Best of BS Opinion: Global disorder and the cost of intellectual comfort

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

As the year draws to an end, this newsletter wishes to bring the curtains on the year with restraint rather than flourish, staying close to arguments, evidence, and reconsideration. Across trade, geopolitics, energy, politics, and culture, today’s writers share a common discomfort with easy answers. They describe systems under stress, assumptions that no longer hold, and the costs of pretending otherwise.Let’s dive in. 

Writing on global trade, Arvind Subramanian argues that instability flows not from absence of leadership but from excess power. The United States has embraced protectionism through tariffs that are broad, uncertain, and hard to restrain, while China’s export push has intensified. The result is rising pressure on developing economies, slower convergence, and a retreat into defensive trade policies across regions and income groups. 

R Gopalakrishnan turns to India and China, rejecting slogans in favour of practical engagement. He traces shared civilisational confidence, diverging modern outcomes, and China’s sharp economic lead since the late twentieth century. From a business lens, he urges focus on trade, travel, and ideas, arguing that disengagement is unrealistic, and that Indian enterprise must lead cautious, sustained interaction with its neighbour despite imbalances. 

Devangshu Datta examines the Shanti Bill and nuclear power’s uneasy return to policy focus. The Bill opens the sector to private capital, limits liability, and makes the state the final backstop. Yet high costs, delays, public resistance, and fuel dependence persist. Nuclear offers clean base load, but targets remain optimistic, with any payoff likely distant under current assumptions, timelines, and political constraints today. 

And in a rare year-end correction, Shekhar Gupta revisits and withdraws a flawed earlier argument on Islam and democracy. He accepts that focusing only on military interference ignored broader evidence, including the failure of the Arab Spring. Distinguishing faith from political Islamism, he argues that democratic outcomes depend on institutions, pluralism, and limits, not reassurance or comforting theories, ideological shortcuts, and selective history alone. 

Finally, marking Mirza Ghalib’s birth anniversary, Aman Sahu reflects on what Urdu shayari has lost. He contrasts Ghalib’s discipline and humility with today’s performance-driven verse, shaped by virality and spectacle. While festivals and digital spaces have widened access, craft has thinned. The responsibility, he concludes, rests with audiences choosing seriousness over applause and demanding technique, imagination, restraint, and respect for language, history, and form. 

Stay tuned!