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Karwaan Heritage's Baithaks are attempting to revive the culture of meaningful discourse. Through conversations featuring thinkers, writers, journalists, and academics, the Delhi-based initiative encourages people to engage with difficult ideas, ask questions, and disagree constructively. Following successful sessions in Delhi, the Baithaks are now expanding to cities across India, creating new spaces for thoughtful public engagement.
Arguing is a lost art. Not arguing in the sense that this conversation is the end of the world, that whatever is said will be taken as a personal offence and held against the other person for eternity, but arguing in order to establish discourse. Discourse is what maintains the health of any ecosystem: social, economic, cultural. It helps bring new ideas to the forefront, allowing the ideals of people from different social structures to meld and come together. It also helps surface the evils and injustices embedded in society. And we have lost it, because most people today are either apathetic or too consumed by their own frustrations with the world to engage meaningfully with anyone else's.
Karwaan Heritage, a Delhi-based public history collective, is trying to bring that art back through its series of lectures and conversations called the Karwaan Baithaks. Launched in May 2026, the Baithaks create a space for people to come together, disagree, ask difficult questions, and have conversations that genuinely mean something and add value, a rare thing in a public discourse increasingly defined by either outrage or silence.
Over the past several months, the Baithaks have hosted a range of prominent figures from India's current social and cultural landscape. The very first Baithak featured Nivedita Menon in a conversation on understanding consent. Since then, guests have included NewsLaundry journalist Manisha Pande, scientist Gauhar Raza, and even Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy, each bringing their own perspective to the table and modelling what honest, rigorous disagreement and conversations can look like in public.
What began as a Delhi-based initiative is now expanding its footprint. In the last couple of months of this year, the Karwaan Baithaks will travel across the country, holding sessions in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, and Bhopal. There is a growing appetite for such spaces across the country and this expansion is also an attempt to decentralise the culture of thoughtful public conversation beyond the capital.
These days discourse often collapses into either polite avoidance or hostile confrontation. But the Karwaan Baithaks are a deliberate attempt to revive and remind us how to disagree well, and grow because of it.
Follow Karwaan Heritage for updates on their India wide Baithaks.
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