Idea Exchange - Opinion Makers, Critical Issues, Interesting Times

This volume brings together 47 selected interviews that lay bare the views of today’s top thinkers and opinion makers—politicians, actors, writers, sportsmen, entrepreneurs. At a time when interviews mean 15-second sound bytes in TV studios or ‘he said–she said’ discussions, when Q&As are heavily supervised by media handlers and spin doctors, Idea Exchange charts an altogether different course. Conceived as a regular column in the Indian Express , it works on the principle that newsmakers are best understood when there is time and a free flow of questions from a super-informed and super-inquisitive audience—journalists of the Express Group. Candid and eloquent, these pieces range from Barkha Dutt’s defence of her coverage of the 26/11 crisis in Mumbai to Shashi Tharoor’s justification of his tweets; from Amitabh Bachchan’s apprehensions about his family to Abhinav Bindra’s euphoric retelling of his Olympic win; from Thomas Friedman’s precise deconstruction of the recent financial crisis to Imran Khan’s unrestrained thoughts on cricket and extremism in Pakistan. This collection also includes conversations with William Dalrymple, Narendra Modi, Baba Ramdev, Vijender Singh and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, among others. Eschewing rigid structures, this forum gives newsmakers the freedom to state, to deny, to provoke and to argue. An Idea Exchange might lead anywhere—and that’s the idea.