Remembering my grandfather on Chacha Nehru’s birthday

Today is Chachaji’s birthday, but I’m reminded more of my grandfather. My maternal grandfather was an excellent mathematician. Thinking about his mathematical brilliance reminded me of something I once read about Nehruji—he wasn’t a maths person, so he shifted to botany and later studied law. But Jawaharlal Nehru is the architect of modern India—a role that involves dreams, passion, patriotism, and vision, not just calculation. As a visionary leader of Nation, what truly mattered to Nehruji was touching the life of the common man and bringing meaningful change. There was no need to sit and calculate the gains and loss.

In his victory speech, Madmani evoked Nehru’s timeless words to mark the importance of his win as a step into a new era. “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new”. Nehru who was born in the 19th Century is inspiring the millennials born 100 years later.

Today, November 14, is Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday. But there is not much mention of it in the media. The attention is given to the Bihar election results.

The kanakapillai

My grandfather was the kanakapillai (accountant) for some wealthy families from the 1940s to the 1980s. This meant he maintained the financial accounts of their businesses. He had his own special way of doing calculations—first writing the total income and expenditure, and then adding them backward. It sounds simple, but when my father tried to learn this method from his father-in-law, he said the whole system was so mind-boggling that only someone with great arithmetic skill could master it.

There is so much arithmetic involved in this election: the NDA is getting a thumping majority, far above their previous state election performance. People now ask what magic the Nitish Kumar government has done to be elected for the fifth consecutive time, almost negating the presence of the opposition. Has the clear calculation of depositing ₹10,000 into women’s accounts played the trick? Rahul Gandhi’s SIR research report is watched and understood mainly by the elite and the middle class. The majority of the poor understand only the language of earning rozi-roti.

Swami Vivekananda once said, “Don’t go and preach religion to a hungry man. Feed him first. His religion, for the time being, is food.” Jesus fed the five thousand who came to listen to his words. Catering to the basic needs of the voter is important.

The arithmetic in present day elections

The arithmetic of the present-day election results often fails to match the post-election analyses of failures and victories. There was a time when Prannoy Roy and his team could sum up an entire election for the public. Clearly explaining why parties won or lost. What remains today are the graphs and numbers that show wins and losses. All that is highlighted on the television screens are figures that provide no solid explanation for the victory. No amount of discussion and debate will give a clear idea of why one alliance won and the other one lost.

In this moment in search of a convincing election analysis I miss my grandfather. If he were here, he would have taken the election numbers the same way he handled accounts—starting from the final total and working backward—and perhaps shown me how such a huge majority was built.