Open Minds 2026: Editor's Note

Meet them and realise how rewarding it is to be in their company—and to be part of the conversations they generate on the attitudes of India. Among them: a technologist unlocking the mysteries of the human brain to make life an uninterrupted sensory experience; a novelist enriching his imagination with knowledge and moral urgency to bring a planet endangered by the bad habits of its inhabitants to our consciousness; an economist refusing to be a doomsayer despite a war-ravaged marketplace having made everyone else in his profession a pessimist; an amateur naturalist turning a project in conservation into an instrument of gender justice; entertainers balancing action with frisson, box-office cult with creative variety; designers breaking free from the clichés of the Orient…

They tell us why ideas multiply in places where freedom is both struggle and subversion. In controlled societies, as a great writer said, censorship is the mother of metaphor. Some of imagination’s boldest expressions are indebted to totalitarianism, whether it is Mandelstam or Solzhenitsyn or Kundera. In democracies, the struggle is a journey through the bylanes of freedom, resisting the map of others. It is a passage of the mind, guided by nothing but the instinct for the next.

Freedom is a constantly rewritten concept in a democracy like India, whose volatility is matched by its volubility. Still, the stability of Indian politics is not a mark of stagnation but of imagination. Professional harrumphers are certain to disagree; but then we are used to the noise of rejectionism passing off as dissent (and some honourable exceptions to which are featured here.) India’s political stability—a singular achievement in the democratic world—is a happy affirmation that creativity is not restricted to political campaigning alone. It drives governance too. That said, it is not political power that defines Open Minds. We seek them in the higher echelon of ideas.

If the hard power of politics makes competition the abiding spirit of freedom, the power that flows from a study or a studio, from a laboratory or a movie hall, makes competition a renewal of oneself. Hard power sets the stage; the other performs the possibilities of the day after. The stage is stable in places where power is separated from paranoia, and where arguments reflect the relentlessness of morality. Democracies die in the stranglehold of consensus. A questioning mind, though, is different from a repudiating mind, which is not hard to spot in India’s echo chambers. To dissent is, as Havel, a playwright who led a revolution that turned soft power into hard power, said, to live in truth. The public intellectual, the adjective an indication of his or her social responsibility, is an interrogator as well as an elucidator of power—and an active moralist sceptical of ideologies. We went looking for them but couldn’t find many. Their number is dispropor­tionate to the size of our democracy.

It is a different story when it comes to the Republic of Imagination, a global bestseller now. What is filmed in India gets a standing ovation at international festivals; what is designed in a dazzling fusion of the local and the global may not have set the runways on fire, but the aesthetics of the East have a distinctive Indian flavour today. Not just Indian writing in English, works translated from the languages too are turning India into a prize-worthy item in the lit marts of London and New York. And at home, the exuberance of ideas per­meates arts and culture, academia and businesses— and makes success a habit in a country once known for its economic lethargy, lampooned as the Hindu rate of growth. The new habit of overcoming and succeeding in India, where to be young is not a life in an unimaginative state and where to be rich is not an embarrassment any longer, is made possible by the change in the national mood. When adjectives like ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ dissolve in the aspirations of a nation, power ceases to polarise. It becomes a unifying nature of life.

What we present in the following pages is the diversity of that power, its originality and influ­ence—a portrait of India perfected by open minds.