For more than a decade, India has steadily deepened its ties with the Gulf while trying to balance competing interests across the region. How is India being impacted by the Iran crisis? And what do these geopolitical shifts mean for India’s West Asia policy? To discuss these and other questions, Milan is joined on the show this week by Kabir Taneja, the Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation’s Middle East office.

It’s safe to say that India’s 2026 state assembly elections have scrambled many of the assumptions that have long shaped our understanding of Indian politics. To make sense of these results, Milan is joined today by Neelanjan Sircar and Yamini Aiyar—two of the sharpest observers of Indian politics and political economy.

India hasn’t updated how political power is distributed across its states in five decades—and the consequences are mounting. Recently, Milan sat down with Shruti Rajagopalan of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University for a wide-ranging webinar on delimitation, representation, and the reshaping of Indian democracy.

For more than three decades, India’s growth story has rested on the promise of a large and youthful workforce. But a new report published by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University takes a comprehensive look at how young Indians move from education into the labor market—and asks whether India is successfully converting its demographic dividend into an economic one. This week on the show Milan speaks with the report’s lead author Rosa Abraham, who heads theCentre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University.

Kanwal Rekhi was the first Indian-American founder & CEO to take a venture-backed company public on the NASDAQ. He also co-founded and built The Indus Entrepreneurs—or TiE—into the largest global network of Indian entrepreneurs. He writes about his life in his new memoir, which traces his remarkable journey from a modest upbringing in India to becoming one of the most influential figures in the Indian diaspora in the United States. Kanwal joins Milan to discuss his lifelong passion for entrepreneurship, his modest upbringing and challenging early family life, and his role in building the modern Internet.

For decades, India’s growth story has rested on the spectacular rise of its middle class. But a new book argues that this very group—roughly 40 million income-tax–paying households—is now under acute strain. Facing a convergence of job disruption, wage stagnation, and rising debt, the middle class may no longer be the engine of growth it once was. This is the argument made in a new book titled, Breakpoint: The Crisis of the Middle Class and the Future of Work. It is authored by Saurabh Mukherjea, along with Nandita Rajhansa and Sapana Bhavsar.

On this week’s show, Milan sits down with the novelist Karan Mahajan, author of a much-anticipated new novel, The Complex. Karan and Milan discussed the book at our first ever live Grand Tamasha event at Carnegie headquarters in Washington, DC on March 16. Karan is an associate professor in Literary Arts at Brown University and the author of the books Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has once again altered the contours of international politics. For India, this evolving context raises several important questions about the viability of its foreign policy approach. This week on the podcast, Milan sits down with three of the contributors to a new compilation published by the Carnegie Endowment—Shoumitro Chatterjee, Sameer Lalwani, and Tanvi Madan—to discuss the uncertain trajectory of Indian foreign policy.

Over the past two decades, Washington and New Delhi have drawn steadily closer—driven by shared concerns about China, expanding economic ties, and a growing Indian diaspora in the United States. To help us unpack all of this, this week Milan spoke with Congressman Ami Bera in his office on Capitol Hill.

In 2024, mass protests brought an abrupt end to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s long tenure in power, opening the door to Bangladesh’s most consequential election in more than a decade. To talk about this new political era, Milan is joined on the show this week by Global Research Professor Naomi Hossain, with the Department of Development Studies at SOAS University of London.