Best of BS Opinion: Figuring out where sensibility ends and folly begins

Here are the best of Business Standard's opinion pieces for today

Have you realised of late that this point is getting lost increasingly everyday that there is not a fine line between sensibility and idiocy, there is a huge chasm. Like the kind that hides in plain sight, dressed like a harmless crack until someone’s overconfidence steps on it. The world currently feels like that with people building grand theories on rickety planks, governments marching boldly across makeshift bridges, and institutions convinced their footing is firmer than it really is. A single misjudged step sends reason tumbling into the void. Today’s writeups wander through those fault lines, each tracing what happens when societies mistake noise for wisdom, or worse, stubbornness for strategy. Let’s dive in. 

Kenneth Rogoff writes of immigration as a space where this chasm yawns widest. Advanced economies are ageing, labour-hungry, and running short of hands for work that machines cannot perform. Yet politics has drifted into a zone where economic logic is dismissed as elitist and demographic arithmetic treated like an optional belief. The result is that the US and UK, once powered by immigrant ambition, now inch toward policies that undercut their own growth, innovation, and competitiveness. 

Aditi Phadnis captures Nepal negotiating its own chasm after the GenZ uprising. The calm is deceptive as outward-looking youth and a powerful diaspora are tugging the polity toward overdue reform. Kulman Ghising’s rise and tentative alliance talks with the battered RSP show a country experimenting with new political equations. With elections three months away, Nepal seems destined once again for a coalition, the political version of hovering indecisively at the edge of that chasm. 

Sandeep Goyal charts the digital version of this divide. Search is no longer a neat SEO staircase but a terrain of AEO, GEO, and AIEO where machines decide whose voice carries. Brands must craft content that is structured, credible, and machine-readable or risk disappearing entirely from AI-driven visibility. The ones who adapt cross the chasm; those who cling to old habits slip through its cracks.  

And Shekhar Gupta shows Pakistan attempting its own leap and landing, but, again on the wrong side of the canyon. General Asim Munir’s rise to a constitutionally entrenched, immunity-wrapped, field-marshal-for-life role marks a civilian-approved mutation of military rule. While the rest of South Asia’s armies have stepped back from politics, Pakistan’s doubles down, ensuring its democracy remains suspended over the void, and towards idiocy. Where others crossed toward stability, Pakistan perfected the art of marching confidently into the chasm itself. 

Finally, Uddalok Bhattacharya shows how history, too, becomes a cliff-edge when trimmed to suit convenience. Debates around “slave mentality” and Bankim Chandra’s contradictions reveal how selective memory can warp the past. When narratives stretch history beyond method, it stops illuminating and starts misleading. He warns that cultural validation built on selective memory can tilt societies toward complacency or push them, unwittingly, into that widening chasm between sense and folly. 

Stay tuned!