Best of BS Opinion: Living with the routine and suddenness of change

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

In Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, there is a moment in the trenches where soldiers, exhausted and half-starved, gnaw at dry cheese to try and eke out some comfort from the mundanity of unending shelling from the opponents. It is that exact moment when suddenly a shell thuds into the earth beside them. It is not just the violence of the explosion that unsettles but the intimacy of it which serves as a reminder that destruction is never as distant as it may appear. It crouches beside us while we perform the smallest acts of survival. The war in that book may belong to another century, but the sense lingers. We too live amid ordinary routines that mask the nearness of disruption, shells falling into our fields, our markets, our politics, and even into our songs. Let’s dive in. 

 

India’s trade standoff with Washington carries that same trench-like uncertainty. A US team led by Brendan Lynch sits across negotiators in New Delhi, each side chewing on technicalities while guarding fragile ground. The formula on the table of value-based tariffs, premium dairy for American producers, protection for Indian farmers, resembles a soldier rationing crumbs, choosing carefully what to share and what to hoard. Our first editorial notes that any careless concession, any sudden push, could bring the shell down on domestic politics or fragile alliances. 

The monsoon too has behaved like an unpredictable barrage this year. It gave seven per cent more rainfall than normal, leaving reservoirs heavy and fields fat with promise. Wheat and mustard stand ready for the cold, but weather no longer follows scripts, highlights our second editorial. A stray frost in Kutch, a rogue downpour linked to La Niña, and bounty turns to wreckage. The farmer may count grain in the granary, but he knows that each harvest is a brief reprieve, never a lasting shield. 

Meanwhile, Shyam Saran writes of youth across South Asia, connected, educated, furious, yet hemmed in by stagnant elites. In Colombo, Dhaka, Kathmandu, they poured into streets not very unlike young soldiers stumbling into mud, demanding that someone in power hear them. For India, the lesson and the task is not to dictate but to wait, to hold the line gently. Neighbours share the same trench, and one man’s panic can unravel the entire front. 

And Kanika Datta shows how Indian tea, abundant and storied, failed to carve a brand worthy of its leaves. Sri Lanka, with far less, built Dilmah into a flag. India, still trapped between tariffs, imitation teas, and climate change, risks watching its estates vanish quietly. Abundance without recognition is like Hemingway's soldiers’ cheese. It is useful in the moment, but forgotten when the dust settles. 

Finally, A K Bhattacharya reviews Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Song of India: A Study of the National Anthem, where Tagore’s anthem is reimagined not as routine recital but as lyric vision. Mukherjee dispels the myth that it honoured King George, placing instead Tagore’s universalism at its centre. What makes the work resonate is how it treats the anthem as both memory and aspiration, a fragile song of pluralism that somehow endures even as politics lobs shells at the very idea of unity. 

Stay tuned!