Vivek Menezes
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Last month, the intense and engaging (and extremely brilliant) data scientist Nilakantan RS gave the Goa Arts + Literature Festival an exclusive, highly illuminative preview of the national imbroglio that has been raging the past few days, as Tamil Nadu chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi Stalin – ably supported by his star cabinet colleague Palanivel Thiaga Rajan – launched an emotive public battle against the three-language recommendations in the National Education Policy (which they see as an imposition of Hindi), as well as prospective “electoral delimitation” to rearrange seats on the basis of population growth. All this, exactly as it is being debated at the highest levels in India today, was neatly laid out in Nilakantan’s superb, urgent 2022 book South vs North: India’s Great Divide, and this young engineer-turned-author, who says his “primary interest is designing stable decentralized systems – be they for political entities or business-related processes”, has had an immense influence on framing the discussion. Here’s what he wrote on Twitter/X earlier this week, “I am going to take credit for predicting this moment in politics. This will not end well.”
At his riveting GALF session, Nilakantan recounted how he started looking into the numbers to find out exactly how democracy worked for him – a voter in the South Madras constituency – and then to see how it compared with voters in other parts of the country. What he learned was so startling that he started writing long threads about the results on Twitter/X, until an editor got in touch to encourage him to write South vs North: India’s Great Divide. We all owe whoever that is our collective thanks, because this unlikely debut author has written an instantly invaluable book for anyone interested in the future of Indian democracy, and perhaps especially important for Goa, with its ultra-bizarre combination of the best of South India in terms of human development, and the very worst of North India when it comes to criminal misgovernance.
