CHENNAI: Around a decade and a half before Los Angeles elected her as its first Indian-origin mayor, Kerala-born Tamil Nithya Raman sat with residents of a south Chennai suburb to map the notorious traffic snarls that would routinely disrupt their lives.On Thursday, WhatsApp groups in Nanganallur were buzzing with messages claiming the face riding the crest of the blue wave along Southern California’s glitziest skyline as one of their own.Someone wrote in about being part of the group of 10-odd residents she interacted with regularly as an urban planner helping find solutions to the suburb’s civic problems. Another spoke of how “curious and eager” she was to understand local issues and use her expertise to resolve them.“What we didn’t know was that she would go on to be a politician and get elected as mayor of LA,” said K Sankaran, ex-president of Thillai Ganga Nagar Residents’ Welfare Association.The distance between Los Angeles and the Tamil Nadu capital, separated by 7,800-odd nautical miles, wasn’t the only one to be bridged by mutual celebration of a bright, young politician straddling different worlds.Around 830km from Nanganallur, at Kumarapuram in Thiruvananthapuram, a nondescript two-storey house in a narrow lane off the main road resonated with more personal insights into the Nithya story. It was here that the mayor-elect has stayed during multiple visits to meet her aunt Vanaja Sankar and other family members.“She is a good girl who has always cared deeply for the family. She would make regular visits to her grandparents in West Fort till they were around. She never fails to visit me whenever she is in Thiruvananthapuram. I am her oldest surviving relative here,” said Vanaja, showing family albums containing her now-famous niece’s pictures.Nithya (45) moved to Louisiana with her parents as a six-year-old and became a US citizen by 22. Armed with an urban planning degree from Harvard University, she arrived in Chennai at 23 and founded Transparent Chennai, a civic initiative under Centre for Development Finance at Institute for Financial Management and Research. It used data and community participation to tackle urban governance.Nithya worked on urban planning in Chennai from 2004 to 2013, including working closely with local citizens’ groups to document civic problems.“The collaboration involved organising community forums, mapping traffic problems and collecting data on public transport, pedestrian safety and gaps in civic infrastructure,” said V Rama Rao, an activist from Lakshmi Nagar in Nanganallur. “The data was meant to be presented to Chennai traffic police and municipal corporations to help develop actionable solutions.”
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Nithya has acknowledged her Chennai stint in interviews to international publications, saying her organisation mapped and evaluated public toilets across the city to identify what needed to be fixed. She also spoke about studying working conditions of recycling workers and helping them get recognition from the state govt.In Thiruvananthapuram, where Nithya was born in 1981, aunt Vanaja said her niece loved visiting Kovalam for its beach and prayed at the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple. “Nithya studied at a private school in Thrissur before moving to the US. She likes leading a simple life and has a lot of empathy for the poor. Perhaps it was this quality that led her to public life in the US.”Before immigrating to the US, Nithya’s father, R Venkataraman, worked at Keltron while her mother, Sudha, was emploted with Indian Overseas Bank.
