December 22 marks the 129th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the greatest Indian mathematician of our time. Just 32 when he died, Ramanujan has fascinated mathematicians, writers and filmmakers for nearly a century.

Generations of Indian Americans have had Arthur first note their feats and recount it to the world. And that is why so many desis across America have been saddened by his passing.

Have you tasted Besan ke ladoo cookies?

'Asked which Dilip Kumar films were among her favourites, she said she had seen not a single movie of his until that time. This became a sensational issue. She did not mean to offend Dilip Kumar. There was not a bone of diplomacy in her and she never acquired that calculating attitude even at the cost of some of the roles that she would eventually lose.'

Smita Patil would have been 60 on October 17 had fate not cruelly snatched her from us in 1986. She was only 31 when she died. Rediff.com salutes the incomparable actress in a special series.

'The main meal consisted of one soup, a salad, 2 or 3 vegetarian dishes (including at least 1 green vegetable), a variety of rice, freshly prepared Rotis or Phulkas, Dal, and yogurt.'

Arthur J Pais interviews John Madden, director of the Marigold Hotel films, on the difficult task of creating an equally hilarious and as feeling a sequel.

There are 2.5 lakh undocumented Indians across the United States. While President Barack Obama's executive order last week does help, only the US Congress can really address the needs of those caught in the immigration tangle.

Civil rights activist Deepa Iyer, former executive director, South Asian Americans Leading Together, a social justice organisation thought after a visit to the minority businesses hit in recent weeks that the tragic story in Ferguson, Missouri, offers Indian Americans an opportunity to stand up and decry police brutality and show sympathy and support for African Americans in the beleaguered city

Residents anxious after masked gunmen break into 4 desi homes in New Jersey, many disappointed over the police's response to the violent crimes. Arthur J Pais reports from New Jersey.

The scholars are awarded for their outstanding scholarly achievements, character, commitment to others and to the common good.

In analysing census data from 2007-2011, researchers found that the at-birth sex ratios of Asian Americans are the same as white Americans. Arthur J Pais reports

New Jersey state Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula may have triumphed over his opponents in a Democratic Party debate last week, but his campaign for a House of Representatives seat is caught in a controversy. Arthur J Pais reports

'Narendra Modi could be too old to change his personality. On the other hand, his attachment to the RSS could be mostly sentimental. So one must hope that if he becomes prime minister, he is able to detach himself from the RSS view of the world as completely as Narasimha Rao detached himself from the Congress's First Family.' 'India cannot be governed by the autocratic methods by which he has governed Gujarat. If he becomes prime minister he will have to learn to speak in a more civil language about his political opponents,' historian Ramachandra Guha tells Arthur J Pais/Rediff.com

While work on his most ambitious project Bombay Velvet is on, Anurag Kashyap's taut and gritty thriller Ugly screened at the ongoing New York Indian Film Festival.

Rishi Singh, who recently joined a protest meeting against anti-immigrant laws in Arizona and demanded legislation to help the children of the undocumented, has known for over 17 years what it means to be an illegal young man in the United States.

Arthur J Pais analyses Oscar 2014 big wins and losses.

The court case in India against Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus was in a way initiated in Atlanta, Georgia, by a group of Indian-American businessmen including Dhiru Shah, who have been fighting against several controversial books on Hinduism by Western thinkers and professors in recent years.

'How can Hindus protest efforts to ban an edition of the Gita in parts of Russia, and force a publisher to withdraw an academic critique of Hinduism, all in the same breath? It makes the Hindu community seem petty, self-serving, and hypocritical. Episodes like this allow Hinduism to be "owned" by the most conservative, intolerant, extremist voices. These people do not speak for me, and they certainly don't represent the form of Hinduism I practice and love," Princeton University's Hindu chaplain Vineet Chander tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.

'For over a decade, the United States has been shaping the contours of Hinduism. It has been doing this from the perspective of upper caste and conservative interests,' Professor Shefali Chandra tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.

The preferred course of action to challenge Wendy Doniger's many published works and polemical Hinduphobic statements is to debate it, Aseem Shukla tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.

On Tuesday, a judge in the US denied a request by Aakash Dalal's attorney to have his trial sent to another district and conducted under a different judge since the adverse publicity the case had gathered in the present court area in the Bergen county of New Jersey. Arthur J Pais reports.

With two decades of experience as a teacher, researcher and administrator at Princeton University, Sanjeev Kulkarni, a professor of electrical engineering and director of the Keller Center, is described by some colleagues as a 'seasoned university citizen' who has made a name for himself in interdisciplinary courses.

Raghuveer Nayak, an Indian-American multi-millionaire, was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $500,000 in a decade-long medical scam by a federal judge in Chicago on Monday.

Lawyer and scholar Vinay Sitapati says the 'Get Modi' strategy largely misses the efforts to prosecute people evidently guilty of violence and murders in the Gujarat riots in favour of "a narrow quest to stop one man from becoming prime minister."

The Guruvaayoorappan temple in Morganville, New Jersey, which is the biggest of its kind in North America, has now turned into a Vrindavan of sorts with the grand opening of a cow sanctuary On the premises.

"Many people in America see animals, particularly cows, as meat...animals have a soul, personality, they interact," says Sankar Sastri, who runs the Lakshmi Cow Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, USA.

The Dalals, whose son faces 30 years in prison if found guilty of masterminding domestic terror acts, have decided to take their case to the Indian-American community.

'The challenges of the world are too great for any one religious tradition to address alone... The best way to learn about other religions is not from books, but from people... Go talk to someone from a different faith tradition. Get to know them. Build up some trust.' Dr Katharine Rhodes Henderson, who jointly won Hofstra University's Guru Nanak Prize for inter-faith champions in the United States, discusses religion and the challenges of extremism in this lively interview with Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.

One of the first things Meera Chandrasekhar noticed at Brown University, where she was enrolled in the doctorate program in physics, was that there were just three women and some two dozen men.

Founder Shilen Amin tells Arthur J Pais how far the South Asian International Film Festival has come since its inception 10 years ago

'Both resisted cruel white rule through non-violence. But Mandela's is a singular story. He never lost faith in his ideals and goal even when he was in prison for many years,' Anant Singh, who produced the Mandela biopic, tells Rediff.com's Arthur J Pais.