Dear reader,“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;Where knowledge is free;Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;Where words come out from the depth of truth;....Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and actionInto that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”Every August, every Independence Day season, this poem is dragged out of its devotional register and made to do political work in India, mostly because nobody has written anything better since, but this year it earns the dusting-off more than most.Tagore wrote these lines around 1900, tucked into Naivedya and later into Gitanjali as a prayer, but we saw them become a manifesto in the past few weeks in New Delhi and India’s digital public-sphere. Read those lines again, juxtaposing them against the visuals from Jantar Mantar and its counterparts online, and you will see each word, each verb, and each adverb in the stanza come alive, blooming with myriad meanings. That’s perhaps why this August 15 is going to be a special one for us; it comes at a time when Indians have refreshed the idea and function of freedom after a long, forced lull.The slogan or word—azadi or freedom—has meant different things to different Indian generations. This season, the students reclaimed it without the weight of older ideological baggage. Interestingly, they used it the way one would use a word just discovered, not passed on by the elders, and organised across caste and class and party lines that people twice their age have spent careers failing to bridge, and they did it, largely, without asking permission to be funny. That combination—fearlessness plus a straight face that keeps cracking into a grin—is what is worth talking about this Independence Day. It is a new form of civil disobedience. On that cue, Gen Z has updated Gandhi in a clever way (what a comic tragedy for the Right, which has been focussing on the wrong target, Nehru, this whole time).The template the students handed the rest of us—parents, editors, grandparents, the whole tired apparatus of people who are meant to know better—was simply this: be free. Be unafraid. Be willing to look a little ridiculous while you say something true.That said, freedom of that kind runs into a specific difficulty in this era, and it isn’t political in the obvious sense. It’s epistemic. Knowing what’s true has become one of the harder freedoms to exercise, because the line between fact and its algorithmically optimised impersonation has been sanded down almost to nothing. A genuine forwarded video, an AI-generated quote, and WhatsApp uncle’s confident falsehood now reach us with the same visual polish as a peer-reviewed study. They all look the same on a 4-inch screen, and many seem stuck in that fog, still trusting formats that used to signal credibility and no longer do. The students seemed to cut through it. Whether that’s a permanent talent or a generational accident of timing, nobody yet knows. A society doesn’t get to coast on one good instinct. It has to keep re-earning its clarity, year on year, like you’d re-earn a muscle.That process of rebuilding needs a lot of alertness, understanding, and discipline. Nehru, in The Discovery of India, called it a “scientific temper”. This was not a demand that every citizen study physics; it was an insistence that everyone refuse to accept claims without testing them, and be willing to revise a conclusion when better evidence turns up. This means questioning as a form of citizenship. Critical thinking, reasoned scepticism, and a productive irreverence towards things revered merely because they are established form the pillars of such a disciplined approach that makes freedom or azadi a real and present possibility.If you want to know what happens to a country when that discipline gets neglected at the institutional level, Aashima Dogra’s new Frontline piece, “How to Build a Scientific India”, is essential reading this week. She lays out academic freedom, evidence-based policymaking, social inclusion, and transparent governance as the four pillars any genuinely scientific nation needs, and then, pillar by pillar, shows how India has let each one erode. It isn’t a comfortable read. It’s a necessary one, and it belongs on your list this Independence Day week.Now let me digress a little bit and talk about a man who died this week having spent 60 years trying to build, in his own way, what Dogra is (or Nehru was) asking for.M.P. Parameswaran died at his home in Thrissur on August 11 at the age of 92, and if you have never heard the name outside Kerala, that is itself a small scandal, because few Indians did more to translate the idea of scientific temper out of Nehru’s prose and into the daily lives of people. He was born in 1935 into a conservative dominant-caste household in Kiralur, was given the caste suffix “Namboothiri” at birth, and dropped it himself while still in college—not, he later said, as an act of ideological theatre, but because caste consciousness had simply never felt central to how he thought. That instinct—to discard what didn’t serve the argument, however comfortable it might be to keep—turned out to define the rest of his life.He trained as an electrical engineer in Thiruvananthapuram, then went to Moscow for a doctorate in nuclear engineering, and came back in the late 1950s to a job at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre that most Indian scientists of his generation would have killed for. He kept it for 18 years. Then, in 1975, he walked away from it because he’d come to believe the laboratory was too small a room for the question that actually interested him: what good is knowledge if it never reaches the people who need it most? He called it a transfer from one kind of work to another that he found more satisfying. He gave the rest of his life to the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, and the KSSP, in turn, gave a country and a language a working model of how popular science should work in society.I owe the KSSP something myself. My own early education in how to think—not what to think, which is a different and lesser gift—came through its school wing, the Science Forum, in classrooms and evening sessions where the whole premise was that a 10-year-old could ask a real question and expect a real answer, not a pat on the head. Parameswaran was, in that indirect but very real sense, a teacher of many like me, as he was to two or three generations of Keralites who never met him in person and would recognise his name today mostly from the spines of the small, cheap, beautifully lucid science booklets the KSSP has been printing since the 1960s.Parameswaran’s politics were harder to keep tidy than his science writing. He was a Communist Party member for more than 30 years, and his membership ended when he kept thinking past the point where the party wanted him to stop. From the 1990s he developed what he called the Fourth World theory, “one concept of a post-capitalist society”, formulated after reflecting on the failures of 20th-century socialist experiments and the dominance of global corporate capitalism. It was an attempt, as he put it, to find where Karl Marx’s own writing on decentralising industry might meet Gandhi’s gram swaraj (village self-rule). These writings led to his expulsion from the CPI(M) in 2004. He kept working anyway. He kept arguing anyway. That, more than any single position he held, might be the most instructive part of his biography: a man capable of being wrong in the eyes of the institution that had shaped him, and choosing curiosity over vindication.History will judge him kindly.Parameswaran’s death in these times especially comes as a kind of concentrated reminder of everything that connects science to dissent, and dissent to the health of a democracy. He believed scientific temper was essential to a society capable of questioning power, testing claims, and thinking for itself, and that idea, in its own way, was also in the background of the movement that unfolded at Jantar Mantar.Which returns me to where I started. Frontline’s latest issue on the protests has just hit the stands, and if you read one thing this fortnight, let it be this issue. Also, check out this package of stories from our archives, brought together around the idea of “freedom”. It spans politics, culture, social affairs, literature, and much more. The pieces, together, ask a question worth asking in an Independence Day week that has actually earned its stakes this year: what does a free mind look like when you’re the one who has to build it rather than inherit it?Wishing you a free, breathe-easy fortnight ahead, and a very happy Independence Day to our beautiful, contradictory, still-becoming country.Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor,FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS