Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Is India’s population still growing? Or does the answer vary drastically across its states? This blog is not about the political (and therefore emotional) connection of those questions to the topic of delimitation. Instead, it is about the at-times surprising answers to the questions, without the political and moralising aspects .   Rukmini S’s post presents the data on this superbly. Even without China or Sanjay Gandhi-like birth control measures, the following has happened. “There was certainly a time when India's population was growing very fast. In the three decades after Independence, India's population had doubled. But from the 1980s, population growth began to slow down.” Today, India’s population growth rate is below the global average !   Unintuitively, all states are slowing , though they slow at different rates : “Until the 1970s, population growth rates in different states were quite similar. However, since the 1980s, India's southern states have...

It's just a game: that's something nobody ever feels when playing chess. Not even Viswanathan Anand , one of the nicest guys in the game: “When you lose, you really feel a sense of self...You actually feel that you are being taken apart, rather than just your pieces.” Anand acknowledges the other guy feels the same way too: “I understand that if I win, I’m probably crushing my opponent’s ego” But unlike Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov, Anand says that: “It’s not like I do that with great satisfaction.” You can see why Anand has the nice guy image when you realize he even finds a reason as to why Kasparov felt that chess “required the domination and demoralisation of their opponents”: “It’s true that someone like Kasparov has this sense of history, and I’m talking world history rather than chess history. He has a sense of himself being in it, which, for me, is very hard to understand or even relate to in any way.” But beyond not relating to that feeling, “The...