Year-ender lists have a job. And the job is to feign that the year gone by made sense. The writer lines up events/stories, ranks outcomes, and assigns winners and losers. The year becomes a listicle.

In that sense, 2025 was not especially cooperative. Growth numbers looked good, though it was less clear who benefited. Technology kept promising the future, while also creating new things to worry about. Capital kept flowing, though not always to places where outcomes visibly improved. Scale, which used to be the north star, suddenly needed explanation, even justification.

In a year like that, interviews became one of the more honest forms of reporting. Not because interviewees suddenly grew candid, but because they showed how to think when old frameworks stop delivering answers. They exposed the trade-offs the leaders can no longer hide and the assumptions they are beginning to abandon.

The conversations chosen here aren’t united by sector or seniority. What they do share is a common problem: each interviewee is dealing with a system that has reached some sort of limit.

Healthcare, where outcomes are rising but affordability isn’t. Markets where participation surges, but returns don’t. Consumer businesses discovering that India now behaves like several different countries at once. Technology founders realising that engagement and impact don’t always point in the same direction. Investors admitting that patience, not pattern recognition, might be the scarcest resource of all.

Read individually, these interviews look like stories about cancer care, mental health, venture capital, FMCG, hotels, markets, and dairy. Read together, they tell a story of how power, capital, and even credibility are being renegotiated in India. 

In many of them, the shift was visible in a single exchange. A question asked plainly, and an answer that didn’t reach for cover.

Here are The Ken’s best Q&As of 2025:

The man who refuses to let cancer become a luxury productThe KenCancer treatment can ruin families. But one doctor thinks he has made it affordable for one-third of India

Images of the story

BS Ajaikumar, founder of Healthcare Global (HCG), runs India’s largest cancer-focused hospital chain while owning barely 10% of it.