Best of BS Opinion: Patching roads, not rerouting paths

Business Standard

20-05-2025

Have you ever noticed there's a kind of optimism in repair work? The street is cracked, the foundation crumbles. The older cement pieces long gave way, cracked, uneven, almost forgotten. But someone is out there laying new bricks, hopeful that the next layer will hold. Today's stories speak to that quiet but persistent hope, of fixing broken systems, salvaging old promises, and forging ahead on damaged ground. Whether in politics, trade, law, or narrative, the road forward is uneven but we need to build anyway. Let's dive in.
Take Bangladesh. In the name of reform, its interim government is simply laying old bricks with new slogans. Mohammed Yunus's regime, born out of street protests against Sheikh Hasina, is now banning her party and splintering the democratic space even further. The economy teeters as investor confidence shrinks and India slams the trade door shut. And yet, New Delhi's own diplomacy has been marked by inconsistency, first embracing Hasina's iron grip, now sulking in silence, highlights our first editorial. Rebuilding trust will take more than strategic silence; it'll need a path paved with honesty, accountability, and open dialogue.
Closer home, a university professor is under arrest for suggesting that we match symbolic applause with real protections. Ali Khan Mahmudabad's case exposes how easily our institutions treat cautionary critique as hostility, notes our second editorial. The irony? His words about unity have been twisted into grounds for criminal charges, while louder, divisive voices walk free. In the government's zeal to control the narrative, it has cracked the very bricks it claims to protect.
Meanwhile, India's trade tools are turning on their own. As Laveesh Bhandari writes, Quality Control Orders, designed to filter out subpar imports, are becoming stealth weapons against competition. Rather than lifting domestic capability, they're shielding big players, bruising small ones, and denying consumers the variety and affordability they deserve.
And if we peek into insolvency law, the cracks run deep. Rajeswari Sengupta unpacks the Bhushan Power and Steel case, where the Supreme Court's liquidation order has thrown five years of resolution into the bin. Instead of building faith in the system, institutional lapses have left investors watching their bricks crumble.
Even storytelling isn't immune. Chintan Girish Modi's review of The Storypreneur's Playbook by Nitin Babel and Prateek Roy Chowdhury, offers a hero's journey for entrepreneurs, but one where most of the heroes are men, and the path feels too clean, too narrow, for today's complex terrain.