Public Square

What is the good life? What is a good society? These are questions for which everyone has their own answers and these all get clubbed together and there then emerge numerous sides from which identi­ties are born. Citizens will find them­selves part of the one that their views correspond with. Even that might change as they age or have different experiences or meet someone who convinces them that a different cor­ner is sounder. What there will never be are certainties that come from these questions. Yet, there is nothing more important than asking them.

Philosophers like Michael Sandel argue that so long as these competing answers are welcomed to be debated, society and the politics that governs it remain lively and charged. That is the only way to do it and the only place to do so is the public square. It was once a real physical space, in the city-towns where civilisation began its march towards modernity. No such square exists now in exclusivity. Instead, today you have various me­diums where these ideas are thrashed out. In Parliament and Assemblies, homes, convention halls, in newspa­pers and on television channels, and of late online and on social media. The last, especially, despite the many divisions it has fomented, has truly democratised the public square. Everyone can now have an opinion and talk on equal terms with those who earlier were called the experts.

All this, however, also means the possibility of chaos lurking round the corner. If all voices sing together there is no melody, and if everyone has now the ability to be loud, then eventually, all there will be is noise. Preventing this collapse are the few who define the public square. They are not monitors or supervisors policing the arena, instead through their own ideas and achievements they stand out just a little to create definition, like a pole star providing direction. Whether intellectuals deciphering the world over a laptop or wealth creators strategising in boardrooms or a female astronaut whom young rural girls look up to, it is through them that others find the route to meaning.

It is not necessary to agree with them or to admire their achievements because disagreements are the foun­dation of an open society. But so long as what they stand for is reasoned and virtuous, then they are key to the discourse. Those who populate the Public Square of this issue are men and women of depth and drive—writers and ideologues framing narratives of the present, overseers of institutions that keep economies standing, architects preserving the nation’s aesthetics, historians provid­ing context to present-day emotive issues, Indians on other shores changing the world in their pockets, and more. They are the clearest voices of the public square and they invite the rest of the world into it.

Salman Rushdie, 77, Author: On a Knife-Edge

Two years after he was brutally attacked by a man inspired by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in upstate New York, Salman Rushdie put the whole experience—and more—in a searing memoir. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is a testament to freedom and courage from a writer who survived the bloodlust of religious hate. Rushdie’s story of recovery from near-death, told with the poignant clarity and the wit of a writer who refuses to give in or give up, is the rejoinder of language to the life-denying falsehoods of scriptural alternatives—and a celebration of being alive to tell stories. It’s also about falling in love, and how it added layers of beauty to his slow return to the world he almost lost. Rushdie continues to be a living reminder of how the power of imagination and argument sustains truth—and life.

Venki Ramakrishnan, 72, Structural Biologist: Decoding Life

The structural biologist with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for his work on ribosomes. This year, Venki Ramakrishnan came out with his book, Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality, on human longevity. His field of study deals with proteins at a cellular level and they are also intimately connected to ageing. In the book, he asks how much science can increase life spans and explains in great detail why it won’t be anything miraculous. But he also goes one step further and argues that by itself a longer life doesn’t mean anything and is not something to be aspired to unless better and equal access to health could be addressed. With his work, he has brought a reasoned overview and an ethical framework to an area dominated by hype and wishful thinking.

Shaktikanta Das, 67, Governor, Reserve Bank of India: Wise Banker

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das was low-key in keeping with his past as a high-ranking bureau­crat in the finance ministry. This was unlike some of the econo­mists who had preceded him at RBI. Six years later, he is now recognised as one of the best leaders RBI has had, having among other things ensured monetary stability during an unprecedented national lock­down because of Covid. RBI, under him, has also upped the ante in protecting consumer interests against big financial companies. It had earlier made HDFC Bank suspend the issuing of new credit cards after there were one too many outages in its technology platform. Recently, it punished Paytm by disallowing its payments bank from accepting fresh deposits because of repeated violations of regulations. This was followed by action against Kotak Mahindra Bank, another big entity. The message being sent was that regulations were not irritants that could be ignored but rules to be followed to the letter. In his firm and stable lead­ership, Das is now admired by even those who once doubted his ability to head RBI.

S Somanath, 60, Chairman, ISRO: Cosmic Quest

The man credited with sending India’s space dreams, and the imaginations of its youth, soaring is helping build homegrown reusable launch vehicles for future missions. On S Somanath’s watch, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) delivered one of the most spectacular feats of Indian space science—Chandrayaan-3’s soft landing near the south pole of the lunar surface in August 2023. Launched in September 2023, ISRO’s maiden solar mission, Aditya L1, recently captured data from the most powerful solar eruption in over 20 years. Somanath, who recently revealed that he was diagnosed with stomach cancer on the day of the launch of Aditya L1, has since made a full recovery. As the space agency, in its golden age, goes from strength to strength in preparation for a manned mission, the private space sector, too, is rapidly building capacity. Having India’s leading space tech evangelist on their side is certainly a big plus.

Sudhanshu Mani, 65, Engineer: Man of Speed 

The Indian Railways has been witnessing an image makeover and leading this are the Vande Bharat trains. Instead of the boxy languid ones of yore, these trains are high-speed, fully air-conditioned, and look futuristic with sleek, elegant curves. They are entirely a Make in India product and the person who oversaw this project was Sudhanshu Mani. An engineer with the Indian Railways since 1976, it was in the Integral Coach Factory in Chennai that, on his watch as general manager, Train 18, as it was known then, was born. It was the first time the design and manufacture of such an ambitious project was being attempted in-house and Mani’s efforts bore fruit when Vande Bharat immediately became a rage with passengers. He retired with its successful turnout but remains a valued expert on rail transport in India.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, 57, Public Intellectual: Shattering the Idyll

 His columns and essays often carry the depth and weight of well-researched books. One notable example is his essay on Ambedkar titled ‘Slayer of All Gods’, which contains arguments rich enough to fill several volumes. Over the past few decades, Pratap Bhanu Mehta has penned numerous essays and columns that captured the public imagination. The former vice chancellor of Ashoka University has consistently challenged the notions and illusions of powerful ruling classes and their backers, regardless of their ideological stance. Demonstrating his moral courage, Mehta advocates for those who crave freedom, demanding that their voices be heard and rights protected. Echoing Edward Said’s idea of a public intellectual, he “balances the private and the public”, often becoming an inconvenient scholar and perpetual dissenter. A trained academic and alumnus of Princeton and Oxford universities, Mehta understands the impor­tance of disturbing the status quo when necessary. He places his intellectual interventions above other gains. In his efforts to advance knowledge, he has made people rethink and re-read, often to their delight.

Ram Madhav, 59, Author and RSS Leader: Argumentative Nationalist

He has donned many hats while being part of the realignment of the Indian polity with the coming of BJP to power in 2014. Ram Madhav was the party’s general secretary focusing on conflict-ridden regions like the Northeast and Kashmir. He was a foreign affairs expert with books published around it. Later, he returned to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and, as a member of its national executive and president of the think-tank India Foundation, has been instrumental in defining and maintaining the ideological shape of Hindutva. His latest book, The Indian Reality: Changing Narratives, Shifting Perceptions, came out this year and in it, through a series of essays, he turns his lens on the seismic changes happening domestically and in the world order. It is an analysis of India’s present and a prescription for its future. Madhav’s words and ideas are heeded because of the heft he brings to them.

Swapan Dasgupta, 68, Commentator: Conservative Panache

It is now common for Indian intellectuals to be ideologically rightwing but in an earlier era when left liberals held the reins of academia and media, Swapan Dasgupta, a senior journalist then, was among the few who did not shy away from announcing their side. And this he did in the old conservative tradition of reasoned debate and the power of argument. When BJP came to power under Narendra Modi, he remained a much sought-after sounding board for those in the higher echelons of power. It eventually culminated in a Rajya Sabha seat and an entry into active politics in the last West Bengal Assembly elections. Now, Dasgupta is back to his original métier, of the writer-intellectual analysing and explaining India, whose opinions are valued by his readers and those who run the country.

William Dalrymple, 59, Author and Anita Anand, 52, Presenter: Imperial Interpreters

How do empires rise? Why do they fall? And how have they shaped the world around us today? Historian William Dalrymple and radio and TV presenter Anita Anand answer these overarching questions from history with wit and intellect, where they phone friends and crack jokes, in their hit podcast series Empire. Launched in 2022, and with episode #161 having dropped just a few days ago, Empire is arguably one of the most popular podcasts today on all things historical, with around 8,80,000 downloads per week. The first series examined the British in India, and now Dalrymple and Anand have arrived at the American Revolution. The first season of 18 episodes was voted No 1 on the Apple 2023 Shows That Made Us Think because of its intel­lectual rigour and the duo’s sharp repartee. This is history at its best, this is history for the masses—complete with scheming queens and insecure kings and the rise and fall of empires. It does away with dates and numbers and instead uses the power of storytelling to make the past come alive.

Wealth of Ideas: Powering India Inc
Mukesh Ambani, 67, Chairman, Reliance Industries: Mastering the Universe

The transformation of Reliance from an oil refinery-driven business to a conglomerate that stands at the cusp of the future in terms of technology is extraordinary. Its chairman Mukesh Ambani oversaw that transformation patiently. Now they have a footprint that ranges from telecommunication to media to retail, all weaved in through a digital interface. If giant conglomerates from China and the US are staking their claim to the future, it is Reliance that is carving space for India on that front. Ambani has also seamlessly laid out a succession plan for the next generation of his family to take over different busi­nesses, to prevent any disruption later. An instance of Ambani’s foresight was evident at their AGM last year when he announced Reliance’s grand ambition in the artificial intelligence (AI) arena. He spoke of having delivered on his promise to make broadband accessible to all Indians and now he would set about doing the same with AI.

Wealth of Ideas: Powering India Inc
Gautam Adani, 62, Chairman, Adani Group: Seizing the Future

HE faced perhaps the biggest crisis of his business journey last year when the Hindenburg report came out. But within months of a steep fall in share prices, Gautam Adani had not only steered the group back to stability but also kept it on the path of expansion. Starting from scratch, Adani now dominates sectors like airports, ports, renewable energy, cement, and more. The acquisition of NDTV had led to a foray into media sometime back. This year, Adani was also charged with the biggest housing project in Mumbai when they got the redevelopment project of Dharavi. Adani Green Energy meanwhile also started generating power from the Khavda Renewable Energy Park which is touted as the world’s largest. In a speech to shareholders, Adani said they would generate 30GW in five years, enough to power countries like Belgium and Switzerland.

Wealth of Ideas: Powering India Inc
N Chandrasekaran, 61, Chairman, Tata Sons: Steady at the Helm

Before he took over as chairman of the Tata Group, when it was floundering after a fractious boardroom dispute that had led to the eviction of his predecessor, N Chandrasekaran had great success in making big bigger with Tata Consultancy Services. He is repeating it in the eight years he has been at the group’s helm. Tata Motors, once thought to be a lost cause, is back as a major automobile business because of a single-point focus on electric vehicles (EVs). This year saw the pacing up of the integration between Vistara and Air India that the Tatas purchased from the government two years ago. From semi-conductors to defence, the forays of the group are gigantic in scale but well-considered. On the flip side, there are businesses that range from grocery delivery to retail electronics, all tied together through apps. The Tatas bet on a profes­sional CEO instead of family to steer them and the decision is paying off with Chandrasekaran.

Satya Nadella, 56, CEO, Microsoft: The Expansionist

When he took over Microsoft, the once biggest company in the world seemed on its way down as the march of technology increasingly made its products like operating systems redundant. But Satya Nadella veered it around and Microsoft is not just among the top three in the world today but also right at the forefront of the future. It is now recognised as a major player in artificial intelligence (AI) and Nadella achieved this with an astute tie-up with OpenAI which creates ChatGPT and other generative AI products. When OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman was evicted in a boardroom meeting, Nadella immediately offered him an AI division in Microsoft. It led to Altman being able to return to OpenAI and Microsoft’s position in the company being even stronger. In the history of business, there are not many precedents of a CEO being able to make a company the size of Microsoft do successful manoeuvres usually associated with startups. The markets are recognising it in how Microsoft continues to be valued by them.

Adar Poonawalla, 43, CEO, Serum Institute of India: Vaccinating the World

The pandemic thrust Adar Poonawalla into the national spotlight as Indians learnt about a company that had long been making vaccines for the entire world and now found itself at the forefront against Covid. Poonawalla, CEO of the Serum Institute of India, managed numerous challenges, ranging from the political to the operational, and soon most of India had been protected against the virus with Covishield. Despite the end of the pandemic, Poonawalla has managed to keep the company financially buoyant. They continue to focus on low-cost life-saving vaccines for other major diseases. The latest, produced in collaboration with the University of Oxford, is the R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine. The disease is a big killer in the developing world, especially in the African continent. Serum Institute has already started exporting it.

Gita Gopinath, 52, Economist: International Sensibility

As the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a post she has held since early 2022, Gita Gopinath is a globe-trotting economist, addressing high-profile summits and meeting global leaders. The topics on which she delivers her speeches range from the impact of geopolitics on the world economy to the impact of generative AI on the future of markets. From Beijing to Kyiv and Colombo to Geneva, policymakers treat her statements like gold dust. Gopinath’s prophecies on the impact of AI and trends in global trade during geopolitical conflicts tend to go viral, and so do her pronouncements on a raft of other issues plaguing the world. That she has often broken the glass ceiling and has brought excellence to whichever posts she has held makes her special. Gopinath, whom former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke called “one of the strongest and most promising students I [have] worked with”, became the first female full-time professor at Harvard’s Economics Department. The Kolkata-born Malayalee has had a stellar academic record since her days at Delhi University and the Delhi School of Economics. A perfectionist, she keeps setting her standards higher.

Kangana Ranaut, 38, Actor: Star Trek

She has the ability to reinvent herself, from gauche Bollywood ingénue to star slayer to self-appointed champion of the underdogs to newly minted MP from Mandi and empowered voice of the rightwing woman. Though her movies are self-destructing at the box office, the actor has found a safe landing pad for herself with BJP’s focus on ‘nari shakti’. Even as the Opposition women MPs prepare to shoot straight in Parliament, Kangana Ranaut will have to do more than give them advice to stop “chillam chilli”. Everything in her years in the Mumbai film industry suggests the maverick from Mandi is quite capable of standing up to the high priests of nepotism. Expect her to never be far away from the headlines.

Vikram Sampath, 44, Author: Nation’s Historian

After a two-volume project on VD Savarkar which took years in the making, the book that Vikram Sampath came out with this year, Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi’s Gyan Vapi, was written in quick time and was once again on a subject related to the new politics sweeping India after the ascendancy of Hindutva. He turned his historical lens onto Kashi—the issue of the Gyanvapi mosque and the claim that it was built over a temple. With the Ayodhya Ram Mandir no longer a political issue, Gyanvapi has the potential to come centrestage and Sampath’s book is an attempt to bring a historical understanding to it. He pored over documents related to it, from Persian to British sources and Indian scriptures, to provide context and background to the long festering issue. Sampath advocates for dialogue as a means to resolve it. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has nine books under his belt.

Tridip Suhrud, 58, Author: Pursuit of Gandhi

Renowned Gandhi scholar and political scientist Tridip Suhrud, also provost at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, is coming out with his much-awaited work, The Diary of Manu Gandhi: 1946-1948, which he has translated from Gujarati and edited. Suhrud, former director of Sabarmati Ashram, came out with the first volume some five years ago, The Diary of Manu Gandhi: 1943-1944. Suhrud treats Manu, the grandniece of the Mahatma, as the ultimate witness to Gandhi’s late phase that ended with his assassination on January 30, 1948. Manu was with Gandhi in Noakhali (now in Bangladesh), in Bihar, Kolkata, and Delhi, the crucial locations close to Gandhi’s activities at the time. A multilingual scholar, Suhrud says that we know of Gandhi’s last phase in large measure due to Manu because she was the only associate with him on a day-to-day basis from 1946 onwards. Manu entered Gandhi’s life following the death of Mahadev Desai, his closest collaborator. This volume of Manu’s diary will also reveal more about Gandhi’s sexual experiments.

Bindu Reddy, 46, Entrepreneur: Alternative Intelligence

An alumnus of IIT Bombay and Dartmouth College, Bindu Reddy has earned a reputation, especially this year, as one of the most vocal artificial intelligence (AI) commentators in the world. An ex-Googler, she is CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based Abacus.AI, a startup that is hot for enterprises and that helps them embed cutting-edge AI into their business processes and apps at scale. She had made a mark in AI at Amazon Web Services and Post Intelligence. At Google, she was head of product for Google Apps. Hers is the word that people take seriously whenever a new large language model (LLM) or other AI tools are launched. On some occasions, she comes up with tongue-in-cheek comments, too. “Claude Sonnet 3.5 is a great psychiatrist! Way better than GPT-4o,” she posted on X, comparing Anthropic’s latest AI model with OpenAI’s. The Indian-origin CEO, one of the biggest names in AI, is making as much of a splash at her workplace as on X with her incisive and snappy tweets about technology. When Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world, she posted, “The company that sells shovels in a gold rush has made it again!!” Reddy is also bullish about the growth of AI in India and China thanks to their local talent.

Sunita Williams, 58, Astronaut: Space Diva

It was in 2006 that Sunita Williams first became a familiar name in the country when she became the second woman of Indian descent to go to space as part of a NASA mission. This year she was once again in space, as part of Boeing’s venture into the emerging private market of space vessels. She led a mission to the International Space Station, a familiar place for her given that she had been on it twice before and once even ran a marathon from a treadmill there. Williams is half Indian, with a Slovenian mother and a Gujarati father who had emigrated to the US. She first made her mark as a pilot before being selected to be an astronaut. And despite having spent more than 300 days in space across all her missions, she seems to still think that the sky is never the limit. That is an inspiration Indian girls draw from her.

Karthik Muralidharan, 49, Economist: People’s Theorist

The economist’s debut work, Accelerating India’s Development: A State-led Roadmap for Effective Governance, addresses issues of policy priorities, weak governance, politics of scarcity, and more in an effort to zero in on the public goods the government must focus on. Well-known for his study of the Indian education system and his work with the NITI Aayog, Karthik Muralidharan puts forth bright ideas for charting a course for the Indian economy. The Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego and Co-Chair of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab’s Education Sector acknowledges the strides the country has taken on political, economic and administrative fronts. At a time when state welfare budgets are burgeoning, Muralidharan’s empirical work on crucial high-impact interventions in education and health is a relevant study on where the government needs to be and what it needs to do.

Ashok Elluswamy, 35, Engineer: The Driven

Elon Musk’s post on X on June 9 complimenting his Tesla colleague Ashok Elluswamy for his role as director of the autopilot software team at the car company got close to 28 million views. Elluswamy, a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication from the College of Engi­neering, Guindy in Chennai, won praise from his boss for his leadership since 2019. “Without him and our awesome team, we would just be another car company looking for an autonomy supplier that doesn’t exist,” Musk wrote. Elluswamy, also an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University, was the first engineer to join the Tesla AI/Autopilot software team in 2014 before he went on to lead the section in 2019. Tesla’s Autopilot stresses on convenience and supervision by drivers. It assists drivers by managing steering, acceleration, and braking mostly on highways, but the driver must be ready to handle any emergency situation. A robotic engineer born in Tindivanam, Elluswamy had earlier worked with WABCO Vehicle Control Systems. Now based in San Francisco, the 35-year-old played a pivotal role in developing Tesla’s autopilot system and AI hardware. In a sense, his work has revolutionised driving while making all of it seem easy.

Abha Narain Lambah, 54, Conservation Architect: Restoring Heritage

Last December, when the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conserva­tion were announced, the David Sassoon Library in Mumbai and Bikaner House in Delhi were among the recipients. These were both restoration projects that Abha Narain Lambah had helmed. And the two were only the most recent additions to a large number of UNESCO awards her firm already had under its belt. Starting her career in 1993, Lambah went on to become a pioneer of conservation architecture in India. She brings in a process that honours the tradition of what is being restored, delving deep into the history of the structure or monument, tracing old photographs and drawings to make the restoration reflect the original. Among other projects she is working on are Shalimar Bagh in Kashmir and Mumbai’s Gateway of India plaza.

Joyeeta Gupta, 60, Environmental Scientist: Climate Cool

She was 20 years old when the Bhopal gas tragedy occurred in 1984. The tragedy and its fallout showed Joyeeta Gupta how multi­national companies work in developing countries. The law and economics graduate decided she would then focus on issues of the Global North and the Global South. Decades of research on climate change in developing countries has led the Indian-origin professor to receive the Spinoza Prize, also called the Dutch Nobel, late last year. She has worked towards making justice and fairness issues mainstream in science and policy. Her work is celebrated for its interdisciplin­ary nature, where she is working towards creating a global constitution so that a small group of countries does not use too many resources, and so that the benefits and perils of technology are aligned more fairly across the globe. Gupta’s work spotlights the importance of good governance, above all else, in mitigating climate change.

Arghya Sengupta, 40, Author: Rereading Constitution

From consulting on Aadhaar and Aarogya Setu to serving on an expert committee on India’s data protection bill, Arghya Sengupta has helped frame technology policy in India. His more recent work on decolonising Indian constitutional law has emphasised the need to find ideas that work for India by attuning law to ground realities and making it relevant for people. A pod­caster, prolific writer and research director at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Sengupta is a scholar to watch for new constitutional ideas and his recent book, The Colonial Constitution, ignited a debate on a sacred topic.

Abha Narain LambahAdar PoonawallaArghya SenguptaAshok ElluswamyBindu ReddyGautam AdaniGita GopinathJoyeeta GuptaKangana RanautKarthik MuralidharanMukesh AmbaniN ChandrasekaranOpen Minds 2024Pratap Bhanu MehtaPublic SquareRam MadhavS SomanathSalman RushdieSatya NadellaShaktikanta DasSudhanshu ManiSunita WilliamsSwapan DasguptaTridip SuhrudVenki RamakrishnanVikram SampathWilliam Dalrymple & Anita Anand