Best of BS Opinion: Improvising through powerplays, policy gaps, and cracks

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

Ever tried fixing a wobbly chair with a butter knife? It’s not elegant — the blade bends, your wrist cramps, and the screw mocks your effort — but somehow, it works. That’s how a lot of the world feels right now: patchwork solutions, borrowed tools, and a stubborn refusal to give up just because the kit’s incomplete. From geopolitics to cricket, everyone’s improvising. No one’s really got the perfect tool. But the job still needs doing. Let’s dive in. 

Take Xi Jinping’s recent Southeast Asia tour. Karishma Vaswani observes that while the West fumbles for its strategy screwdriver, China’s reaching for whatever’s within arm’s length — be it Belt and Road or RCEP. Xi is filling in gaps with charm and trade, smoothing over screws left loose by Trump’s trade wars and Washington’s incoherence. China may not be the trusted tool everyone wants, but it’s offering itself as the only one that works in a pinch. 

Back home, BluSmart — the EV startup once polished as a sustainable Uber-alternative — is now the butter knife that snapped. As Devangshu Datta notes, it wasn’t their model that failed, but the scandal-stained hands that held it. With the Jaggi brothers accused of financial mischief, BluSmart’s wallet-toting users and hopeful investors are left holding a bent blade. And just like that, trust in India’s green future gets scratched. 

In the corporate world, R Gopalakrishnan reaches back to famine-era Bengal to remind us: sometimes, leadership means picking up whatever tool history hands you and making it work. Wavell didn’t wait for perfect plans — he acted with urgency, empathy, and purpose. Those traits, Gopalakrishnan argues, are timeless. If you want your company to survive disruption, you’ll need to get your hands dirty — butter knife or not. 

Even in politics, Shekhar Gupta writes, Modi’s dominance continues not because he has a shinier tool — but because the Opposition keeps reaching for outdated ones with no edge left. 

And then there's cricket. Vishal Menon laments how the game’s balance has been hacked. Batters swing tree trunks; bowlers get crumbs. In this slogfest era, the BCCI’s new bat-size limits and saliva-for-swing experiments are desperate but necessary — small gestures to restore an old equilibrium. A butter knife in the kit? Maybe. But at least someone’s trying to fix the hinge. 

Stay tuned!