How far have we come?

In the summer of 2006, I had studied a lot of AIR manuals spanning the second half of the last century and carried out a review of the history of the broad direction of the legal system of this country through the reading of a number of publications which found their way into the markets and libraries at the turn of the new millenium.

Nothing can be more frustrating for an individual than the inefficiency of a redressal forum or system and the legal system of this country bestows just this helplessness on its subjects. The following contains one of the most comprehensive and insightful readings I had come across in the course of the two months of my brief tryst with the fundamentals of law in this country. The incredible feature of this reading, apart from its quality is the time of its composition. Drafted and published at a time very close to the formation of the constitution, it exhibits a rare clarity defining the purpose and the requisite fundamentals behind the execution of law. As one progresses through the script, one realises its ever growing relevance in modern day life in this country and makes one wonder just how far have we come in the last 60 odd years?

Excerpts from the speech delivered at the inaugural meeting of the Legal Study Circle of the Calcutta Small Causes COURT Club on the 10th of march, 1951 under the presidentship of Sir Arthur Trevor Harries, Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court and in the presence of H. E. Dr. Kailash nath Katju, Governor of W. Bengal:

The March of Statutory Laws in IndiaThe law dominates the whole of life. Every activity is subject to legal regulation, from personal habits to the ways of earning one’s living. The humblest man cannot pass through life without coming into contact with the machinery of the law. Whether you are a businessman, a labourer, an agriculturist, a landlord or a tenant you are coming up against the law at every turn. The enormous strides in statutory laws today are not necessarily an indication in the stride of national development. India with her teeming millions most of whom are illiterate and disorganized, presents a problem which raises the fundamental issue how far legislation and statute can be made the foundation and basis of nation building.

The ideal is and the practice should be the less the laws the better for the country and its citizens. The reason for this is that if you make the laws too numerous and too complex touching men’s life at every conceivable point, there are bound to be in the very nature of things many breaches of such laws both conscious and unconscious and such breaches are apt to be too frequent.

Life is greater than law. Life will express itself through laws if possible, but without laws if compliance with them is made impossible. That is a truth very often ignored. Also numerous and frequent breaches of law which are difficult to comply with have the tendency to convert the state into a punitive institution. The ideal of a welfare state legislating for the good of its citizens in every sphere of life has to steer carefully enough to avoid the Scylla of public disrespect and the Charybdis of punitive tyranny.

Legislation like any other human act and perhaps more than any other requires thoughtful planning. The legislatures must have in view sufficiently clear in their minds the objective that they intend to reach. Each and every legislation that they put on the statute book must then be so directed as to be in aid of that main objective. Random legislation will always defeat its own purpose. Also, legislation is not like the clothes to be put on casually and taken off equally casually but is intended to be the very sinews and arteries of orderly life and existence. It is not a practical proposition for any country through means of legislation to achieve at the same time all and every conceivable reform-industrial reform, labour reform, social reform, political reform, religious reform, and moral reform. A nation cannot be reformed by laws. The reform must well from within and must be part of the life of people.

Laws today passed by the legislatures are frittered away in conflicting tendencies. The present spectacle is like that of a high powered motor car whose gear is on the neutral but whose accelerator is being pressed hard in every manner so that the engine is constantly running out but there is no movement. Legislation is not normally an instrument for reform but is only one for registering a certain stage of public opinion already reached. If the vacuum between public opinion and legislation is great then the laws and the people do not react on one another.

Democracy is said to be the government of the common man but it is not recognized that legislation is not the job of the amateur politician. Legislation has always been a very skilled and technical work and more so in the growing complexities of modern life. Constant amendments raise difficult and sometimes impossible problems of construction where justice is defeated and adjudication becomes a farce. The sine qua non of good sound legislation is good careful draftsmanship. The existing system and principle in drafting statutes require radical improvement. Statute drafting in India should be the care and job of individuals specially trained for the work.

Federal democracy under the written constitution like any other form of democracy depends for its very existence on the rule of law. The rule of law must be clear and well defined. A nation that does not know how to respect the rule of law and the judiciary as its final interpreter is a nation that is not fit for the democratic way of life.

- delivered by Mr. Justice P B Mukharji of the Calcutta High Court.

laakh take ki ek baat!

Quote of the day...
Padh likh kar kya karna hai?
ek din to marna hi hai yaar...
char din ki zindagi hai jee le
agle janam nursery se hi shuru karna hai phir ek baar!

- courtesy: my exam afflicted brother of 13 years.

The origin'al' chain

The temperature at my current station today touched 42degrees Celsius. At jodhpur, this year, my vacation has been a warm one, warm in terms of the progressing summer and also the intimacy shared with one half of my family in the 8 days that have gone by.

Jodhpur is the place where my grandparents (mom’s folks) reside and where my mom has spent few significant long years before she got married to Dad. This is not my first visit to the suncity but never before has the visit meant so much to me, perhaps because my years were too few earlier, or because my successive visits were made at very short intervals. After an interval of close to 3 years this time, I have come to know things that I was merely acquaintances with previously and also made friends with new places and experiences.

I have learnt to read the newspaper in hindi, tried my hand at using the datun (neem stalk used as an economical one piece substitute for both the toothbrush and toothpaste by rural folksmen and also health conscious city dwellers of predominantly the previous generation) albeit with failure, savoured delicious marwari delicacies prepared by mamiji, dined south Indian style with the food served on freshly plucked banana leaves in the middle of the desert, explaining to the diners the formalities of eating on the leaf and the the correlation between the direction of folding the leaf post dinner and the non verbal communication of having/not having enjoyed the meal, much to their amusement (Ref- the folding of the lower half of the banana leaf up indicates a thumbs up for the cook and vice versa), put on a few kilograms thanks to a daily dose of the original desi icecream, the rabri malai kulfi (a thick milk preparation served in a conical shape on a stick) which is inaccessible in Hyderabad, learnt to decipher a few words of marwari and utter a badly accented greeting in ‘mujro sa! Katthe jaoo so? Mhare ghar aao so ‘, (Hi there! Where are you off to? Do come home sometime- and the people here pass a warm smile even to the stranger on the road) and many more of these trivial likes.

The significance of this visit, however, lies in that stroll I took with granny in the neighbourhood park yesterday that acquainted me with my roots.With every step that granny took towards the higher generation while she recanted the story of one half of my family to me, I realized how little I knew about my origins and just how I had come to be. Not only did I know very little of the generations that exist only in our family's history now, but I also knew very little of the surviving generations viz., my parents and my grandparents. The lives and history of five generations now lie before me and I am now trying to identify which parts of me trace back to these roots. Chances are they are but few. Roots often germinate in a place seldom traceable, travel far and wide, crossing regions, states and countries, and the tree, as it grows, gives out seeds that again seek abode in far off places giving birth to a new being. Some of us travel with the roots and some of us with the seeds. I think I grew out of the seed.

For new sprouts like me, origins are thus tricky affairs. People say that I am half a marwari because my mom hails from the marwar region. Its like saying to my kids a few years hence, that you are half a telugu because your mother hails from Andhra pradesh. Amusing!

Right now, however, I am getting geared up to discover the other family tree that I am part of when I visit the other set of my grandfolks ( Dad's parents) during the next week. To more discoveries!

I can feel the sun

It had rained heavily last evening and spanned throughout the night, but as I stepped outside my house porch today, well into the morning, the weather was wornful and sultry. I foreboded the tan my brown skin would cruelly be subject to, despite having worn a full sleeved red and white striped cotton shirt, acclaimed to be the best sun tan protection by grandma. the sun's protracted glare was mockery towards my incessant attempts to attain snow white's complexion, even as I constantly tried to remind myself of the dichotomy of the Indian cliché with the west's fascination of the tanned skin that was, though I would but have got grade A if not higher in fairness by brown Indian skin standards. Just as I was contemplating discarding this thought for the time being, as i had graver issues to burden my seventeen year old Saturday morning mind with, I couldn’t help seeing the reflections of a more universal nature in this phenomenon, the Idolization, in whatever degree of introspective abstract, of the ruler, the powerful, and on the other hand the complex and successful seeking refuge with the simple, as the wise Wilde had put it," simplicity is the ultimate respite of the complex."

Invictus *

One of favorite poems goes:-

Out of the night that covers me,
BLack as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced or cried aloud;
under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horrors of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY(1849-1903)

* Picked from The Prison Diary (Jeffrey Archer)

Repeat the Q, please

I didn’t know it was such a circulated piece of writing, till my sister enlightened me on its internet offline messages journey. It appeared in the Hindustan Times and though technical errors may be arguable, its good humour nonetheless:
‘The UN conducted a worldwide survey. The only question asked was: “Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?” The survey was a huge failure. In Africa, they didn’t know what food meant. In India, they didn’t know what honest meant. In Europe, they didn’t know what shortage meant. In China, they didn’t know what opinion meant. In west Asia, they didn’t know what solution meant. In South America, they didn’t know what please meant. And in the US, they didn’t know what the rest of the world meant.'

udayan's smile says it all :)

stock market quiz:
1) how does a blind stock market speculator know how the market is faring?
Ans. He listens to CNBC
2) How does an illiterate stock market speculator know how the market is faring?
Ans. He listens to CNBC Awaz
3) How does a deaf stock market speculator know how the market is faring?
Ans. He reads the scrolls on CNBC
4) How does a deaf and illiterate stock market speculator know how the market is faring?
Ans. He studies Udayan Mukherjee's smile. (Ref- One doesn't need to be a facereader to interpret the direction and degree of the curve of his mouth.. it moves in direct proportion to the sensex!)
5) How does a deaf and blind stock market speculator know how the market is faring?
Ans. Sorry dude, even CNBC cant help you. tough luck!

how abt a research on the cyclicity of mood swings?

Outlook (reference the Indian political weekly) and its mood swings are getting increasingly violent by the issue. If you were to pick up the latest issue ( dated Jan 28 2008) of the I-forget-how-many-years-old magazine and it happens to be the first issue of the magazine that you read, chances are that you will never pick another issue. Of course, the assumption in this case is that you are the kind of reader who likes reading stuff worth reading. In this issue, however, all the way from the cover, to the cover story and beyond, the magazine has failed to live up to its intellectual potential or seems more likely to be a part of a series intended as an experiment into commercial success ‘ the masala way’.

The cover throws upon you the catch of the experiment ‘he has the look, the attitude, the money. But when it comes to sex and marriage, the small town guy is still a macho man.’ I failed to comprehend to contrast between the two phenomenons. Its only when out of curiosity you pick up the story to make sense of the cover abstract that you realize that ‘the look, the attitude and the money’ has been equated to metrosexuality. And the conclusion of the entire survey is simply that the Indian small town man still wants a virgin wife! I bitched about statistical research in my previous post and this survey by a leading, usually sane and occasionally unusually insane magazine is a classical example of the misuse and futility of statistical research (conducted 999 out of 1000 times inappropriately). Read the survey methodology- 840 odd men sample the entire small town population. You’d be a fool to believe these figures are not inflated atleast by 100 percent. Read the survey and you’ll further find that you can sufficiently conclude that the survey was conducted in just two towns- ludhiana and hoshiarpur (barely 60 kms apart) - one of whom will not even qualify as a small town by many standards. And then the findings of the survey! Insanity, time-pass and printspace-pass do not quite make a very fruitful combination and their synergy can induce temporary mental disorders in many a readers- read frustration and irritation. Coupled with all this mental trauma comes visual torture, the editors having converted the magazine virtually into a porn mag this issue. Outlook’s experiments at masala success which have been developing with increasing frequency over the last 2 years may be affecting readership in more ways than the people running the magazine think.

I for one, however, would still tolerate its mood swings. Though it comes out with the worst in popular English Indian print media once in a while, the best in this space has also been outlook’s domain. Two issues back it ran a full fledged story on the bibi assassination and the future of Pakistan as it can be hypothesized thence. It is by far the most authoritative and cohesive document on this issue in Indian print media space that I have come across. In this issue too, inspite of all its prostitution, it contains a few delights. Sample the quote of the season- “I welcome the merchant of death… to corruption, official apathy, terrorism, darkness and despair” – Thuglak editor Cho Ramaswamy welcoming Gujarat CM Narendra Modi to Tamil Nadu. It’s a pity Mr. Modi cannot approach the election commission for this!

merlin didnt like statistics!

Academic research is just not my cup of tea! I have a strong dislike for statistics and any results they predict. So, having to do a heavy weight (6 credits paper compared with 3 credits for the other 5) compulsory research project in the final semester of your undergraduate studies doesn’t make life seem any easy. This comes with the additional realization of the fact of ours (St. Francis batch of 2005-08) being the first ever batch subjected to the semester system (would that qualify us as pioneers or guinea pigs?) and its resultant consequent of we (B com professionals) having been given only one semester (90 working days or 4 months of college including abundant holidays) to complete the project as compared to our seniors who had more than twice that time (annual examination system). Thank them now, be elated, be proud or blame them for setting such standards in this research exercise over the last years that the evaluators now expect nothing short of a PhD paper from undergraduate students who now have less than half the time with more than twice the pressure (academic and life- read admission into an MBA oops diploma awarding B-school, or fulltime CA articleship or CS inter or final examinations). Add to that fools like me who don’t believe in the credibility of statistical analysis of most kinds… at least the ones that I can undertake at this stage of my education in finance and statistics and thus plan to do a research project over a period of 10 days by simply anthologizing various papers done earlier and pick up a super-sophisticated topic like ‘diversification of banks into non traditional banking sectors’ worded simply to people-with-dislike-for-long-titles as ‘universal banking’. You have 40 days to do your project and it takes you 30 days to realize that things are worse than it seems, in other words, that you have created just the right environment for the world to eat you up alive.

You break your I-stayed-awake-till-dash-hours-after-midnight records every night, live with the constant fear of developing spondalysis with the ever increasing growth rate in the number of hours you spend in front of the comp each day and each night, you google, you altavista (I don’t know if the verbs have yet found their place in the dictionary) almost like never before, read up every article and paper there exists on the topic, curse JSTOR for commercializing academic information on the internet (read charging users for access to academic papers after providing an abstract which enables the reader to frame a far-from-vague-idea), write close to 40 pages of notes (yes handwritten!), compose the introduction and review of literature (9 pages- keyboard typed- without copy and paste) and then one day the bomb drops on you! You learn that the osmania university evaluators who had far too much confidence in the ability of undergraduates with one semester of statistics as a paper, now have the backing of the management of the college who insist and send a guideline requisition to the evaluators asking them to make the project methodology and analysis a prime criterion in the evaluation.!

The 40 pages of written material now find their place in the bin, ditto with the 9 pages of the word document now occupying unnecessary place on my hard disk (even in the recycle bin) and the topic is finally discarded for I did not plan to do any significant analysis on the project and was hoping only to create a well structured and cohesive theory base for the work that has already been done. An analysis, which I had not thought of, and which was now required, of any nature in this topic would have to be based primarily on secondary data, the only accessible documents being the annual reports of banks, which most claim suffer from non-reliability and inadequacy, thus nullifying the entire project. Added to this is the incapacity of the researcher (read me) with regards to the awareness and competency in use of analytical tools and techniques that a research of this nature and complexity requires. A difficult task now seems super-difficult, almost to the point of being impossible and it seems only wise to discard the foolishness and move on… to a new topic.

That’s 10 days now to come up with a new topic, do the research and drop the bomb of having changed the topic at this sensitive time on my research guide. This doesn’t make me fancy academic research any more than I did earlier. Only maybe less.