Happy Independence Day! And today’s day means whereever you go there’s a flag being hoisted or something selling those tricolour brooches at the signal. And if we talk about books, one can recall the Salt March, Quit India Movement, and all the freedom fighters we studied about in school who got jailed, and worse just so ‘independence’ could stop being a hypothetical term and start being a whole country’s actual Friday. That’s one thing people often seem to forget about freedom, that it was never handed over politely. It was marched for, protested for, and occasionally straight-up refused to be given until enough people made enough noise that ignoring them stopped being an option.

Sound familiar? It should, because Gen Z has basically inherited that exact energy, from campus strikes to national protests and entire movements organised from a phone in someone’s back pocket. And plot twist: the generation that grew up getting mocked for ‘not reading’ is currently the reason B.R. Ambedkar is trending on Instagram again, decades after he wrote some of the sharpest words ever written about what freedom actually requires.

Back in the day freedom used to mean something simple: no curfew, your own room, maybe a bike. Now it’s a contested, slippery word that shows up in protest placards, reels, and unhinged 3am group chats about whether we’re actually free or just optimised prisoners of the algorithm and endless marketing. These 5 books, some homegrown, some global, are quietly (and not-so-quietly) shaping how an entire generation thinks about what freedom even is, on a day literally built to make you think about it. None of them are the ones your history textbook made boring.

This is the speech British India didn’t let Ambedkar give in 1936, so he published it instead, and it’s still one of the most radical things ever written about freedom in this country. Ambedkar’s whole point is that political independence means nothing if the social order underneath it stays exactly as oppressive as before, caste and all. It’s blunt, it’s furious, it’s completely unafraid to call out Gandhi himself, and it’s exactly why Gen Z keeps rediscovering it, because “azaadi” was never supposed to just mean the British leaving.

Forget the sanitised, single-paragraph version of independence you got in school. Guha’s massive, gripping history covers everything that came after August 15, 1947, the riots, the language wars, the Emergency, the protests that never made it into the syllabus, and it makes the case that Indian democracy has survived less because it was guaranteed and more because people kept fighting to keep it alive. It reads much less like a textbook and much more like the messiest, most dramatic group project in history, because it kind of was.

This is a historian who’s spent years studying how democracies collapse, who flips the usual script: he argues ‘freedom from’ (no government telling you what to do) is only half the story, and real freedom is ‘freedom to,’ having the actual capacity to live the life you want. Published in 2024, it’s become required reading for anyone trying to think seriously about freedom in an age of surveillance and rising authoritarianism worldwide. Dense but electric, like arguing with the smartest person in your poli-sci seminar.

Davis connects Ferguson, Palestine, and decades of organizing into one sharp argument: freedom isn’t a personal vibe, it’s collective, and it has to be fought for continuously, not declared once and forgotten. It’s basically the intellectual backbone of every ‘protest is patriotic’ sign you’ve ever seen at a march, and honestly the closest thing on this list to what freedom fighters everywhere were actually arguing, that independence on paper means nothing without people still showing up to demand it stays real.

This is the book that made “phone-based childhood” a phrase your parents now use unironically. Haidt’s argument is that Gen Z got robbed of a very specific kind of freedom — unsupervised, boring, scraped-knee childhood play — and traded it for infinite scroll. Whether you fully agree with him or want to fight him in the group chat, this book single-handedly reframed the freedom conversation for an entire generation, and you’ve probably already heard someone quote it without knowing the source.

Five very different definitions of freedom, five very real fingerprints on how Gen Z actually thinks — half of them homegrown, half of them global, all of them arguing that freedom was never a one-time event. So today, between the flag hoisting and the family WhatsApp forwards, maybe crack one open. The people who marched, sat in, and got arrested for the right to even argue about freedom in the first place probably wouldn’t want you spending the day just scrolling past it. Pick a side, or better yet, read all five and argue with yourself.