Bhargava picked up his pen—an old fountain pen, his father’s—and wrote one last equation on the back of a telegram form. He circled it. Then he called his assistant.
For decades, he built models that were ridiculed. “Correlation is not causation,” his colleagues sneered. “You cannot put rain and marriage in the same regression.” Bhargava nodded, went back to his cramped office in Delhi, and kept writing. He called it the Environmental Nuptiality Index . ENI. A formula that predicted, with 87% accuracy, when a girl in a rain-fed district would become a mother, based solely on the previous season’s groundwater level. nn bhargava
“Publish this,” he said. “Not in a journal. In the district gazette . In the panchayat office . In the schoolbooks, if they’ll take it.” Bhargava picked up his pen—an old fountain pen,