of England’s triple-headed series in India, the attention of the cricket fan moves on. But to where? To Derbyshire’s next game, say — a university match at the county ground, over what promises to be a somewhat nippy Easter weekend. Or perhaps to the Indian Premier League, where the Mumbai Indians, featuring Rohit Sharma and the Pandya brothers, from the recent Test series, kick off the latest edition of the tournament against Bangalore, perpetually under-achieving despite the presence of A.B. de Villiers, Virat Kohli, Washington Sundar and Adam Zampa. Some of the best players in world cricket will be in India, for

The UK vaccination programme has been such a success to date that until yesterday evening it seemed a formality that the government would achieve its target of offering all adults at least a first dose of a Covid vaccine by July. Indeed, on Monday it looked as if this date might be brought forwards when it was announced that there would be a huge uplift in vaccine shots available, thanks to the arrival of a large consignment of AstraZeneca vaccine from India. Instead of 2 million doses a week, the vaccination programme would be able to deliver 4 million doses. On Wednesday evening, however, that hope was shattered. Firstly, Ursula

Michael Vaughan might disagree but — putting aside 2005 and all that — was there a more thrilling and satisfying series than India’s evisceration of the Aussies which ended at the Gabba? Especially after being rattled out for 36, their lowest ever score, in Adelaide in the first Test, when no one, not even extras, reached double figures, and then losing many of their best players to injury or absence. They’ve pulled off a skilful trick, the Indians, in making the world see them as underdogs despite them being a cricket-mad country of more than a billion people, which already runs and owns the game. Now there can’t be a