When the Lights Go Up, Does Civic Sense Go Down?

Dear Insighter,

There’s a particular kind of magic that descends upon Bandra in the final weeks of the year. To understand it, you have to rewind past the Instagram grids. Bandra’s unique character is rooted in its history as a former Portuguese territory. The land was later granted to Jesuit priests, who settled local East Indian Catholics—among Mumbai's oldest Christian communities—in wadis or villages around chapels. Their descendants have preserved that heritage, turning neighborhoods like Mount Mary Church area, Ranwar, Chimbai, and Sherly into living archives of cross-cultural life, where feast-day traditions and architectural ghosts of a Portuguese past quietly persist. This is why, every December, Bandra doesn't just put on Christmas; it recollects it.

It’s not just the fairy lights strung like careless constellations between buildings on Chapel Road, or the life-sized nativity scenes glowing in the courtyards of Runwal Village. It’s the scent of plum cake mingling with exhaust fumes, the sound of carols competing with rickshaw horns, and the sight of every human being under thirty dressed as if they’re about to walk onto a set for ‘Christmas in Bombay’. The area transforms into a living, breathing, heavily Instagrammed globe of cheer. You feel the collective agreement to be merry.

And for about thirty minutes, it feels magical.

Then, you need to get home and the magic curdles faster than milk. The AQI is punishing, horns build into a relentless symphony, litter gathers in corners, and autos either vanish or demand ransom. Last year, we paid ₹300 for hardly a two-kilometre ride home, the driver grinning like he’d just won a bidding war. We would have walked the stretch in saner times, when every second street in the area wasn’t dug up. Some revellers are drunk, some loud, most oblivious that people actually live here. The glow begins to feel less like wonder and more like suffocation. I love that the city wants to celebrate. I just wish we could do it without making shared spaces unbearable. Maybe the real luxury isn’t front-row access to the spectacle, but the peace of a quiet Christmas at home.

That gap between what looks good and what actually works is not just Bandra’s festive problem. It runs through the economy, markets and policy debates.

Take the bond market. Despite rate cuts and soothing macro talk, long-term yields refuse to fall. As Madhavi Arora notes, we’re staring at a bear steepener in an easing cycle, barely a quarter of cumulative cuts have transmitted to the ten-year. The bond market isn’t being petulant; it’s signalling that fiscal pressures and structural mismatches matter more than comforting words.

The rupee tells a similar story. Dhananjay Sinha argues that despite being one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, India’s currency is on a managed slide, and the rupee’s path to 100 now looks unavoidable. This isn’t cyclical noise. It’s structural — growth that hasn’t translated into productivity, capital strength, or external confidence.

Even our export cheer needs tempering. November’s 19.4% surge made headlines, but Rajesh Mahapatra reminds us it’s partly a base effect, with cumulative growth still modest and job-creating sectors struggling. Eight of our top twenty destinations saw contractions.

To be fair, there are genuine wins. Ajay Srivastava’s take on the Oman CEPA shows India quietly anchoring its Gulf footprint: near-zero duties on almost all tariff lines, strengthening presence at a critical maritime corridor. Oman’s market is small, but geopolitically this is smart consolidation, not just another photo-op trade pact.

Yet markets love spectacle more than substance. R. Gurumurthy’s critique of the IPO boom captures this perfectly: listings increasingly serve as exit ramps for insiders rather than entry points for long-term capital. From Paytm to LIC to recent promoter sell-downs, public markets are often where optimism is monetised.

And when numbers turn ugly, we swing to the other extreme. Kirti Tarang Pande shows how a 96% drop in net FDI triggered “crash” headlines, ignoring hyperscale Big Tech capex and long-horizon commitments. We crave verdicts, not nuance. It’s fast food analysis for a slow-cooked economy.

Regulators are trying to impose a little civic sense of their own. SEBI’s move, explained by Krishnadevan V, to shift takeover and ESOP valuations from merchant bankers to independent registered valuers reflects an old truth: the deal-maker shouldn’t also be the referee. A cooler head, a duller pen is exactly what overheated markets need.

The RBI, too, wants banks to remember customers exist. Alpana Killawala notes complaints have risen to 1.33 million, even as technology supposedly makes service cheaper and better. A cleanup drive is coming, but the irony remains: we’ve built dazzling digital rails, yet human dignity still waits at the counter.

On the ground, there’s a rare bright spot in jobs. Akshi Chawla reports unemployment dipping to 4.7% in November, with rural and female participation improving. It’s not triumph since youth and urban joblessness remain stubborn, but momentum matters.

Dev Chandrasekhar explains how the draft Electricity Amendment Bill could redraw industrial power economics by phasing out cross-subsidies, tightening captive generation rules, enforcing renewable obligations. It’s the kind of boring, structural reform that doesn’t trend on social media but pulled BlackRock into Grasim’s renewables bet.

Contrast that with Coal India’s leadership choice, also dissected by Chandrasekhar. Appointing an operations veteran over a clean-energy transformer tells you everything. At seven times earnings and a fat yield, Coal India is becoming operationally excellent at managing its own obsolescence.

Tax policy could also use some clarity. Sangeeta Jain’s piece on presumptive taxation for foreign entities shows how certainty, not concessions, attracts serious capital. After decade-long disputes from Motorola to Rolls Royce, even optional simplicity would be a statement: India wants investors, not litigation trophies.

Sharmila Kantha’s account of Quality Control Orders being rolled back days after being praised captures the drift — ambitions, reversals, stalled schemes. Manufacturing’s share of GDP sits near a six-decade low. Make in India promised a factory floor; we got a policy mood board.

 

States, meanwhile, are partying on the credit card. Abhishek Dey’s look at Bihar, Punjab and West Bengal shows freebies stretching debt and crowding out investment. ₹75 billion transferred to voters before elections may win applause today, but January’s bill will still arrive.

Amid these macro currents, the human cost is easy to miss. G. Chandrashekhar’s warning on India’s protein blind spot is stark: growth hasn’t fed the nation because nutrition policy forgets protein, despite abundant pulses.

And sometimes, what we lose is not calories but character. TK Arun asks who pays to sustain legacy as he laments over Annapurna Bhandar in Chandni Chowk, a 1929 sweet shop facing closure after a rent dispute. Must every history-soaked corner yield to glass fronts? Bandra residents watching quiet lanes turn into carnival corridors might recognise the feeling.

Big money, of course, still loves big numbers. Shubhranshu’s take on AI investments reminds us that hyperscale data centres grabbing headlines won’t by themselves build sovereignty. Ownership of models, ideas, and platforms will. Otherwise, India risks becoming the real estate and electricity grid of someone else’s intelligence revolution.

In another Shubhranshu piece, there’s a lesson from Indian Railways: trains don’t get cancelled for crew shortages because the system runs with a 30% buffer, strict rest protocols, and planning that assumes humans get tired. A century-old network teaching resilience to shiny new sectors. It’s boring, unglamorous, indispensable.

And beyond economics, the gap between appearance and reality turns deadly. Rami Niranjan Desai’s account of the Thailand–Cambodia conflict over the Preah Vihear temple shows how memory, pride and colonial scars outlive maps and rulings. It’s not just a border dispute; it’s a politics of identity. Beneath every statistic lie stories, resentments, and a longing for dignity.

It’s important to remember the space between spectacle and substance.

We’re brilliant at creating scenes that photograph well: festivals, headlines, growth charts, investment announcements. We’re less consistent at building systems that function quietly when nobody’s watching: clean streets after the lights go off, markets that reward patience over hype, policies that survive beyond press notes, growth that feeds bodies as well as balance sheets.

Maybe we need fewer celebrations of headlines and more attention to footnotes. Less faith in what looks good on Instagram, more care for what works on a Monday morning. Less optimism-mongering, more honest reckoning with structural constraints.

As I think of that overpriced auto ride home, part of me laughs. Part of me sighs. And part of me hopes that someday, whether in Bandra or in the economy, we’ll learn to celebrate without leaving behind exhaust, debt, grievances, and forgotten basics.

Because the real test isn’t surviving the festival. It’s building a city worth celebrating every day, even when the lights come down.

Until next time, hoping for magic that's magical for everyone.

Phynix

Also Read:

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• The Middle East After Gaza: Strategic Stalemates and Uncertain Futures by Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain: On the dangerous calm after the storm, where unresolved conflicts simmer beneath a fragile quiet.
• Beware of Central Economic Forecasts for 2026 by Mohamed A. El-Erian: A warning against the seductive, and often misleading, comfort of the consensus view.