A Year Through The Daily Eye: A sweeping reflection on The Daily Eye’s Business writing in 2025, where writers tracked power, creativity, inequality and ambition—revealing how economics, culture and conscience collided across advertising, entertainment, politics and global capital through the year.

This year-end Business review from The Daily Eye revisits 2025 through fourteen incisive articles by Shashwata Ray Chaudhuri, Sharad Raj, Monojit Lahiri, Vinta Nanda and The Daily Eye #Newsdesk, examining advertising, inequality, global capitalism, Indian media, entertainment economics, leadership, branding, DEI backlash and the human cost of ambition in a rapidly polarising world.

If there was one truth that emerged consistently from The Daily Eye’s Business coverage in 2025, it was this: business is no longer about profit alone. It is about power—who holds it, who is excluded from it, and how culture, politics, creativity and conscience are increasingly entangled with capital. Across fourteen deeply reported, reflective and often unsettling pieces, our writers chronicled a year where ambition collided with inequality, creativity battled commodification, and leadership was tested by moral consequence.

Together, these writings form a portrait of a world in flux—where markets expand even as meaning erodes, and where success, stripped of accountability, leaves deep human scars.

Shashwata Ray Chaudhuri’s evocative piece on Tottenham Hotspur’s improbable 2024–25 season set the tone early in the year. While ostensibly about sport, it read unmistakably as a business parable—about leadership under pressure, institutional resilience, and the fine line between collapse and comeback. Tottenham’s brush with relegation alongside its Europa League triumph mirrored the volatility of global markets in 2025, where failure and success coexisted uncomfortably. It was a reminder that organisations, like people, are shaped as much by belief and culture as by resources.

That tension between aspiration and collapse was explored with devastating intimacy by Sharad Raj in Rohit Arya & When Dreams Turn Desperate. This was perhaps the year’s most painful business story—because it exposed the economy of dreams. Through the tragic Powai hostage crisis involving a failed actor-casting director, Sharad laid bare the entertainment industry’s ruthless hierarchy, where hope is endlessly sold but dignity is rarely protected. Mumbai’s film economy, he showed, thrives on aspiration while offering no safety net for those it discards. In doing so, the piece reframed mental health not as an individual failing but as an economic outcome of systemic neglect.

If Sharad’s writing exposed the human cost of ambition, Monojit Lahiri’s cluster of essays interrogated the industries that manufacture desire itself—advertising, branding and celebrity culture. His affectionate yet unsparing tribute, Reflections of Advertising’s Mr. Bharat!, celebrated Piyush Pandey as the man who humanised Indian advertising by giving it language, emotion and cultural confidence. Pandey’s insistence on speaking in the idiom of Bharat—not anglicised aspiration—was framed as a business revolution that democratised consumption and redefined leadership in creative industries.

But Monojit was equally clear-eyed about what advertising has become. In Is Branding Yesterday? Passé? Dead?, he examined whether branding as a sacred discipline still holds relevance in a service-driven, hyper-customised, algorithm-led economy. Drawing on global thinkers and case studies, the piece suggested that predictability—once branding’s greatest strength—may now be its death knell. In a world where experience is the product, brands can no longer hide behind legacy or logos.

This argument deepened in Entertainment Hijacks Sales in Adville, where Monojit questioned whether advertising’s obsession with entertainment has eclipsed its core purpose—to sell. As campaigns chase virality, awards and cinematic spectacle, the product itself often disappears. The essay read as both critique and caution: creativity without strategy, he argued, is indulgence masquerading as innovation.

That concern carried forward into Challenging Credibility Or Influencing Sale?, where Monojit dissected India’s celebrity endorsement culture. From Leela Chitnis to contemporary superstars, he traced how star power, when misaligned with brand values or social context, becomes an expensive distraction. In an era of polarisation and hyper-scrutiny, celebrity silence—or speech—has commercial consequences. Endorsements, he warned, now demand ethical alignment, not just glamour.

Monojit’s exploration of identity reached its most philosophical expression in How Indian Is Indian Advertising? Here, voices like Santosh Desai, Mitali Lahiri, Raghu Rai and Jatin Das debated whether Indian advertising reflects genuine cultural insight or merely cosmetic tokenism. The conclusion was deliberately unresolved—Indian consumers themselves are hybrid, contradictory, global and rooted. Advertising, like business, must navigate that complexity honestly or risk irrelevance.

While advertising interrogated persuasion, The Daily Eye #Newsdesk focused on power structures shaping the global economy. The report on rising global inequality mapped how wealth concentration, housing crises, healthcare privatisation, climate vulnerability and democratic erosion are not parallel crises but interlinked outcomes of the same economic logic. India’s urban-rural divide, job scarcity and climate precarity were framed as business failures of policy imagination, not inevitabilities.

That structural lens sharpened in the #Newsdesk report on PoSH implementation across political parties, which treated women’s safety as an economic and democratic necessity. Featuring voices across party lines, the piece exposed how political organisations exempt themselves from the very workplace laws they legislate. Power without compliance, the article suggested, is not governance—it is privilege institutionalised.

Vinta Nanda’s two essays gave the year its moral spine. In Backlash on DEI and Intellectual Inequality, she dismantled the global right-wing assault on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, revealing it as a calculated economic strategy. By dismantling inclusive education and workplace policies even as AI reshapes labour markets, elites ensure that access to future economies remains restricted. The attack on DEI, she argued, is not cultural—it is financial engineering.

Her second piece, Peace Demands More Than Progress, written in the shadow of the Pahalgam tragedy, confronted the illusion that technological and economic advancement automatically lead to peace. Violence persists, she wrote, because development remains exclusionary. When dignity, employment and justice are denied, progress becomes hollow. Peace, in her formulation, is not a sentiment—it is an investment.

The year’s business narrative closed on a note of strategic ambition with Sameer Nair’s Masterstroke, reported by The Daily Eye #Newsdesk. Applause Entertainment’s acquisition of screen rights to six Jeffrey Archer novels was framed not merely as a content deal, but as a declaration: Indian studios are no longer just adapting local stories—they are shaping global fiction. Rooted in character, scale and confidence, the move positioned Indian creative leadership as globally competitive, not derivative.

Taken together, these pieces charted a year where business could no longer pretend neutrality. Advertising confronted its own excesses. Entertainment exposed its casualties. Leadership was measured not just by growth but by responsibility. Inequality was revealed as design, not accident. And creativity—at its best—remained an act of resistance.

This was The Daily Eye’s Business lens in 2025: not a celebration of markets, but an examination of what markets make of us.