Dear Reader,

On a Sunday morning at the Taj Mahal Tea House—a cozy Mumbai café known for its pakoras, chaat, and fine teas—we are just settling into a discussion of our book of the month when our attention is caught by two men at the next table. Deep in conversation, they pass a hardcover book between them—sometimes poring over its pages, sometimes examining the cover with care.

Curiosity gets the better of us. After a few failed attempts to identify the title, one of our group finally leans over and asks, “Forgive us for butting in—we’re a book club and just had to ask, what book is that?”

One of the men smiles. “It’s a new book—you’re the first people to ask us about it in public. This is the author, Rahul Bhatia.”

And so we meet Rahul Bhatia and fellow journalist M. Rajshekhar, and get an unexpected first look at The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy, a book that would go on to become a New York Times Notable Book of 2024 and the Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Kerala Literature Festival. Soon we’re all seated at the same table, and conversation flows easily, as it often does among book lovers.

That serendipitous encounter leads to an unforgettable conversation with Rahul Bhatia—and later, a masterclass at NMIMS Mumbai with my MBA students—on journalism, power, and the narratives that shape modern India. In an era of contested facts and fragmented attention, Bhatia reminds us that stories, rigorously reported and responsibly told, are how we make sense of power. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:

You grew up in Dubai. Tell us about your childhood reading.

My parents worked at banks in Dubai—my mother worked in the treasury department, and my father was in information technology. My mother loved jokes and puns, and so our home was filled with books of limericks, joke books, books full of insults, and comics—mostly Mad magazine and Asterix. My father preferred National Geographic and PC Magazine.

My mother tried hard to get me to read the classics, but my attention wandered. I tried Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, but they did nothing for me. I kept returning to teenage detective stories, Clarke, Asimov, and all the science fiction I could find.

You studied design at the Pratt Institute, New York, worked as Art Director at Ogilvy and Mather, but ended up finding your calling in journalism. You’ve written for Reuters, Cricinfo, Tehelka, Mint, The Caravan, The Guardian, The New York Times. What draws you to this profession?

It’s the relationships, the personal growth, the getting to know sources over months of interviews. It’s that feeling that everything in the world is available for me to write about. I am obsessed with writing things down as they happen. The narrative really, really matters. Today you find powerful people exerting a great amount of narrative control, because it allows them to shape reality in a certain way.

The truth is much more complicated, but it’s not something that you see often, and I wanted to put all of that together.

You’ve written on........

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