Abstract: In 1916, Ramanujan came up with a series of conjectures about the coefficients of the $undefinedtau$-function, a function that appears naturally in number theory. Last of these were eventually proved as a consequence of Deligne’s result (1974) on Weil conjectures in Algebraic geometry. The common motif connecting the two seemingly disparate topics is the so-called theory of motives as laid out by Grothendieck and his school. This talk will try to summarize this long journey, and time permitting, present some of our related recent results.