Creative Politics, Creative India, Creative Youth

In a Global Perspective — by S Kaul, an Ex-NSG Black Cat Commando

At the centre of the book's cover sits a wheel of radiating spokes fanned out across the map of India — a device the author calls the "Chanakya Chakra." It is a fitting image for a book whose central claim is that India's politics, its economy, and its youth are not separate conversations but spokes of the same wheel. Drawing on the strategic thinking associated with Chanakya, the ancient statesman and author of the Arthashastra, S Kaul reframes statecraft as a creative discipline rather than a purely administrative one.

The author's own background sets an unusual vantage point for the argument. Having served as an NSG Black Cat Commando — India's elite counter-terrorism force — before turning to writing, S Kaul brings a practitioner's sense of urgency to questions that are often left to academics and policymakers. Creative Politics, Creative India, Creative Youth asks what it would take for governance itself to become an act of creativity: how policy, culture, and national ambition might be designed with the same imagination India brings to its arts and its enterprise.

The book's subtitle, "In a Global Perspective," signals that this is not an inward-looking argument. The wheel on the cover stretches outward to the edges of the map, gesturing at India's place in a wider world of competing ideas and shifting power. Youth, in this framing, is not a demographic statistic but the engine that carries a creative political vision from concept to reality — the generation expected to translate strategic thought into national momentum.

Structurally, the book positions itself as part manifesto and part strategic framework, inviting readers — particularly younger ones — to see civic and political life as a space for original thinking rather than routine participation. It sits comfortably alongside the author's related titles on India's economic and technological future, forming a broader body of work built around a single idea: that creativity, applied deliberately to politics and policy, is itself a form of national strength.