Best of BS Opinion: Power, memory, and the steep cost of chasing shine

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

Most of us first learn about comets not from textbooks but from childhood impatience. A rumour in the neighbourhood that something rare would streak across the night sky would bring adults dragging out plastic chairs to the terrace and children craning their necks long past bedtime. The comet, when it would finally appear, would be brilliant for a moment and then gone. You could chase it with your eyes but you could never touch it. Today’s writeups are about that pursuit of running after comets that promise dominance, closure, or revival, only to reveal how fragile brilliance can be. Let’s dive in.

 

 

In the global economy, Eswar Prasad writes, China’s record $1.19 trillion trade surplus in 2025 looks dazzling from a distance, a streak of unmatched exporting power. But up close, the heat is destructive, as investment-heavy growth, anxious households, weak consumption and deflation at home have pushed excess goods outwards, unsettling manufacturers from Europe to the developing world. The comet’s tail is scorching the global trading system. Without rebalancing towards consumption and reform, the brilliance risks fragmenting the very order China seeks to lead.

 

Closer home, Aditi Phadnis traces a quieter chase; India’s hesitant pursuit of historical acknowledgement for the IPKF. For decades, the sacrifices of soldiers in Sri Lanka have hovered like an unclaimed celestial event -- seen and whispered about, but never fully embraced. Rajnath Singh’s recent remarks mark a moment when the state briefly looks up and names what passed overhead. Yet the glow is still constrained by domestic politics, reminding us that even memory can burn up before it is properly held.

 

And cinema, as Sandeep Goyal argues, is again sprinting after the 2025 spectacle. Bollywood’s projected 2026 boom is studded with stars, wars and mythic scale, as if box-office salvation lay in catching ever-bigger comets. But 2025’s surprises, including failed patriotic blockbusters and the quiet success of a romantic musical, suggest audiences are getting tired of merely pure glare. Authentic emotion, he says, not just velocity, will determine what survives re-entry.

 

In India’s strategic imagination, Shekhar Gupta observes, Pakistan is a comet that should have faded long ago. The economic, military and global gap is now structural and irreversible. Yet India keeps looking up, allowing Pakistan to occupy disproportionate space in politics, sport and neighbourhood diplomacy. That attention, Gupta suggests, grants leverage where little objectively exists. Real great-power behaviour lies in restraint, confidence and strategic focus.

 

That tension between posture and substance also frames Kumar Abishek’s column on hyper-masculine cinema. Films like Toxic chase dominance as spectacle, mistaking biology for destiny. Yet real authority, as science and older cinematic traditions show, is relational and fragile. The comet of brute power burns brightest just before it disappears and what endures is not the flash but the dreamy eyes that learn to hold complexity without giving up on witnessing another spectacle when it arrives.

 

Stay tuned!