Best of BS Opinion: Seeing the shifts, struggles, and silences clearly

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

There’s something satisfying about cleaning your glasses — wiping away the smudges, holding it up to the light, and suddenly everything snaps into focus. That speck you mistook for a shadow? Just dust. The blur on the horizon? A hill, clear as day. These past few days, in India and beyond, feel like that moment. We're squinting through chaos, trying to focus, and bit by bit, the picture is sharpening. Let’s dive in. 

Start with Microsoft. Its decision to lay off around 6,000 employees isn't just corporate churn, it’s a signal. The AI lens is coming into focus, and everything not aligned with it is being quietly pushed to the background. India’s ITeS sector, which was once the darling of offshore customer service, is getting uncomfortable. The future of 1.5 million Indian call centre workers is uncertain. Our first editorial notes that a clearer view requires policymakers to urgently retool skillsets and avoid an impending employment blur. 

 

Meanwhile, on the geopolitical front, India has wiped the lens clean to see its security priorities starkly. The Pahalgam terror attack sparked ‘Operation Sindoor.’ But as our second editorial highlights, clarity doesn’t just lie in retaliation. The real test came after, when trolls targeted the grieving, when a minister stoked communal flames, and when families of diplomats were harassed. Yet, the country’s larger response, measured, united, and focused, suggests we’re finally seeing such provocations for what they are: distractions meant to cloud our shared vision. 

In Delhi’s regulatory corridors, a quieter lens-cleaning is underway. As K P Krishnan writes, the RBI's new regulatory framework brings transparency to how unelected bodies like Sebi and Irdai wield rule-making power. Borrowing from the visionary, if long-ignored, FSLRC recommendations, this shift marks a push toward democratic oversight and public consultation, bringing long-fuzzy institutional decisions into sharper public view. 

Vinayak Chatterjee observes something similar in infrastructure. The Union Budget’s nudge toward social infrastructure, like sanitation, hospitals, and skilling, is a move to focus on what really affects lives. Public-private partnerships and Viability Gap Funding may sound technocratic, but they’re essentially tools to clear the grime from decades of underfunding, helping us see people-centric growth clearly. 

And finally, in Harleen Singh’s The Lost Heer: Women in colonial Punjab, Ananya Singh takes us through a different kind of lens, history’s. The women of colonial Punjab emerge not as blurry background characters, but vivid protagonists — rulers, poets, rebels. Through forgotten songs, letters, and lives, Singh shows how power and identity were never fixed. Like cleaning a stained photograph, the book restores lost detail and gives long-ignored voices their rightful place in focus. 

Stay tuned, and remember, sometimes all it takes is a pause and a wipe of the lens!