Best of BS Opinion: Landing right when the ground is full of potholes

Business Standard

4 hours ago

We all know that particular moment when you're walking down a familiar lane, eyes on your phone or lost in thought, when a pothole filled with muddy water suddenly appears in your path. You don't have time to study it. There's no traffic light or warning cone. You just leap — instinctively, awkwardly, hoping to clear the splash. Sometimes, you land clean. Sometimes, you get drenched despite your best effort. But in either case, the leap is a moment of decision, a refusal to sink into something messy and unfixable. Most of us don't think of it as bravery. But really, it is: the everyday kind, shaped by necessity, uncertainty, and a deep distrust of what lies beneath the surface. Let's dive in.
That's what the Supreme Court just did, vaulting back from a May judgment that had declared the Bhushan Power & Steel resolution plan illegal. In recalling that verdict, the Bench led by Chief Justice B R Gavai acknowledged not just a legal misstep, but the economic splash it had caused, of risking JSW Steel's investment of Rs 20,000 crore in investment, thousands of livelihoods, and the very credibility of the IBC, notes our first editorial. It was a leap back to stable ground, but also a reminder that the potholes, like chronic NCLT delays, still remain, waiting to trip up another resolution.
And in Maharashtra, two judgments revealed deeper craters in our justice system. Eighteen years of trial in the 2006 train blasts case, only to find coerced confessions and tampered evidence. Another acquittal in the Malegaon blasts. The courts jumped, but the puddles are darker here. Victims' families and the wrongly accused alike are left drenched in delayed justice, their lives shaped by a system that's failed to dry itself off.
Elsewhere, Laveesh Bhandari maps a different balancing act, between India's small-town shopkeepers and the tidal force of e-commerce. The splash here is subtle: convenience versus community, price versus people. Can policy help us leap toward a hybrid model that combines reach with resilience? That may be the trick to landing without losing our footing.
Prosenjit Datta, meanwhile, cautions that India's economic path is riddled with strategic potholes: rare earth dependency, tech gaps, weak AI foundations. Until we build muscle memory for self-reliance, each new global shock will feel like slipping on familiar gravel.
And Chintan Girish Modi reviews A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory, the story of Dr Jagadish Shukla — a scientist who leapt across continents, chaos theory, and climate politics. His memoir captures a life of graceful leaps over personal pain, global geopolitics, and scientific inertia. But as he writes, too many leaders still stand at the edge, hesitant, staring into the water, waiting.
Stay tuned!