Best of BS Opinion: The erosion nobody noticed, until it finally snapped

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

There’s a moment, familiar to many of us, when something stops working, a fan blade hangs at a tilted angle, a Wifi signal stutters, a houseplant starts yellowing, and we realise we never really took care of it. We didn’t break it. We just forgot it. And when that moment scales up, when systems and states neglect maintenance and vigilance, a quiet decay sets in. No mutiny, no sirens. Just a slow, silent coup of incompetence, where power isn’t taken, but quietly slips away. Let’s dive in. 

That’s what David Fickling observes in the global oil industry, which, after four decades of steady growth, finds its crude core stagnating. The numbers are sobering. While global fossil fuel investments now trail clean energy, US shale rigs are being idled and even Saudi Aramco is redirecting its might to gas. In China and India, demand has already begun to fray. The collapse isn’t loud. It’s methodical. A drip-drip of underinvestment, climate pivot, and a dawning realisation that the oil age may be dimming not with disruption, but with quiet retreat. 

 

That same drift echoes in India’s public safety, writes Devangshu Datta. Three recent tragedies, a Dreamliner crash, a Mumbai train collision, and a stampede, might seem disconnected. But zoom out, and a pattern emerges: failing infrastructure, absent accountability, outdated systems. When seven die daily on Mumbai’s trains and it causes no outrage, it’s not just tragedy, it’s institutional indifference solidified into routine. 

Mihir S Sharma reminds us that even in aviation, where precision is everything, the old ghosts return. In the wake of Air India 171, history casts a long shadow: pilot hierarchy problems, ignored warnings, and a recurring fog of premature conclusions. The Dreamliner crash may be new, but the neglect feels familiar. 

Shekhar Gupta finds the same quiet slippage in foreign policy, as Washington toys again with “hyphenation”, lumping India and Pakistan together in strategy. It’s not a crisis, but a memory of one, and a hint that global diplomacy may be lapsing into old habits. India’s muted response, more calibration than outrage, shows maturity, but also the fatigue of having to remind the world, again, that it has moved on.In art, too, a different kind of forgetting plays out.   Ranjita Ganesan explores Jafar Panahi’s cinematic rebellion in winning the Palme d’Or for It was Just an Accident, a reminder that resistance isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it’s a quiet, stubborn act of storytelling. The system tried to forget him. He filmed anyway. 

Stay tuned!