The line ticked up. A hundred points on the Sensex, a steady pulse at 25,500 for the Nifty. It’s the financial equivalent of finding a nickel in your couch cushions while your house is slowly filling with smoke. We’re supposed to care. We’re supposed to look at these green numbers and feel a warm glow of domestic stability, ignoring the fact that the global economy is currently held together by duct tape and the frantic prayers of central bankers.

The market opened with the kind of cautious optimism usually reserved for a second date with someone you met on a dubious app. IT shares are leading the charge. Again. It’s a familiar script. TCS, Infosys, and the rest of the Bengaluru heavyweights are clawing back territory, mostly because the American tech giants realized that firing half their staff and replacing them with hallucinating chatbots requires a lot of backend cleanup. That’s where the Indian IT machine comes in. It’s not about innovation; it’s about maintenance. It’s about keeping the lights on while the C-suite in Mountain View figures out how to turn "synergy" into actual cash flow.

Then there’s Eternal. The name itself feels like a threat. The stock is gaining, riding a wave of retail enthusiasm that defies basic logic. Investors are piling in, chasing a narrative that feels increasingly untethered from things like "earnings" or "reality." It’s the classic FOMO trap. You see your neighbor’s portfolio swell and suddenly you’re convinced that a company selling vague promises of digital dominance is a safer bet than gold. It’s not. It never is. But the momentum is there, and in a market this jittery, momentum is the only god anyone worships.

Let’s talk about the 25,500 mark on the Nifty. Traders treat these round numbers like holy relics. There’s no fundamental reason why 25,500 is more significant than 25,499, but we’ve collectively decided that crossing this arbitrary threshold means we’re all going to be okay. It’s a psychological security blanket. If the index stays above that line, the narrative remains "resilient." If it dips, it’s a "correction." The semantics are exhausting.

The friction here isn’t in the numbers, though. It’s in the trade-offs. While the Sensex bloats, the actual cost of doing business in the real world is skyrocketing. You want to build a data center to support all this "Eternal" growth? That’ll be a $1.2 billion entry fee, assuming you can find a plot of land that isn’t tied up in twenty years of litigation or under three feet of monsoon water. The government wants its cut, too. The 18% GST on basically everything that makes life bearable is a constant, grinding pressure. You can’t have a digital revolution if the people meant to lead it are spending half their salary on rent and the other half on taxes for services they don't actually receive.

The IT sector's gain is particularly cynical. These companies are currently navigating a brutal pivot. They’re trying to convince clients that they’re "AI-first" while simultaneously praying that their legacy contracts don't evaporate. The trade-off is human. For every point the Nifty gains, there’s a project manager in Pune wondering if their job will exist in eighteen months. The margins are thinning. The "labor arbitrage" model—the golden goose of the last two decades—is dying a slow, noisy death. You can only underbid the competition for so long before you’re just paying people to sit in darkened rooms and wait for the inevitable.

So, the Sensex is up. The Nifty is holding. The tickers are green, and the news anchors are using their "everything is fine" voices. But look closer at the volume. Look at the institutional investors quietly moving their chips off the table while retail hobbyists buy the top. It’s a game of musical chairs played at 120 beats per minute.

The screen says 25,500. The reality says something much more expensive.

Who actually wins when the market goes up by 0.4 percent while the price of a head of cauliflower doubles?