Best of BS Opinion: Law, logic and language: Playing your hand is paramount

Here are the best of BS Opinion pieces today

Have you ever played a game of poker? When the table’s already set, the dealer (your friend) has moved on, and the chips are clinking in quiet defiance of fate. You can curse your luck or learn to bluff with what you’ve got. The world’s been shuffling through its own uneven deck lately, with leaders holding aces that turn out to be twos, startups drawing jokers that suddenly play like kings, and some discovering that the game is all about playing with some grace. Today’s writeups are a reminder that sometimes you just stay at the table, even when the odds look impossible because the game itself is the point. Let’s dive in. 

Across the Atlantic, the US Supreme Court is debating whether Donald Trump’s power play with tariffs was ever legal to begin with. By fast-tracking a case that questions his authority to impose sweeping duties under a 1977 emergency law, the justices are deciding whether a president can bypass Congress’s constitutional right to set tariffs. For India, the verdict could change little. As our first editorial cautions, even if the Court cuts Trump’s hand short, he could still find other legal cards to play. Protectionism, after all, is a deck with many duplicates. 

In Bengaluru, two 23-year-olds decided not to wait for a better draw. They built Maya1, a text-to-speech AI that ranks No. 2 globally among open-weight voice models — crafted on free cloud credits, late nights, and belief, highlights our second editorial. It lets users summon custom voices with prompts like “calm, elderly male school teacher with an American accent,” and even modulates laughter, sighs, or whispers in real time. Sometimes, the winning hand is the one you build yourself, one humble data point at a time. 

Meanwhile, T T Ram Mohan writes that the Tata group’s latest tussle between Noel Tata and Mehli Mistry over trustee positions in the Sir Dorabji and Sir Ratan Tata Trusts, reveals not governance rot but the logic of family control. With Noel Tata now leading the trusts that hold two-thirds of Tata Sons, his authority has simply consolidated, not destabilised. In this game of legacy, the Tatas aren’t bending the rules, they just know which ones matter. 

At COP30 in Brazil, emerging economies are confronting their own deck: how to finance the green transition. Rakesh Mohan and Janak Raj find that financing the green transition might be more affordable than the doomsayers think. Their new study finds the numbers less daunting than feared. With China and India accounting for most of the cost, the authors argue the challenge is real but far from insurmountable.  

And in her review of Tangerine: How to Read the Upanishads Without Giving Up Coffee by Namita Devidayal, Neha Bhatt writes how Devidayal learns the oldest rule of the table, that sometimes, surrender is strategy. As the author turns to Hindu philosophy in midlife turmoil, she rediscovers stillness in the middle of chaos. Like a soft tangerine glow amid saffron flames, her memoir reminds us that even when the cards don’t fall your way, there’s wisdom in simply staying in the game. 

Stay tuned!