Election Results

My son is still too young to show “character”, and who or what he is like. My daughter, on the other hand, is something else.

Her school holidays started today. I picked her up just before noon after a “half day”, and we immediately headed out to a place close to school for a long leisurely lunch. And then we got home, and I’ve been working. And she’s been doing something by herself in her room. And when I went to check, she showed me this:

Election Results, by Abheri Karthik. Made using Kinder Blocks

“This is called ‘Election Results’”, she said, showing it off proudly. "Yellow is BJP, Blue is Congress and Red is others. Each graph is for a different state, with the winner being outermost”.

“Top left is Madhya Pradesh”, she went on, “and top right is Mizoram”. That was cue enough for me to guess that bottom left is Telangana, bottom right is Chhattisgarh and middle right is Rajasthan (hopefully this is a persistent link). I remember being out for lunch with her on counting day when she saw the results on a TV at the restaurant, and she had immediately been hooked. For a moment, I thought she actually remembered the results until I saw the iPad next to her - she had looked up the results to make this.

I’m so stunned (pleasantly) that I don’t know what to say, so I’m just posting it here for public consumption. She has got (almost) everything right - the choice of colour scheme (based on, I think, how many blocks of each colour she had), the relative proportions of various assemblies (though Telangana could be smaller), the arrangement of the various graphs to make it look nice, and all that.

Now I need to somehow tell her that the human eye can’t perceive two dimensional quantities as nicely as one dimensional quantities, and so a better visual representation would be to make these “simple bar graphs”. Then again, that would lose some of the aesthetic quality in this piece, so I’ll just let it be.

I still stand by this.

PS: I’ve told her that I’ll set up a blog for her, and she should start writing these holidays. Iff both of us follow through on this, I’ll link to that here.