A new book turns India’s complexity into simple charticles without missing the nuance

Listicles have a bad name on the internet. Elite readers routinely chide this format, mostly rightly so: they see listicles as clickbaity traffic magnets, bereft of substance. But when done well by the best in the business, listicles can show a maturity that parallels more serious forms of writing. With 100 Ways to See India: Stats, Stories, and Surprises, the listicle format comes of age and sets right its follies by combining its strengths with traditional print gravitas into a digital-native avatar.

Times of India journalist Rohit Saran’s power-packed book, illustrated splendidly by his design colleague Sajeev Kumarapuram, traces independent India’s journey and present-day realities through short but wholesome bites of data, charts, and context. Saran’s biggest achievement is that he gives data and stories in just the right doses, operating within the attention span of today’s reader. Pick any chapter and you’ll be done in less than 10 minutes. It’s data-led, but never numbers-heavy.

Many of us data-minded nerds in India operate with an esoteric frame of mind, producing fabulous pieces of work and analysis only to please ourselves. Here’s a book that truly makes itself accessible. It treats low attention span neither as an inconvenient constraint nor a creative challenge, but rather its very fuel. The first duty of such a book is to educate and touch the reader—that process starts where the reader is. The book succeeds in this, and does it while retaining substance and nuance. Nearly all the chapters boast rigour: they do not merely sprinkle numbers, but put things into perspective.

Beyond the listicle in the book’s title, there are other aspects where it mimics a digital-inspired product. It’s modular: pick any chapter and you’ll be fine. It’s highly engaging: data is important but many of its best experts are also the most alienating; Saran ensures you’re hooked. It’s dramatic, too, using ample storytelling tropes that describe India’s achievements as “quiet revolution”, “silent rise” and a “deeper shift”—tropes that invite eye-rolls when generated by ChatGPT but not when a top-notch storyteller weaves them into his words. It’s visual: data visualisation and design are equal and effective partners to the prose. And it comes with a “living digital companion”, a website that promises to keep its data updated.

Most themes that shape India make an appearance. What does the rapid rise in India’s buffalo and chicken population say about us? Are Shah Rukh Khan’s future female leads yet to be born? How much easier is remarriage for a widowed or divorced Indian man than for a woman? How much GDP does a banker add in relation to a farmer? Can millions of India’s vacant homes house all its homeless? The economy’s academic traits (when it will become the world’s third largest) get pages, as do its more unexpected and offbeat realities (did you know about the ₹1-trillion cow dung economy?). There are chapters on India’s biggest sociopolitical cleavages (caste, gender, religion, language, and migration) and also its best-known sources of relief (cinema and sports). The book has enough for your games-night quizzing trivia (which city speaks the most languages?), and also includes high-level expert talk based on academic research (how much does religious doctrine contribute to high fertility rates?)

Several surprises dot the book as you discover India through numbers with sufficient spatial (across states and cities) and temporal (across long periods) trends. As Saran manoeuvres data sources, staying clear of dubious ones and interpreting them accurately, he doesn’t take sides (barring in one animated chapter, where he is unable to conceal his displeasure over salaried employees’ plight in India’s taxation).

Kumarapuram’s design looks as 2026 as it can get, and deserves as much applause as Saran’s work. The choice and depth of data visualisation reflects an intimate understanding of each story. He has played with space and colours beautifully, and has used clear and judicious labelling at every point of friction in charts, making them a breeze to read and comprehend even for beginners. Barring one chapter where women get the stereotypical pink, he adopts the best design principles. This approach makes for a textbook in any classroom on information design: it does justice both to its data and design needs.

The biggest fear that serious data users have is “snackification” of statistics. Data may be tasty and shareable but not nutritious by itself. It’s always the story that matters: the narrative, the context, the cause-and-effect, the hidden “but”, the explanation. Saying India is the fourth-largest economy is incomplete without pointing out its low per capita income. A state with high crime rates may simply have a high rate of reporting crime. The book covers these details, but it is easy fodder to be misused.

We need people to use data-guided claims, but it would be sad if the book’s format leads to numbers flowing around like quick bites. Viral charts and numbers without context don’t reflect a data-literate society. Data literacy starts by acknowledging that numbers are imperfect, not by using them as be-all-end-all crutches to brandish poorly-formed opinions.

This is where the book misses one trick. It starts with a beautifully designed peacock with 100 feathers, each designed as a pie chart; the peacock guides you to the book’s website, which reveals a number and a factoid for each pie. This could have been avoided; rather than cautioning readers about data, it only risks feeding the “snackification” and diluting its own nuance. (I have already seen a social media post summarising the big numbers in the book, defeating the whole point.)

The book ends with an “Explore” section, part of which devotes 10 pages to a collection of semantic pet peeves that editors commonly have, written like a rushed-up presentation deck rather than a serious engagement with detailed explanations. Such a chapter—too basic for the expert and too brief for the beginner—serves little purpose. The next section, “Emotional Attyachart”, is again a list of rushed, emotionally-charged bullet points that can only be understood and appreciated by someone routinely working with India’s data sources (the chapter even refers to highly niche and true—but practically irrelevant for the lay person—experiences of “horror stories”, “joy” and “agony” of data crunching and design).

This part of the book is at odds with the rest of it. The book’s intent, for the most part, seems to be to present India’s story through numbers; numbers are a tool, not the protagonist. This part inexplicably talks about how to write about numbers correctly, an activity concerning only a small section of readers. This space could have been better used as an appendix of how various data points mentioned in the book were likely collected by their sources, e.g. through household surveys, through the national accounts system, through censuses, etc., and hence, how trustworthy they are. When given two data sources for the same metric, which one to trust? What questions must you ask when you read a data-drenched headline in the papers? These would be important additions to future editions. That’s all the more important for a book relying on numbers that will likely change within a year as fresh data comes in, leaving numbers education, not numerical trivia, the ideal goal for such a project.

For now, in a country cleaved into echo chambers, if Saran’s endeavour manages to drive informed data-driven discourse, and helps more Indians assess the country’s successes and challenges objectively, it is a job well done.