Best of BS Opinion: The coin, the world, and the equilibrium of our times

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

Imagine flipping a coin, a small, shiny disc of pure chance spinning mid-air, light bouncing off its surface like two possibilities fighting for dominance. Almost always, gravity wins as the coin falls, picks a side and then settles. But every once in a while, it doesn’t. Like that happenstance we all have had during our childhood days. It shakes slightly before it stands upright. Like a sliver of silver caught between fates, defying the rules of heads or tails, right or wrong, rise or fall. Currently, the world feels exactly like that impossible coin: balanced, breathless, and refusing to decide. Let’s dive in. 

Take the US and China, who seem to have mastered that very art of balance. After a week of tense negotiations during Donald Trump’s Asia visit, the two sides have reportedly reached a preliminary trade understanding, one that could see tariffs rolled back, rare-earth restrictions eased, and soybeans returning to ships bound for American ports. As our first editorial notes, this could calm the global trade storm that’s battered markets from Shanghai to Surat. Yet, beneath the handshakes, strategic mistrust lingers, like a coin perfectly poised, neither peace nor provocation, only the illusion of stability. 

Meanwhile, the 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, released ahead of COP30, tells of another fragile equilibrium. As our second editorial highlights, poverty and climate change now overlap so completely that they’ve become two sides of the same coin. Eight in ten of the world’s poor face direct exposure to floods, droughts, or choking air with South Asia hit the hardest. The poorest live on the knife-edge of global warming, caught between survival and catastrophe, their futures decided not by choice but by temperature. 

In India’s boardrooms, too, the coin keeps wobbling. Janak Raj and Aashi Gupta chart the long slump in private corporate investment, a story of hesitation and half-turns. Since 2011-12, capex growth has slowed to a crawl, even as policy supports and public spending rise. Weak demand and global uncertainty have dulled the “animal spirits” once expected to roar back. Yet balance sheets are cleaner, banks sturdier, and interest rates friendlier, all signs that the coin, though still spinning, might soon tip the right way. 

And then there’s Rama Bijapurkar’s India, which is funny, flawed, and fascinating. Where the coin doesn’t just land on its edge, it dances. From the two-Diwali confusion to a Maharashtra farmer paying for his son’s wedding, to delivery workers rewriting platform rules, her vignettes capture a country that improvises its way forward. Progress here isn’t linear, it sways between the old and the new, finding equilibrium in motion. 

Finally, Prosenjit Datta’s review of The Shortest History of AI by Toby Walsh reminds us that even our machines now live on that same edge of logic and imagination, rule and intuition. From the birth of AI at Dartmouth to the rise of chatbots and neural networks, Walsh’s brisk narrative shows how humanity’s oldest quest to create intelligence has itself become a balancing act of ethics and ambition. 

Stay tuned!