Best of BS Opinion: Turning up the music while the smoke thickens around us

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

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There is an increasing habit catching up all around us, if you have noticed, that of treating dangerous decline as background noise. You can picture a party where the bass beats get harder every time someone notices the faint burn in the air. No one wants to be the first to say something is wrong, so people raise the volume, hoping the discomfort will fade on its own. Instead of pausing to check, someone edges the volume higher. Comfort wins while caution loses. But smoke has a way of insisting on itself.  And today’s writeups sit inside that very room, each one being a reminder that pretending not to smell the fire only brings the flames closer. Let’s dive in. 

In Delhi and the wider NCR, the smoke is not even metaphorical. Environmentalists have long warned that the Aravallis are the region’s natural air purifiers, and yet, as our first editorial notes, the recent SC verdict that redefines these hills effectively lowers the guardrails. Even with a temporary halt on new mining leases, analysts argue the reprieve feels like turning up the volume rather than addressing the fire, a pause without a plan, in a region already stripped by decades of quarrying and shrinking forest cover. 

The same instinct appears in Silicon Valley’s chip wars, where, as our second editorial observes, Google and Meta edge toward a partnership that could chip away at Nvidia’s dominance. The market is giddy with the potential shift. Yet behind the excitement is an ecosystem burning through energy at unprecedented rates. Custom chips, skyrocketing AI capex and accelerating demand are the industry’s equivalent of ignoring the smell in the room while relying on ever-larger speakers. The race is thrilling but the heat behind it is real. 

And CKG Nair and M S Sahoo remind us that India’s institutional design battles work in much the same way. Parliament and the judiciary circle each other over tribunal reforms, each defending turf while the machinery weakens. Short tenures, ad hoc appointments and regulators treated like extended ministries amount to masking structural smoke with procedural noise. Without a coherent, evidence-based redesign, the cycle repeats. 

Meanwhile, Prosenjit Datta brings the metaphor home to the air we breathe. India’s emissions intensity may be falling, but total emissions climb as growth accelerates. Hitting high-income status while inhaling toxic air is like celebrating in a room that’s steadily filling with haze. Development without health is essentially decline disguised as progress. Tackling absolute emissions can no longer wait for a future milestone. 

Finally, in World of the Right by Rita Abrahamsen and others, reviewed by Shyam Saran, the smoke is ideological. The radical conservative movements mapped in the book are not spontaneous sparks but long-laid sparks, fanned across borders through networks and institutions. Their project borrows from Gramsci yet dismantles the very liberal norms he analysed. What emerges is a movement skilled at amplifying its message even without a clear blueprint for the world it seeks.  

Stay tuned!