Best of BS Opinion: India and the art of finding the rhythm of progress

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

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Some pens just need a few firm taps before they flow. Their ink is hesitant at first after you have picked the pen to write after a long time, and then suddenly it becomes alive, ink gliding as if remembering what it was meant to do all along. India’s public systems, too, often work like that. They stall, scratch, and pause before finding rhythm. Today’s writeups remind us that the push for progress and momentum is often just one firm tap away. Let’s dive in. 

Take the Union government’s decision to ask NITI Aayog to re-examine the toll rate framework after 17 years. As our first editorial notes, the country’s roads may have transformed, but its toll rules remain trapped in 2008, adjusting rates by formula rather than fairness. With revenues surging and highways stretching 60 per cent longer, the mismatch between tolls and road quality has become too obvious to ignore. It’s a long-overdue tap on a pen that should’ve been writing smoother lines years ago. 

Meanwhile, another era of steady handwriting reaches its final flourish. Warren Buffett, highlights our second editorial, has decided that his famed annual letters will now rest. For six decades, the Berkshire Hathaway chief wrote what became the world’s most widely read guide to investment and integrity. At 95, Buffett’s withdrawal from public life feels less like an ending than a gentle pause of a pen that has already inked its masterpiece. Even as he passes the baton, the pages he’s filled will keep others writing. 

A K Bhattacharya writes of another steady hand at work. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who readies her eighth Union Budget, faces both legacy and test. With the fiscal deficit tightening and tax revenues lagging, the question is not just of numbers but of balance. Can the government keep investment high without overextending itself? February 1 falls on a Sunday, leaving her a choice between history and habit. Either way, the pen in her hand might yet draw a line across India’s fiscal story that endures. 

And while policies and profits change, Vanita Kohli-Khandekar observes that the soundtrack of our lives still hums from another era. The music that unites India even today, belongs to the past, when television and cinema inked a shared imagination. The last of the true superstars, Shah Rukh Khan, and the creative mind of Piyush Pandey remind us of a time when mass culture was a single page we all read together. The pen hasn’t stopped, but its script has turned into a thousand smaller notes. 

Finally, in Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, reviewed by Akankshya Abismruta, Vauhini Vara writes of finding identity amid the hum of machines that try to finish our sentences. Her dialogue with AI mirrors that hesitant tap-tap moment before ink begins to flow. Vara learns that even when algorithms mimic feeling, it is the human act of rewriting that restores meaning. 

Stay tuned!