Best of BS Opinion: Ageing gains, trade, and the promise of renewal

Business Standard

30-04-2025

Some mornings, when the city hasn't quite woken up, and even the news alerts hold their breath, do you hear them — birds scripting messages in a dialect of rustled wings and stretched silences. Watching them trace invisible sentences across the clouds, like they're trying to teach the sky how to speak in sighs. And in those murmurs above, do you sometimes think the world is trying to make sense of itself? That's what today's stories feel like, exhales in quiet codes. Let's dive in.
Take the IMF's new view on ageing — the economic winds might now be an updraft. India's older generation, it turns out, is not retiring quietly. With 70-year-olds today cognitively matching 53-year-olds from two decades ago, the report nudges us to imagine workplaces filled with silver-haired problem-solvers and elder mentors in AI-equipped health hubs, notes our first editorial. It's a future where longevity is not a cost but capital.
A continent away, another breeze shifted direction. Canada, newly under the leadership of Mark Carney, is learning to rephrase its diplomacy. Gone is Trudeau's standoffish tone; Carney's cautious yet hopeful notes suggest a change. After the deep freeze of 2023, when allegations over the Nijjar killing all but shattered bilateral ties, we might be witnessing the first syllables of a fragile reconciliation, as highlighted in our second editorial. Student visas, trade deals, Indo-Pacific strategy — all waiting for the skies to clear.
Meanwhile, the world's trade thermals have grown choppy. Janak Raj writes that the US-China tariff squall may slow India's momentum in the short run but could also propel it into a stronger 'China-plus-one' orbit. It's like finding lift from turbulence — if India plays it right, this storm might push its textiles and tech into wider skies.
But as Sabyasachi Saha points out, we can't just glide on someone else's wind. India's trade and tech ambitions need deeper wings — stronger R&D, tighter IP strategies, and a new pact between state and enterprise. The skies are wide, but to fly well, we need to build engines, not just kites.
And then there's Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper, the newspaper that once roared from Lahore in Urdu's elegant script, now resurrected in pages by Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan. Vipul Mudgal reads it as a love letter to a paper that once spoke boldly when others whispered, a bird that sang even through prison bars and Emergency's silence.