Editor’s Note

In Orbital, last year’s Booker winner, the English novelist Samantha Harvey has put six astronauts of different nationalities in a spacecraft, circling Earth at 17,500 miles per hour, watching 16 sunsets a day. “They are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene,” she writes. Overcoming the collapse of time and giving in to the mysteries of space, they, four men and two women floating in microgravity, are exhilarat­ed by what they see below: the blue planet. Shubhanshu Shukla, who has piloted a historic mission to the International Space Station, is living a reality sublimer than fiction, as India’s hero whose lift-off was powered by a billion prayers. For India, the cosmic leap of this IAF pilot is a moment to preserve in its pursuit of scientific excellence. Shukla’s role in a space thriller with a cast of four, all drawn from different nationalities, shows why the sky is not the limit when nations take science to the farthest frontiers of the galaxy. India’s space programme, where setbacks only accelerate faith and determina­tion, is a celebration of indigenousness and patience. Shukla in his Tricolour pride orbiting Earth also brings out why the best in science is not always achieved by individual genius alone but by collaboration and sharing of expertise as well.

Heroes are unifiers, and in their glory dissolve differences and partisan pettiness. India, as a growing power in the global economy and an influential voice in the democratic world, like any other nation playing out its strength and confidence without the inhibitions of the past, is the sum of its talents. They are multiplying, scripting an Indian story in which the ideological restrictions of the past have been replaced by the spirit of tomorrow, and where no adversity is big enough to defeat a dream. This India is not distracted by the vaunted posturing of politics, for it is populated by those who explore the unknown with a relentlessness never seen before. The leap of Shukla mirrors the velocity of their hope even as it shows India joining the great leap of science with national pride.

The novel Orbital (‘In Praise of the Blue Planet’, Open, November 25, 2024) is not so much about space as it is about Earth—the blue planet as seen from the distance of detachment. The astronauts, in the mystical rapidity of planetary makeover, are witness to shifting geographies and the ever-changing impulses of nature. Being the unearthed, they are closer to Earth, as if distance only intensifies intimacy. From up there, they cannot resist the thought: “The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.” This planet may be too real to be a fictional alarm. The Earth that Shubhanshu Shukla sees from his space station is ravaged by the theology of hate and the politics of fear. The so-called 12-day war between Israel and Iran may not have engulfed the entire Middle East, and the fragile truce may survive the domestic compulsions of the antagonists. Still, it has once again reaffirmed the incendiary nature of a region where one nation’s existence is a dispute for its enemies. Even if missiles have stopped falling on Tehran and Tel Aviv, Gaza is still burning. It seems an end to the humanitarian crisis is possible only with the complete retreat of Hamas and the release of the remaining hostages. And elsewhere, in Ukraine, the theatre of another existential war, the power of resistance and freedom only aggravates the nationalist paranoia of the Kremlin.

Whoever thought that the end of the Cold War—and the liberation of Eastern Europe— restored the West’s cultural superiority as the guardian of liberal democracy, they have every reason to be alarmed by Western dissonance over freedom today. On the question of national sovereignty under attack, it is true that there has never been an intellectual consensus. It’s the role of America that has always divided the mind. The division was glaring when President Trump kept his options open during the Israel-Iran war. It was a time when hardcore progressives and the isolationist Right found common ground. Tucker Carlson might as well have joined the street theatre of Free Palestine. Moral idealism of Wilsonian vintage is the last thing an intellectual class beholden to the MAGA spirit of America Alone wants. Trump did still strike, proving that his instincts are more attuned to the historical sensibilities of a superpower. A classic case of the political mind steeped in the commonsensical view of justice winning the argument with the eggheads trapped in ideological boxes. The world may be too complex to be left to political judg­ments detached from informed debates on morality, ethics and responsibility. An intellectual community answerable to the certainties of ideologies won’t redeem the world either.

Don’t we Indians know? The thinking class listening to the inherited morality of good and evil is a familiar sight here. The retreat of the independent interpreter of our times makes the idea of the “amateur” intellectual, as put forward by Edward Said in his famous BBC Reith Lectures (notwithstanding his self-righteous cultural rigidity), more urgent. The cracks in the old ethos of India, preserved for so long by borrowed ideologies, are so deep that the new is not yet fully compre­hended by the readers of tea leaves. The stereotypi­cal prefixing of Left and Right to the intellectual makes the art of argument wearily predictable. The political and cultural spirit of the times needs words more original than what’s available now, and that may be one reason why in the following pages the minds that dazzle New India come mostly from elsewhere—entertainment and entrepreneurship. And fresh entrants to our power list of ideas vindicate the possibilities of India as a concept and a country. Let them lead the conversation—and make the story of India as compelling as it is reported in Open every week.

International Space StationOpen Minds 2025OrbitalSamantha HarveyShubhanshu Shuklaspace exploration