High & Mighty

HIGH AND MIGHTY.

The phrase evokes a narrow band of 'the elect' up in the sky, like the deities drawn in calendar art. A 'power elite' at a remote distance from the rest. As we give you INDIA TODAY'S High & Mighty list of 2024, allow us to add a critical caveat to that. In the old niggardly sense, power was seen to be vested in extraordinary individuals. The Great Man Theory, they called it. The idea that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men". Who could argue with that? Well, for starters, how about women? In more refined definitions, power belongs to ideas-in their ability to influence, persuade, transform. And ideas are not born in a vacuum.

Such an expanded sense guides our hand this year; H&M 2024 reflects a change in how we view power. Firstly, it's an expanded list. It's not a List of 50, with only the pantheons of politicians, high-powered officials and global Indians given special treatment outside of it. H&M24 names 110 luminaries. And they are uniformly ordered by the logic of special treatment for each domain. Instead of an omnibus, hold-all listing, the names are organised into 11 separate categories, 10 in each. Politicians, bureaucrats, tycoons, star entertainers, they are all there, of course. But in our 21st year, the extra space allows us to give fuller treatment to key social actors like Professionals-or the two new categories we introduce, Innovators and Influencers. All ranked only among their peers. There's also a separate nobility: the Icons. So we bow to the idea that it's not just the deemed monarchs who influence our lives. That the modern Napoleons are also those who move us with a piece of software, or a turn of phrase on the flute. Read on!

INDIA'S POWER PANTHEON