JOIN USThis is a photograph from the summer of 1997. It was taken outside the main Academic Block of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), often referred to as the ‘Harvard of the East’. I am standing on the right, with my jacket draped over my left arm; and to my right, is my dear friend and classmate, Vikram Raghavan.
Vikram is now a senior legal officer with the World Bank in Washington DC, after having graduated at the very top of our class, cornering almost all of the gold medals on offer (those of us left behind in his wake, had to be content with a gold medal or two he left behind!). Like Vikram, after entering the profession post law school, I have traversed the world and worked in various professional capacities; but, unlike him, I have, after stints in several different cities in India and overseas, settled back in my home town Bengaluru and look back with much nostalgia at the city that nurtured me.
This photograph was taken a few weeks before we graduated – the fifth batch of students to graduate from NLSIU. We had come ‘properly’ and ‘officially’ attired – on lines similar to what we would perhaps face upon joining the Bar – for our law school’s annual students’ day valedictory and awards ceremony that evening. Even if I say so, we do look dapper and well turned-out; our footwear, in particular, probably new black shoes for the ‘formal’ life that awaited us!
A picture that is 18 years old may not, in the opinion of many people, qualify as being one from “old” Bangalore. But how much things have changed in less then two decades. All of this makes even those photographs from just a few years ago in Bengaluru appear “old”, especially since many of the well-known landmarks have made way for newer, often uglier but sometimes better, structures — parodying in many ways the fast-changing fabric of the City’s people, cultures and traditions.
Nagarbhavi – where the NLSIU is located – was a sleepy hamlet on the outskirts of the City. The Law School’s campus had been carved out in NLSIU’s case just a few years before this photograph was taken, from out of the large and unwieldy campus of the Bangalore University. Our campus consisted of several hostels interspersed with playgrounds and open areas, scattered around a main academic block.
| The genesis of NLSIU had much to do with a band of committed teachers and administrators, and lead by a singular focussed leader. Our institution and each of us owed then (and still owe today) much of our respective individual successes to the vision, hard work and dedication of NLSIU’s founder director, Dr NR Madhava Menon, who virtually single handedly got the Bar Council of India (and the judiciary) to accept the establishment of a ‘national university’ just for legal studies in the 1980s. NLSIU was fortunate to have got a grant of a large piece of land for its campus in Bengaluru, which was first built and occupied in 1991.
Nagarbhavi is today, sadly, yet another agglomeration of poorly designed, slap-dash kind of buildings. In the five years we were at Law School, I rode to college every day from Indiranagar where I stayed, in less than half an hour (Vikram and many others had just a short walk from their hostels). The traffic and the state of the roads currently, now makes me re-consider even taking a trip back to my alma mater for the sheer time it takes.
But this story too has a silver lining. The area in the background to this photograph today is virtually unrecognisable. Thanks largely to the students’ initiatives, many trees crowd this area today. We have had the honour to have learnt so much from so many stalwarts both in academia and at the Bar – apart from Dr NRM (as the Director was known), Prof Dr NS Gopalakrishnan, Prof Babu Mathew and Ram Jethmalani to name just a few. Having classmates from all states of the Indian Union (barring one I believe), enriched our experiences and inculcated in us a deep respect for our diverse nation united under our Constitution – a creed driven home by the (then) unique feature of having our Constitutional Law classes conducted by three professors all together (Profs Vijayakumar, Mallar and Devidas) taking diametrically opposite stands in class.
As NLSIU has just celebrated its silver jubilee, my classmates and I wish it well and hope that it will to strive a create a new niche for itself in an ever challenging global environment, as it has undoubtedly done to change the very concept of legal education in India.
Siddharth Raja
(Founder-partner, ‘Samvad Partners, Advocates’)