When I was a small child I used to love maths. So many people who only knew me up until the age of about eleven or twelve assumed I'd study it at university, and I remember Mr. Betts, the lovely man who taught the extra maths classes at my primary school, being astonished and amused when a few years ago I told him that I'd ended up making my way in the academic world of English Literature.
I ended up falling out of love with maths at secondary school, which isn't to say that we didn't have excellent teachers who did their best to infuse their students with a passion for the subject; in particular I would rate Barrie Smith, a laconic and drily amusing Yorkshireman, to be the best schoolteacher I ever had the privilege to study under. But it quickly became apparent to me that I had only liked maths as a child because I could easily cope with the simple operations; the adding, multiplication, subtraction, division, long multiplication, long division. Gradually, as I studied it for GCSE and A-Level, the work got more difficult, my natural facility for maths got me less and less far, and I didn't feel enough passion or curiosity to find the answer, or satisfaction at solving a problem, to really put in the effort to master the really tricky stuff. The tipping point came during an A-Level Further Maths lesson concerning the calculation of the escape velocity of a rocket exiting the earth's atmosphere, after which I immediately went to the head of sixth form and requested the right to drop the subject. Considering that I was going on to study literature and that I really didn't need 6 A-Levels, I think I made the right call, particularly as the most complicated maths I have ever needed to use in life is the equation to find the area of a circle, which has come in very handy when working out which pizza is most cost-effective to buy, or how many 12-inch pizzas add up to make an 18-inch pizza when I rather unwisely bet my friends I could finish one of the massive bastards off. Two and a quarter is the answer. But I could have done that equation as an eleven-year-old (albeit an especially greedy one). I remember feeling a great weight lift from my shoulders when I dropped Further Maths and felt the blessed realization that I would never have to spend any more time doing complex calculus, mechanics, or anything similar that, truthfully, I had long ceased to give the tiniest shit about.
However, as an arts student, and one interested in cultural phenomena, I've remained interested in what certain numbers come to symbolize. A good example is sports, where certain shirt numbers will forever remain associated with a particular player; Johan Cruyff was 14, Michael Jordan was 23, and Jackie Robinson, the first black baseball player to grace the major leagues, wore 42, a number of such significance in the sport that it has been retired by every single major league team. Famously, Diego Maradona was so associated with the number 10 that even when, at the 1982 and 1986 World Cups, the rest of the Argentinian squad was numbered alphabetically, he retained that number. And at the 1998 World Cup, after Maradona's retirement, Argentina refused, in defiance of FIFA regulations, to assign the number 10 to anybody in their squad, eventually backing down and giving it to Ariel Ortega, who spoke of the pressure of trying to follow in Maradona's footsteps.
Even outside of the sporting realm, we have phone numbers like 999 and 118 118 and years like 1066 and 1966, but there are also less well-known integers which have come, through very different means to an organization's wish for an easy-to-recall phone number, or the merciless march of time, to gain some and unusual significance. The integer I'd like to focus on here is 420, which might not mean that much to you, but has some fascinating meanings in certain parts of the world, and in certain cultures and subcultures. I promise I won't be overtly thorough and obsessive like Jim Carrey in that terrible film about the number 23, whose title I forget, but I will give a brief overview of the meaning of 420 in America, and in India.
In the United States, 420 has come to be a code for marijuana. The origins of this association are murky, but it seems that in 1971 a group of friends in San Rafael, California known as 'The Waldos' would get together at 4:20pm every afternoon to search for an abandoned cannabis crop. They never did find it, but the time that they would meet became their slang term for weed, so they could talk openly about it without the authorities cottoning on. San Rafael was also the home of The Grateful Dead, a jam band who have long been associated with cannabis culture, and use of the term '420' spread from The Waldos to the community of 'Dead-Heads' within the town, and eventually beyond. The influential stoner magazine High Times picked up on the term, which helped disseminate it to a more spatially diffuse public. Nowadays, many pot smokers symbolically light up at 4:20pm in honour of The Waldos, and April 20th (4/20 in the American notation) has become a counterculture holiday. Online, there is an internet forum for the discussion of drugs, modelled after the baffling meme-spewing monolith 4chan, called 420chan (I must point out at this point that I only ever frequent 420chan for the part of the forum that is strictly dedicated to professional wrestling).
I'm sure there are pockets of people in India who ape American drug culture, but for the vast, vast majority of Indians, 420 has a different meaning. Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, established by the British colonizers in 1860, covers offences relating to fraud, cheating and dishonesty. In Salman Rushdie's seminal Indian novel Midnight's Children, the narrator Saleem Sinai, head of a convocation of 1001 magical children born at the hour of India's independence, remarks, 'Malnutrition, disease, and the misfortunes of everyday life had accounted for no less than four hundred and twenty of them by the time I became conscious of their existence; although it is possible to hypothesize that these deaths[...]had their purpose, since 420 has been, since time immemorial, the number associated with fraud, deception and trickery. Can it be, then, that the missing infants were eliminated because they had turned out to be somehow inadequate, and were not the true children of that midnight hour?' He goes on to add that this idea 'depends on a view of life which is both excessively theological and barbarically cruel', but he is still keenly aware of the malign meaning of 420 within the Indian context. Most notably, there is the 1955 Bollywood film Mr. 420, or Shri 420 in Hindi (or श्री 420, because I learned the Devanagari alphabet months ago and dammit, I'm going to use it!) This is one of the most famous films in the history of India, and concerns the world of confidence tricksters. Earlier this year, when the Indian cricketer Sreesanth was charged with match-fixing, some genius of a headline writer came up with the pun 'Sree 420'; I've never felt so simultaneously nerdy and proud as when I got the joke. Since 1955, 'Mr. 420' has entered the Indian lexicon as slang for, to use the parlance of our capital, a dodgy geezer.
Whatever your views on whether marijuana should be legalized or not, the fact remains that in most of the world lighting up a fat doobie is illegal, and pot smokers are looked down on by much of society; those who partake of '420' are seen as 'Mr. 420'. I may have ceased to become interested in mathematical equations, but I will never fail to be fascinated by the fact that despite the differences between how 420 came to acquire its meanings in America and India - one signification instituted from 'below' by counterculture and word-of-mouth, the other from 'above' by legal codes and mainstream popular culture - there is such a remarkable overlap.
