Was Nikhil Kamath choosing a life without marriage or children, like Rahul Gandhi? Asked by Rahul Kanwal, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of NDTV, at the NDTV World Summit 2026, the Zerodha co-founder declined to put a fixed shape to his future. He did not know what he wanted six months from now, let alone five years.
What he could name was his priority today.
“I am optimising for freedom and peace of mind,” Kamath said, describing a life with time to pursue different things and stay open to possibilities.
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The uncertainty did not appear to trouble him. Certainty did.
“The people I find appealing are people who are not certain,” he said. Too many people, he argued, settle on a belief and become so emotionally attached to it that changing their minds becomes difficult. Ego gets in the way.
“I am fighting for that certainty as long as I can,” he said.
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His answer left the question of marriage and children open, without committing to either a conventional family life or permanently ruling it out.
That willingness to reconsider established positions also surfaced when the conversation turned to China.
China may reject the capitalist label, Kamath observed, but its local governments often compete like businesses.
“Every municipality or the mayor of each province competes with another province like he were a capitalist organisation,” he said.
For India, he floated the possibility of chief ministers operating like CEOs, competing to attract investment and expand their states' economies. The incentive would be stronger, he suggested, if states could retain the financial upside of that growth.
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“Maybe the chief minister of a state could operate like the CEO of the state,” he said.
China's industrial rise offers striking examples. Writers Robin Rivaton and Ben Southwood describe how Hefei invested $500 million in display manufacturer BOE Technology in 2008, committing almost a tenth of its annual revenue. BOE later became the world's largest display-panel manufacturer.
Shanghai helped Tesla move from factory construction to production within a year.
“I feel like we should learn from whoever has done something well,” Kamath said.
On his personal life, however, he had no comparable blueprint. For now, keeping his time and his options open appeared to matter more than deciding what the next five years should look like.
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