Best of BS Opinion: When the noise fades, it's time to command the wind

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

There are nights when the world feels like it’s breathing too hard, the window shutters tremble a bit too loud, the air becomes thick with the smell of rain and an unnamed something. You sit by the window, counting seconds between lightning and thunder, pretending you’re not waiting for the quiet. And then, suddenly, it arrives. The storm stops mid-breath and you hear the sound of your faint pulse growing louder instead. You realise the wind that was raging against your door had been whispering your name all along. Perhaps maybe, just maybe, you were the storm. Let’s dive in. 

At the Business Standard BFSI Insight Summit, the debate around the RBI’s inflation-targeting framework found its own equilibrium. Former MPC members agreed that the 4 per cent target, with its band of tolerance, has held steady against global uncertainties. Yet one window remains bolted, the central bank’s 2022 failure report that never saw daylight. The law doesn’t force its publication, but transparency, like weather, works best when the air circulates freely, argues our first editorial. The RBI has learnt to read the winds and now it must learn to show their direction. 

Meanwhile, on a sunlit pitch thousands of miles from policy and prose, India’s women cricketers discovered their own mastery of the storm. Harmanpreet Kaur and her squad have turned struggle into spectacle, riding  the very winds once meant to blow them away. Credit, too, to the BCCI for equal match fees and the Women’s Premier League, a proof that institutional winds can shift direction, highlights our second editorial. Yet, the pay gap persists, Rs 50 lakh for top women versus ₹7 crore for men, a reminder that the calm isn’t equality, just a pause before the next gust. 

And in the world of capital, writes Akash Prakash, the winds have fallen oddly still. Global investors, once giddy on India’s growth story, now watch from the sidelines, wary of high valuations, shallow innovation, and the country’s absence from AI, EVs, and biotech, feeding doubts about long-term competitiveness. Yet Prakash notes that this very indifference might be India’s moment of quiet before the storm. That when the next gust comes, it may reward those who stayed the course. 

But commanding the wind demands moral clarity too. As Prosenjit Datta writes, corruption remains the constant weather of everyday India, drizzling through police stations, revenue offices, and ports alike. From bribes for certificates to officials altering FIRs for ₹2 lakh, the stories keep piling up. India’s corruption ranking (96th globally) mirrors this rot. To clean the air, India must simplify laws that breed discretion, strip bureaucratic immunity, and speed up justice.  

And in A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey, reviewed by Nitin Desai, Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian trace the long voyage of a nation learning to captain its own storm. They dissect India’s hesitant transitions from planning to markets, from closed to global, and ask why structural transformation has lagged. The authors argue that India’s problem isn’t lack of wind but lack of coordination between the sails of weak manufacturing, fragile institutions, and an uneasy compact between state and market.