‘The Classics are the books’ writes Italo Calvino in ‘Why Read the Classics?’ (1986), ‘of which we usually hear people say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading…”’ What is strikingly similar in Ramanujan and Calvino is an emphasis on rereading or familiarity with the story before actually reading the text. But isn’t it humanly impossible to be familiar with all the classics of India, Japan, China and the rest of the world? It is inarguably true that as an outcome of years of cultural exchange, transactions and translations, texts and traditions of different parts of the world influenced one another. For instance, several translations of the Panchatantra traveled all over the world since the sixth century AD and influenced Boccaccio, Chaucer, and other storytellers. The concluding section of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), is borrowed from a conversation that takes place between Lord Prajapati and his three sons – God, Demon and Man – in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The influence of the Bhagavad Gita on Robert Oppenheimer is well known. When the nuclear scientist witnessed the first detonation of the nuclear bomb in 1945, he had supposedly quoted from the Gita: ‘Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’