Best of BS Opinion: India's crusader spirit and the swords that betray it

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

Imagine a crusader on horseback with a shining armour, banners flapping in the wind. There is an endless battlefield stretching before him, filled with smoke, dust, and perhaps destiny. He charges with a storm of conviction, striking with all his might. But the sword bends. It does not break or shatter, it bends because it’s made of rubber. The clang he expected turns into a soft whistling sound, the kind that makes even the enemy pause. Kind of like the ache of our times where we still charge into battles with ceremony and courage, but not with the right weapons. Let’s dive in. 

Take trade, for instance. NITI Aayog CEO B V R Subrahmanyam wants India to stop shadow-fencing and actually sharpen its edge. For too long, our trade stance has been that of a warrior fighting shadows by imposing tariffs to look self-reliant but ending up costlier and weaker. We sign trade pacts with faraway partners but stay out of the closeby arenas (RCEP, CPTPP) where value chains are forged. As our first editorial points, to grow, India must swap its rubber sword for a sharper one which is open, connected, and competitive. 

But some battles we fight aren’t even wars, they’re smokescreens. The Delhi government now wants the SC to let “green crackers” burst again on Diwali, citing culture over clean air. A city already choking on its own breath is asking for a licence to pollute 30 per cent less as if that counts as mercy, notes our second editorial. As the smog thickens, we light up the sky, pretending the haze is festive mist. Perhaps our real fight isn’t with pollution but with the unwillingness to change what celebration means when the air itself has become collateral damage. 

Meanwhile, A K Bhattacharya dissects another form of mock combat which is India’s galloping capital expenditure. The numbers are gleaming with Rs 4.31 trillion spent in five months, a 43 per cent jump. But much of it, he notes, is in loans and advances, not fresh steel and cement. It’s like painting battle scars on before the duel. The surge in transfers to states and accounting tweaks boosts the optics of growth, but not necessarily the substance. The crusade for public investment, it seems, is riding fast, but with hollow armour. 

And then, in Vanita Kohli-Khandekar’s world, the crusaders have traded swords for smartphones. Micro-dramas, 2-minute cliffhangers streamed by hundreds of millions, are redefining storytelling itself. They are the new battlegrounds for attention, where wars are fought in seconds. But in the race to compress everything, we may be cutting not just time but depth, thus wielding rubber swords of entertainment that bounce off our minds without leaving a mark. 

Amid all this noise, Akankshya Abismruta’s review of The Last Bench By Adhir Biswas reminds us of a different kind of fight, the one fought without armour, by a child who learns early what exclusion feels like. The memoir, set in 1960s East Pakistan, turns the “last bench” into both exile and resistance. Unlike our modern crusades of policy and politics, Biswas’s is the quiet battle for dignity, waged with tenderness rather than steel. 

Stay tuned!