When British magazine Prospect released its list of 50 top thinkers in the world, the top spot was secured by a figure who has been widely credited with flattening the COVID curve and securing a low fatality rate in the southern Indian state of Kerala – its Health Minister KK Shailaja.
Today's COVID-age has called for thinking of a different sort – less chin-stroking, more hands on. Our top 10 is full of practical-minded thinkers. The victor – KK Shailaja – is the most practical of them all, writes the magazine.
Over 20,000 votes were cast and counted in a public ballot. The results clearly signify a landslide win for the practical minds party.
The others in the list include New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (2nd) whose governing “ethos of kindness” was drawing interest as a refreshing alternative to neo-liberalism even before it showed practical results in keeping a lid on the COVID crisis.
Just behind her is the Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum (3rd), another woman applying her mind to a pressing practical challenge, although in her case: it is climate change – she designs houses on stilts to keep families safe from rising waters.
Click here to see the full list of Prospect's world's top 50 thinkers for the COVID-age
Beyond here, the list gets more eclectic, with intellectuals of a more traditional stripe being represented by the African-American philosopher Cornel West (4th), the historian of slavery at Bristol Olivette Otele (6th) and the Belgian polymath Philippe Van Parijs (8th).
But these thinkers, too, drew support for practical engagement with the world—Van Parijs, for example, for his decades of advocacy for a universal basic income, and West for his recent interventions on Black Lives Matter. Related concern about state brutality also propels two expert advocates up the list: Ilona Szabó de Carvalho (5th), who set up the internationally-influential Igarapé Institute, which champions citizen-led security, and the American prison abolitionist, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (7th).
Scientists fill out the rest of the top 10—Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post (9th) and Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz (10th), who respectively work on lab-grown meat and lab-grown embryos, crucial endeavours for emissions and for medicine.
What also makes the list noteworthy is the fact that seven women find their place in the top ten. It's a refreshing change from fifteen years ago when the then list of 50 top thinkers featured just ten women.
Twenty-three women feature in the 2020 list and Shailaja is the only Indian in it (discounting the Scottish historian Dalrymple who, for the greater part of the last four decades, has made India his home).
Kerala's COVID story thus far
In 2020, KK Shailaja was the right woman in the right place. Even before news of a far-away virus started finding its deserved space in local media, the cogs that made up Kerala's famed health infrastructure had slowly been turning, raising the guard against what it knew would be an imminent threat.
The state wasted no time at all. Advice was sought, instated and even revised to meet evolving challenges and soon, when the first COVID-19 case found its way to Kerala on January 27, the state was ready.
At the height of the outbreak, Kerala saw 1,70,000 in quarantine, another 1,50,000 migrant workers trapped in the state following the closure of borders cared for.
The successful implementation of the World Health Organisation's (WHO) protocol of test, trace, isolate and support and Break the Chain campaigns saw the first two outbreaks in the state quelled in no time.
In this, they were greatly helped by the experience gained while curbing 2018's Nipah virus outbreak. That's not all, Kerala had by then developed a strong chain of command, starting from the top health department officials in Thiruvananthapuram to the field workers on the ground, all augmented in their work by a string of primary health centres at strategic locations across the state.
Now, in the third phase of the virus outbreak, even as the single-day spike of COVID-19 cases shows no sign of relenting, Kerala can take relief in the fact that the mortality rate in the state is far less than what the rest of India endures.