#BookLounge: Whole Numbers and Half Truths.

We are pleased to invite you to participate in our latest BookLounge session, in which Mihir Mahajan will be in conversation with Rukmini S on the latter’s new book, Whole Numbers and Half Truths.

Date and Time: Thursday, January 27, 6 PM IST. Register here.

About the book:

In Whole Numbers and Half Truths, data-journalism pioneer Rukmini S. draws on nearly two decades of on-ground reporting experience to piece together a picture that looks nothing like the one you might expect. There is a mountain of data available on India, but it remains opaque, hard to access and harder yet to read, and it does not inform public conversation.

Rukmini marshals this information—some of it never before reported—alongside probing interviews with experts and ordinary citizens, to see what the numbers can tell us about India. As she interrogates how data works, and how the push and pull of social and political forces affect it, she creates a blueprint to understand the changes of the last few years and the ones to come—a toolkit for India.

This is a timely and wholly original intervention in the conversation on data, and with it, India.

About the author:

Rukmini S. is an independent data journalist based in Chennai. In 2004, she began covering Mumbai city for the Times of India. Since 2010, she has specialised in data journalism. She was the first Data Editor of an Indian newsroom, initially at the Hindu and then at HuffPost India. She has also reported on the field from across the country.

She now writes for a range of publications including Mint, IndiaSpend and the Guardian. Her pandemic podcast, The Moving Curve, won an Emergent Ventures India Covid-19 Prize in 2020. She was awarded the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Mediaperson (Honourable Mention) in 2020 and the Likho Awards for Excellence in Media in 2019.

You can watch the recording over here: