The India Today Conclave – A million arguments and ideas

It’s that time of the year. The India Today Conclave is back. Started as part of India Today’s 25th anniversary, the event was designed as a meeting point for the best minds from India and around the world to map the geopolitical and economic future of the country.

In its 16th avatar, the Conclave is crackling with high-octane energy. It’s current. It’s brilliant. The all-new India Today Conclave sets a new gold standard in summits through an intense, razor-sharp two-day event that is unconventional in form and style. Are there limits to freedom of expression? Is India a breakdown country or breakout nation? What is RSS’s Vision 2020? Is the world equipped to deal with the ISIS threat? Can ageing be cured? Every question that matters today has an answer from the best experts and finest analysts in the world.

Want to know how the government is working towards delivering results? Plug into four ministers who make India work. Roads. Railways. Energy. Manufacturing. Union ministers Nitin Gadkari, Suresh Prabhu, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal give quick presentations. Can they together make India achieve the double digit growth? Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will spell out his vision for making India, the only bright spot in global economy, shine more.

Want a 360-degree view of the ISIS threat? Be there at Conclave 2016 where American counter-terrorism expert Daniel Benjamin spells out the very real danger from the ISIS while Daniel Rye Ottosen, who was kept in captivity for 13 months, lives to tell the tale. The country’s biggest public intellectuals, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Sunil Khilnani, reconstruct the new India on a shared platform. Dattatreya Hosabale from the RSS grapples with the new face of Hindutva and whether it has the power to unite or divide.

Writer Varun Grover taps into the anger to turn it into comedy gold. The world tomorrow will be all about choices. Philippe Petit explains the choices he made when he decided to walk the high wire between the Twin Towers. Management expert Sheena Iyengar explains how choices make us who we are. Futurist Stefan Hyttfors explains the top 10 technology trends that are changing the world socially and culturally.

The modern family reflects the people we become and the future we seek. Few know this better than the Akhtars— Javed, Zoya and Shabana Azmi—together on a panel for the first time.

And can an event be complete without sport? With the world preparing for the 2016 Rio Olympics, champions Abhinav Bindra and Mary Kom as well as badminton coach Gopichand Pullela break down the Indian challenge while former Australian Cricket Captain Steve Waugh will offer tips to Dhoni’s 11 to win the Twenty20 World Cup.

For the first time two “jailbirds” will recount their long and short walk to freedom. Actor Sanjay Dutta, now a free man after serving a five-year jail term for illegally possessing arms, will share with the world his struggle to reinvent and redeem himself while Jawaharlal Nehru Students Union President Kanhaiya Kumar , out on bail in a sedition case, will talk about the India he wants to see.

There may be just a clutch of inventive women in Silicon Valley, but closer home, our highly inspirational digital divas knock your socks off with their brilliance as they share stories of how they used the web to create their billion dollar babies. And there’s a dash of glamour and grit in the highly successful and exceptionally incisive human rights lawyer Amal Clooney to round off Conclave 2016. She speaks on the right to free speech in repressive regimes. From the flailing economy to the whirlwind of politics, top-notch women entrepreneurs to the Indo-Pakistan dialogue, leaders in government to those who question it, India Today Conclave 2016 debates the World Tomorrow today.