GFT: November Edition in Bangalore

Grounds for Thought: Bangalore, November 2026A Blue Tokai × unLecture Series, Three evenings. Three very different conversations. Grounds for Thought brings researchers, scientists, and thinkers out of their institutions and into rooms full of curious people, where the conversation goes somewhere a classroom rarely does. This November in Bangalore runs from constitutional literacy to the history of economic ideas, closing with a reframing of how India's princely states shaped its founding.15th November: Anjor BhaskarDemocracy Is Dying. Why Don't Young People Care? Democracy doesn't die when constitutions fail — it dies when citizens stop practising democratic values. Anjor Bhaskar, faculty at Azim Premji University and founder of Dialogues on Democracy and Development, has worked with over 30,000 participants across India on what he calls constitutional literacy: translating values like liberty, equality, and fraternity into everyday practice. This session asks why so many young people know more about celebrities than the Constitution, why misinformation outruns truth so easily, and why constitutional morality may be the most important skill nobody is teaching.21st November: Alex M. Thomas Fantastic Economic Theories and Where to Find Them Are wages and interest rates "fantastic" in the sense of excellent — or in the sense of hard to believe? Alex M. Thomas, Associate Professor of Economics at Azim Premji University and author of the widely used textbook Macroeconomics: An Introduction, takes this question through the history of economic ideas: does raising the minimum wage really raise unemployment? Does the rate of interest actually capture how people value the present over the future? An interactive session that moves from classical political economy to a sharper way of thinking about economic policy — and who it's really for.28th November: Shruti Viswanathan Princely States and Constitutionalism: Uncovering the Many Imaginations of People, Power and Politics India's founding is usually told as a story with two actors — British India, and from 1946, the Constituent Assembly. Shruti Viswanathan, founder of The Equals Project and a graduate of NLSIU Bangalore and the Fletcher School at Tufts, argues that leaves out a third: the roughly 565 princely states governing a third of the subcontinent's population, usually mentioned only at the moment of their accession, as a problem to be solved rather than as sites of constitutional thought in their own right. This session reframes their integration as a provocation — revealing that the "Idea of India" was never a single, inevitable outcome, but a fiercely contested space with constitutional activity of its own, often well before 1947.