Sessions | Talks
10:00 - 10:30 ⋅ Afternoon
Bangalore International Centre
India's data jungle is vast, unruly, and full of surprises. This talk traces the making of 100 Ways to See India and the craft of turning elusive numbers into stories that are both timely and timeless.
Rohit Saran
Managing Editor·The Times of India
Every Indian can fit in Kerala if we all lived as densely as northeast Delhi. Fifty-six mother tongues are officially classified as Hindi. Almost nobody in India is unemployed after the age of 29.
These are not the facts that make headlines. They are the facts that make you stop and think differently about the country you live in.
100 Ways to See India started the way most good journalism does: out of professional need, occasional curiosity, and a stubborn refusal to let interesting numbers stay buried in PDFs. Over years of hunting elusive data across India's sprawling statistical jungle, Rohit Saran and Sajeev Kumarapuram found themselves sitting on something bigger than a series of stories. They found a portrait.
This talk traces the making of that portrait. What it took to turn India's bewildering diversity into accessible visuals. Which questions led somewhere surprising and which promising threads dissolved into data gaps. How you decide, from a country that could fill a thousand books, which hundred ways are worth seeing.
Underneath the book journey is a longer conversation about the craft of data storytelling: what makes a story timely, what makes it timeless, and what it takes to tell the difference before you start building the chart.
Rohit Saran is the Managing Editor of The Times of India. He has served as Executive Editor of The Times of India, The Economic Times, and India Today, and was Editor-in-Chief of Business Today and Khaleej Times. Since the 1990s, he has practised data and visual journalism across leading newsrooms—blending numbers, visuals, and text to tell richer stories and to create enduring news products.
Rohit teamed up with Sajeev Kumarapuram, Design Editor of The Times of India to author '100 Ways to See India -- Stats, Stories and Surprises' which was published by Harper Collins India earlier this year. Rohit and Sajeev have spent years exploring India's data jungle—mostly out of professional need, at times out of curiosity. Along the way, they've hunted elusive numbers, dodged PDF traps, and found joy in telling stories through charts.