Kannan Gopinathan

Kannan Gopinathan is a former Indian Administrative Service Officer and an activist.

Mr Gopinathan started his career with Freescale Semiconductor as a VLSI design engineer in Noida before joining the Indian Administrative Service in 2012 in the AGMUT cadre.

He resigned from service as a mark of protest against the restrictions imposed in Jammu and Kashmir following the abrogation of article 370.

After his resignation, he has been vocal on the importance of raising questions in a democracy, the threat of perceived victimhood among the majority and the violation of fundamental rights in Jammu and Kashmir. He is one of the leading figures in the Citizenship Amendment Act protests.

He also founded the website whatchinareads.com which crawls Chinese websites for news about India and other countries and translates it to english.

He did his engineering in Electrical and Electronics from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, Jharkhand, he was also the recipient of a gold medal in the stream.

Kannan Gopinathan was born to K N Gopinathan Nair and V R Kumari.

He is married to Himani Pathak ( a software engineer ) and they have a son.

During the 2018 Kerala floods, it was widely reported that he was volunteering in various camps without revealing his identity.

He taught himself Mandarin and some coding to start whatchinareads.com.