Best of BS Opinion: What looks solid is always quietly re-engineered

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

At dawn, for those who haven’t yet visited but always dream to, imagine that when Rome is quiet and the tour buses are still asleep, the Colosseum must look deceptively complete. But historians will tell you that what survives is not what once was. Over centuries, stone was replaced, corridors reinforced, and drainage quietly reworked. The architecture, though seemingly eternal, was always being re-engineered because if the spectacle is to endure, the rebuilding of the scaffolding beneath it is important. Our writeups today echo a similar continuance but spotlight the changes quietly being done as well. Let’s dive in. 

When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrived in India, the optics were ceremonial, but the substance, as the first editorial notes, was structural. Trade, defence, semiconductors, green technology and universities are not mere ornamental add-ons to the India-EU relationship, they are its new buttresses. With Berlin backing an early India-EU free trade agreement amid fraying US ties, the deal is less about tariff arithmetic and more about re-engineering economic certainty in an unstable world. And compromises, including on carbon rules, are part of that reconstruction. 

 

Meanwhile, sport offers a louder spectacle but the same lesson. India’s Olympic ambitions for 2036, the second editorial argues, risk becoming another grand facade if governance remains fragile. Money and infrastructure are rising, yet the administrative arches of professional federations, data-driven decision-making, athlete-led governance appear still cracked. The memory of 2010’s Commonwealth Games lingers as a warning that without rebuilding the institutional vault, the arena will not hold. 

That quiet shift is explicit in budgets too. As A K Bhattacharya writes, the Union Budget has stopped being only a tax carnival and has become a blueprint for fiscal architecture. With GST decisions outsourced to the Council and direct tax rates largely frozen, the real action lies in debt reduction, redirecting resources toward capital expenditure, and Centre–state fiscal redesign after the 16th Finance Commission. It is less theatre and more engineering. 

In corporate India, Amit Tandon shows boardrooms undergoing a similar rebuild. Governance failures and regulatory scrutiny have pushed boards beyond episodic compliance into continuous oversight. Geopolitics, AI, cyber risk, data protection and ESG are no longer agenda items but structural stresses directors must anticipate. Independence, succession planning and shareholder engagement are becoming load-bearing requirements in a promoter-led market under sharper watch. 

And beneath all this lies the most fragile architecture of all: how societies know what they know. In his review of The Echo Machine by David Pakman, Amritesh Mukherjee shows how media systems trained citizens away from evidence toward emotional certainty. Democracies, like monuments, do not collapse dramatically, they hollow out eventually. And survival depends on rebuilding the unseen supports of critical thinking, education, and institutions that insist facts matter. 

Stay tuned!