A National Law School MagazineQUIRK

Trimester II, 2015-16

In this ISSUE:Institution Building at NLS

Sex and the CGPAFall of 19(1)(a)

Juice Shop BubbleAn Open Letter to Law School Students

Free Riding on Santa’s SleighPossibly About Flying Cars

Confessions of a ‘One of Us’Being Learned

Panopticism in Law SchoolBrownian Motion

Princess and the ‘O’

In CONVERSATION with:Prof. Sarasu Esther Thomas

Mr. Narayana MurthySBA Office Bearers

NLS Alumni Association

2QUIRK

It was an incredible moment for all of us when we released the first issue of Quirk last trimester. We were naturally very anxious about the release but the highly encouraging

response we received only strengthened our conviction in the idea of Quirk. We are very grateful to all those who submit-ted pieces for this edition and even though there were some we could not include, we will definitely consider them for future editions.

Our editorial process this trimester started with us wasting the first two weeks, then going into a mode of panic to make a draft storyboard. Our initial deadline was to release this is-sue on Alumni Day, but as usual, Law School got in the way. Finally, after a lot of procrastination and a considerable degree of nagging we’ve managed to come up with something that we are proud of.

We are sure this edition has something for everyone. This issue carries an interview with a faculty member who has seen Law School grow with her, an insider piece by an alumni who nar-rates their intimate experience with caste in Law School and a student submission imploring us to take responsibility for the task of learning in our own hands, among several others that comment on the state of our University. We also have several lighter pieces talking about disparate topics from Secret Santa to Flying Cars. Also featured are two brilliant poems to further diversify the content we showcase.

For this edition, our focus has been to expand our contributing base to include multiple pieces from students outside of the ed-itorial team and extend our interviews to people who you don’t often spot on campus. An attempt has also been made to un-derstand our identity as that of an institution as opposed to the disparate elements that may define our daily experience here. It is our hope that this issue provokes, informs and entertains you.

We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did compiling it!

With love, Quirk TeamNational Law School of India University, Bangalore.

Editorial Quirk Team

Contact usPlease feel free to reach out to us at quirk.mag@gmail.com.

We welcome interesting articles, rants, poetry, book reviews, film reviews or anything else from people within or outside Law School. We also love suggestions on how to make the next edition better.

Aditya Patel (V) wishes he could sleep with his eyes open.

Apurva Shukla (V) wishes someone clicked decent pictures of him so that his Tinder profile got him more matches.

Radhika Goyal (II) wishes she could walk out at night without any fear.

Sakhi Shah (IV) wishes for world peace! And chocolate.

Shikhar Garg (III) wishes wishes didn’t come true. Otherwise we would stop valuing things or working for them.

Typesetting and design by Apurva Shukla Printing at Sumukha Printers, Vijaynagar, Bangalore

Cover image by Dhanya Rajagopal

Quirk Team is deeply thankful for the generous support of our Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Venkata Rao.

A big thanks to Dhanush, Sayan, Sregurupriya and Yamuna for helping us transcribe the interviews

Support QuirkThis edition of Quirk costs around Rs. 50 to print and 300 hours of work by our editorial team.

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3 QUIRK

Sarasu Ma’am: A Law School Odyssey

P rofessor Sarasu Esther Thomas, well known for her incredi-bly popular family law course, has the unique distinction of

doing her LLB, LLM and PhD from NLS. Beneath her soft spoken demeanour she hides a biting sense of humor which has largely contributed to the success of the Facebook page, ‘Heard in Law School’. Quirk Team felt there would be no one better to provide an insight to the life and times of Law School.

Law School has gone through many changes since you’ve been here. What strikes you as most peculiar between now and then?

Probably the first is the campus, because we moved from Cen-tral College to here. The others include growth of, research centers which we did not have in the old campus. We had only CWL and LSC (which at that time was a research center). And the third is the more recent one, being the way a lot of decisions are made. Earlier, it would be the entire community deciding. Even for a fee hike, you’d have the students, the faculty and the administration deliberating. Everyone would be a part of that discussion. Now that system is not there. These might not be the biggest but these are the three that come to mind.

Why did you choose to pursue your LLM and PhD here after your LLB? Especially since most LLBs here choose to go out-side not just Law School but the country as well.

The thing is we needed teachers at that time. And though I did get admission elsewhere, Prof Menon felt that it was better that I stayed and studied here. Because we were really shorthanded at that time. So I was doing my LLM and teaching simultane-ously. I assisted Prof. Pillai in Corporate Law and taught Family Law. I was also the warden and faculty advisor to the SBA. I was also the internship coordinator. I would be working till 1:30 every night. (laughs)

Why did you decide to pick up teaching rather than the usual law school path of going to a firm and also, why did choose to teach Family Law in particular?

Actually I liked Family Law and Corporate Law, to be very frank. So I started teaching both of them. But I always found Family Law more interesting, because Corporate Law didn’t re-ally change from year to year. And Family Law was challenging to teach. Part of it was codified, part of it was uncodified. That was the challenging part.

I had never thought of teaching when I was in Law School. But I remember when I was in my third year, some of my teachers, that is Prof. Menon, who was director at that time, Prof. Mitra, Prof. Vijaykumar, and a few others actually asked me togeth-er. The called me to the faculty room. All of them were there.

So first I thought I had done something wrong. And then they asked me if I would consider teaching. But at that time I wanted to give the civil services one shot because I had promised my grandparents. So I said I’ll do that as soon as I write the exam. So once I did give it a shot, I came back and spoke to Dr. Me-non, and he said come back and teach. So I joined back. It was in the third year that I actually thought about it. They said that I would make a very good teacher so why don’t I consider it. So then I did.

So the teachers were actively encouraging people to take up teaching?

I think so. I think they really wanted to have teachers to come or former students to come and teach. They approached two others but I don’t think they took up teaching. I’m not sure.

What is your favorite part of teaching here at Law School?

It would be taking class, I think. Especially when the class is in a good mood. I think the part I hate the most is the evaluation. Which any teacher will tell you, I think. But, apart from teach-ing I also enjoy the research that we do and working on research issues, finding funding and all. It is very challenging.

We’ve always heard that student-faculty interaction used to be very different in the past. How has it changed over the years? Has it changed over the years?

Actually, Law School was so far away from everything else that we didn’t have any choice but to interact with each other, I think. But we had many events on campus and the events were always well-attended. So even if there was dinner in the hostel, everyone would come. Or when there was a dandiya celebra-tion, even Prof. Menon used to dance and do the dandiya. You don’t see those things happening now. We also used to probably talk more, but that’s not as important now because people are so much more connected to their school friends and everyone else that there are too many people for them to be in touch with. So yeah, we were more close in many ways, I think, which does not happen now, which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just reflective of the way that the world is today. We used to go on picnics together and fun stuff like that.

When did this shift start happening? When did it start hap-pening that college events like Univ Week had only students?

I think it was gradual. Because earlier Univ Week used to be not just the students and teachers but also the administrative staff, their families, the teachers’ families, students’ families that were in Bangalore. It was more like a family thing. And I think it started changing because it kept being scheduled later and later. When I was the SBA Faculty advisor I insisted that it be in the

CONVERSATIONS

4QUIRKafternoon, or evening so that administrative staff could attend but I don’t know how it is now. And also we sent out the invita-tion well in advance so that people could plan. Now it’s like the day before, if you’re lucky. Or sometimes the day of the dinner, and we don’t even check the mail so regularly so we miss it. And the way that it used to be handled was we had more events on that day than committee reports so it made it more interest-ing. Sometimes the team which won things would be asked to perform again so it was a really fun event. The best of the year kind of a thing. Which does not happen now, I think. It’s more of committee reports, and I’m sure they’re interesting to the commit-tees, but it’s very boring for everyone else. It’s not a fun event. The only fun events are things like quad parties which we didn’t have.

You didn’t have quad parties then?

We didn’t have quad parties, but we had hostel parties. Com-bined parties in the hostel. Things like that. In the mess. Not in the rooms. That was never allowed. But yeah. Even the New Year Party used to be on campus, obviously without alcohol and everything. We didn’t have fifth years taking us to a farmhouse. We had a university party so everyone would come. Teachers would also come for that.

Currently, in Law School, mooting seems to be the prime ac-tivity people do. The most important things are mooting and debating. Was that always the case?

When I joined, you could join any committee you wanted be-cause there was no limit and I remember the largest number of people from my batch opted to join the Legal Services Clinic. Two of us opted to join MCS and MCS then was all of four peo-ple. I was a good mooter. But I stopped after the third year. So people said I wouldn’t get the medal and all but I didn’t really care. But the thing is that we put in a lot of effort to popular-ize mooting at that point of time, which is why it is popular and sometimes I’m not sure if we did the right thing. I mean, I was enthusiastic about mooting, so I thought everyone else should be as well. But it wasn’t such a big deal. I mean, it was very hard to get people to moot and compete and get teams to go. But we did well in the first few moots, so that’s what made a difference, I think.

Were a lot of the hostel rules ever enforced? Because there are some that were clearly never enforced. Was there ever a time when stuff like loitering, or people not being allowed to leave their hostels after 8 pm enforced?

For a long time we had just one hostel for the girls, I remember, and at night they used to lock the door. Because you should remember where Nagarbhavi was, in the middle of nowhere.

So at night the door was locked and you could not leave even if you wanted to. Room check used to be in the rooms, going and seeing if all the students were there and it used to be carried on for everyone and not just first years. Because there was a con-cern about safety.

It would also happen in the boys’ hostel but I’m not sure if they followed rules with the same rigor. Some committees did, and some didn’t. Of course there were people who would find ways out. That always happens. But I do re-member that a bus used to come early in the morning and if we wanted to go, the

hostel gate was closed so we used to just jump over the gate. And when Dr. Menon found out he was really angry. He came and blasted all the girls. But the thing is even though he did that we still used to jump over the gate. See, you had to catch the bus. So a lot of people did that. It was the bus that would go to the city. There was one at 6 in the morning and the next was at 8:30 or later than that, actually. On the weekends. And there were no autos here, not even at the circle. And the buses weren’t very frequent.

Is there anything in Nagarbhavi right now that was there back then when you were studying here? Or is everything new?

I think Surya was there. And Amma’s was there opposite the gate. There was a person who used to run a chaat stall, but now he is there at the circle. He has a shop there now, and his cart is inside the shop. These people were there.

How did seniors interact with juniors? Was there “positive interaction”?

They didn’t do anything. All the men tried to hit on all the women, which hasn’t changed. And things don’t change that much that drastically. The seniors were always very nice. We were told at our interviews that ragging doesn’t happen. The parents weren’t really worried about ragging. We did have a Tal-ent Night kind of a thing, for the first years where everyone was

forced to do something, regardless of if they had talent or not. We did not really have any positive interaction as we call it today.

What do you think of the expectations stu-dents have from college now that is has become famous and very well known?

You all have a better Family Law course, I can tell you that. (laughs) But it’s true. Now there are higher expectations of the students, that’s right. And the thing is that the teachers now are teaching fewer courses. Earlier, some of them would teach two courses, or a group of three would teach two or three courses. That must have been hard for them. So definitely the expecta-

Actually, Law School was so far away from everything else that we didn’t have any choice but to interact with

each other

All the men tried to hit on all the women, which

hasn’t changed.

5 QUIRKdoubt about it. But that has happened only in the last few years. I don’t think it has been a constant.

Would you say the blame lies entirely with the students?

No, I don’t think so. But of course if they can get an advantage for it you can’t blame them. But they ought to have the maturity to say no, one shouldn’t do this because it’s affecting the institu-tion. Which we have not been able to do.

If there was a message you could give to students entering Law School, as an alumnus, not a professor, or as someone who has experienced student life here.

Oh god don’t make do this. I’d always tell students to work very hard, and not get stuck with watching movies on Shush or reading junk, but to interact with people and take part in as

many activities as they can, because it’s just the only chance that they will get.

As the warden, what is your principle on rule enforcement?

I have to enforce the rules. You have to en-force the rules that have been given to you, and part of our rules are given to us by our executive council. But I have been encouraging the SBA and the hostel committees to come up with a new set of rules that are acceptable. Completely radical rules won’t be acceptable, but bring something which shows that you have taken care of security issues which is what the EC is most concerned about. Within that we can find some way of taking those possible. There are also UGC rules, the no alcohol, no cigarettes anywhere in an academic institution. So those are things we can’t go against.

Has the student body’s role changed over the years? We have heard that the student body used to be more activist about things.

The student body is not a body anymore. In the sense that you all don’t really come together to do anything. It’s all either dele-gated to your representatives or most people don’t care. Earlier, people did. If anyone needed some fundraiser done, everyone would come together. There was no question of not having

quorum at GBMs. Now you can’t have quorums at GBMs. There will be no polit-ical participation by students at any level. And also in terms of personal interaction. If somebody’s sick, hardly anyone goes to the hospital to see them. •

tions are different.

Do you see a difference in how students generally conduct themselves?

They are the same. I don’t think there’s any difference then and now. I’ve been a student, so I know how people have fudged projects and everything. So it’s not something new that the present generation of students has discovered, as I keep telling my colleagues. Nor is romance new. So that’s the whole prob-lem. Anything you look at, whether it’s drugs or sex or romance or whatever, I think earlier batches have been there, done that. So there’s really nothing new that you are doing. Sorry to say this.

That’s really good to know because we’re constantly told that we are a weird sort of generation.

That’s a judgement for other generations to make, right? My class was a small one. We had some 55 people and there are 9 couples who married each other in that batch. 18 people out of 55 who married each other and are still married. That couldn’t have happened without romance on campus.

Do you identify with the notion that people say that the stan-dards of academics and research in Law School have reduced over the years?

I wouldn’t say it has reduced over the years but what has hap-pened is that one thing we as teachers try to ensure quality con-trol. But the fact is that people have found ways of managing the system, getting grades which they don’t deserve. There’s this whole perception among teachers that people will go and get re-evaluations or whatever is available to them to change the marks and that may not be correct in every case. All your rules which allow students to write old examinations again to get bet-ter grades is ridiculous. So anyone who can afford to pay and has some time off can work and get grades for something which the class finished some four years back.

But I think all these things started because students were having problems like I’m sure re-evaluation started because certain teachers were seen to be biased.

I have no problem with re-evaluation. The prob-lem is when the person who is evaluating must be properly told what it is about. My papers are open book papers. The evaluators are not told it’s open book. They are just sent the papers and the key. I don’t know of they’re informed that is is open book, or even if they understand what it means. So obviously I’ll have a higher standard. So there is a perception and I don’t think it’s only among teachers, but also alum, which has led to this. Definitely the academic standards have fallen. There is no

The student body is not a body anymore. In the sense that you all don’t really come together to

do anything.

The fact is that people have found ways of man-aging the system, getting grades which they don’t

deserve.

6QUIRK

I recall Professor Nandimath using a phrase more than once during our orientation ceremony, with all us wide-eyed wee little first years listening in awe to how we were

becoming part of an intellectually elite institution: Academic rigour. It lies at the very core of our existence at Law School. Four projects, eight exams, three months. Really hits you like a whirlwind when you first get here. Add to that the constant reminders of the standards you’re expected to uphold and how they’re falling. Throw in the challenges of mooting, debating, writing publishable papers, etc. for good measure. Could it be anything but obvious that our lives here are brimming with academic rigour? Actually, it couldn’t be anything but wrong. Blatantly wrong.

Lawyers rely so often on distinctions for their bread and butter, so let’s make one here. A packed schedule does not constitute academic rigour. The hours in a day you spend engaged in something Law School has thrown at you does not determine how academically rigor-ous your life is. The idea I’m proposing is simple: quality, not quantity. How many of your courses are challeng-ing you intellectually? Do you look back over a period of time and think to yourself: Man, my thought process on this issue or general way of thinking has become so much more mature? Let me be clear at the outset: I do not wish to undermine the chal-lenges we face at first trying to get used to this crazy schedule and mad rat race. But once the dust has settled, it’s good to take a clearer look and ask questions such as the above. Of course, you’re entitled to ask: why is this question even important? Be-cause it helps us think about why we are here in the first place.

Terry Eagleton recently wrote a devastating critique of the modern university where he argued, in essence, that education in the UK has become way too commodified, and that the uni-versity as a center of critique has ceased to exist in the face of capitalist forces. He says that we are in the age of the ‘entrepre-neurial university’ that values education only for the contribu-tion it makes to the marketplace. While the point I am making does not delve nearly as deep, I am troubled by what passes for learning at Law School today. One can hear complaints on two seemingly contradictory fronts: one, that our learning is not of enough ‘practical relevance’, and two, that even in courses where the syllabus is not trite and meaningless, we do not ex-plore the nuances that make the subject interesting. It is these nuances and their centrality to the course that constitute aca-demic rigour. The first question is better suited to profession-

al treatment than my own naïve speculation, so I will confine myself to the second. And my answer to it is this: if Law School isn’t giving you academic rigour, take it for yourself.

I’ll be blunt: the system sucks. As much as The Lonely Island said it does. The ‘rigour’ of the institution is killing the academ-ic spirit and not strengthening it. To be sure, a host of other fac-tors are responsible. We have many more distractions than the legendary Law School-ites of yore who have achieved spectacu-lar things in life. And let’s not get the wrong idea here: the spirit of inquiry does not require us to become bookworms who leave

the library only to forage for food. That said, the extent to which curiosity and a desire to learn are noticeably absent in this institu-tion is alarming to say the least.

As a member of Stud Ad for the last three years, and someone taking an interest in its activities for all my time in Law School, I have seen symposia on topics ranging from the Takeover Code to refugee law. Diverse

as these sessions may have been, they had one thing in common: they saw a woefully low turnout of stu-dents from Law School. Very recently, the dean of Cornell Law School delivered a lecture on property law that was attended by six people, three of them being faculty members. This does not prove that there are no more genuinely interested people. They may have had unavoidable reasons like project submis-sions that kept them from attending. After all, rigour rears its ugly head far too often. But even factoring this in, it does show a considerable amount of apathy among our student body. It is precisely this apathy which I believe needs a cure, and it is not an insurmountable problem.

The bottom line is this: do not let the aforementioned sucky system ruin the academic experience that you can potentially have. We are all fortunate to have a relatively smart group of peers, an excellent library and enviable connections that enable us to get the likes of Noah Feldman to deliver lectures here. Use this wisely and you stand to gain an unimaginable amount. One thing we need to bear in mind closely is that this is primar-ily a vocational degree programme. Therefore, you approach the law with a limited knowledge base and worldview as it is. Do not be so caught up in working the system, getting your grades and securing your future that you ignore why you are here in the present. Before trying to score a publication for the piece on cyber crimes you just wrote, stop a while and consid-er how much criminal law you’ve read. It takes years of study

The Importance of Being LearnedKaustav Saha (Batch of 2016)

A packed schedule does not constitute aca-demic rigour. The hours in a day you spend en-gaged in something law

school has thrown at you does not determine how academically rigorous

your life is.

7 QUIRK

Pratham stands at the counter, sipping his tea in what he considers to be a dignified silence. It’s a slow, cool day. Less heat means fewer customers. His eyes narrow

as a boy, the one who insists on calling him “Umesh,” (despite his repeated reprimands and use of expletives in a language the boy doesn’t understand), crosses the road and goes to the juice shop opposite Umesh’s. The boy owes him 345 rupees, a tab that Pratham had generously opened for him as he was a loyal con-sumer. This act of disloyalty would cost him. Pratham makes a quick calculation in his head, and the boy now owes him 380. Smooth.

The allure of half-decent sandwiches seems to be too much to resist for some of his former customers. Add debatably better juice and a variety of cigarettes to that, and you have a winning juice shop. So a reasonable assumption to make would be that if one juice shop provides all of these in one place, it would be the clear favorite of a majority of the people, right? Wrong.

The vitriolic attacks and glares that Pratham had bestowed upon his former customers when a competitor opened shop opposite him had led several Law School-ites to believe that he had lost a substantial amount of business. I would attribute this shift in consumer preferences to his watery juices and constant pestering to repay credit. Add to that universal fondness for the more often than not cheerful service of his most direct compet-itor. In order to ascertain the impact of the new juice shop and other influential factors, Quirk Team decided to look into the juice shop market.

Juice shops sell a variety of products, the most common (and obvious) being juice, milkshakes and sandwiches. They com-bine that with cigarettes, tea, and flexible credit to maximize business. And as is evidenced by the existence of six juice shops on the road from Gate 0 to Surya, all of them are doing pretty well.

The oldest juice shop nearby is Juice Junction. He opened shop

in 2006, and boasts of the most experience in the refined art of extracting juice from fruits. With a workforce comprising of five workers, he also has the fastest service. Another USP had been the generator that he has, which would allow him to provide juice in a blackout, giving him a monopoly in times of darkness. But it no longer aids his business, as other juice shops have procured generators as well. He also claims that no one can match his fruit bowls or chocolate shakes. We leave it to the connoisseurs to determine the truth of that statement.

Right opposite Juice Junction is the six months-old Sri Ganesh Fruit Juice Centre (yes, it is important that you know the name. The lady at the counter was adamant about the name and the blue board). Their USP is a chaat stall that has been opened. Since several people on campus have complained of the lack of good chaat anywhere nearby, we suggest you sample the same. Tell us how it is and then we shall try it. They, according to one our editors, have the best apple juice among all of these juice shops.

The much maligned Pratham works at the Sri Ganesh Fruit Juice Centre, the one with the green board. This shop has been around for seven years. So the next time Pratham tells you that his is the oldest juice shop on the street, you can throw Juice Junction’s existence at him. That won’t really knock him off his perch, though. He has three girlfriends. He feels very cool. When we asked him about the dynamics at play between and how his business was impacted because of the new competi-tion in the market, he laughed us off. A little pestering and a promise to frequent his juice shop yielded results. The assump-tion that we had worked with was that the juice market was a fiercely competitive one, which we soon learned was not accu-rate. What Pratham gladly told us was that there were enough customers to allow all the juice shops in the vicinity to operate without having to attempt to undercut each other.

Opposite Pratham and rivalling his business is the “new juice

The Juice Shop BubbleShikhar Garg (Batch of 2018)

and research to write meaningfully on any subject, and it is absurd to panic if you haven’t done so in two or three years of Law School. A related problem is time management. Among those of you who’ve read this far, a sizeable proportion will be thinking “This is all well and good, but we simply don’t have the time.” Trust me, you do. Our supposedly rigorous system can be worked with surprisingly few hours devoted to it. One way to make time is by not treating extra reading as a luxury that you will get to if you have spare time, but viewing it as part of your schedule: an essential activity without which you will become brain dead.

Eagleton is right when he says that in today’s knowledge econ-omy, pharmacists are likely to be more valued than phenom-enologists. But hell, if you want to study phenomenology, go ahead and do it. The Great Valuer is not sizing you up with his calculator. Not just yet.

References:

Terry Eagleton, The Slow Death of the University.

The Lonely Island, Threw it on the Ground. •

8QUIRKshop,” or Sri Lakshmi Venkateshwara Juice Centre, which opened in March last year. The business was started by three guys, with some of their friends helping out, these friends being the members of the staff that you see in the juice shop. We cred-it him with making sandwiches a common choice for lunch, as Juice Junction failed to manage this due to its distance from the college gate. However, his sandwiches have taken a hit, losing a substantial part of their customers to Super Rolls, as confirmed by a rather gleeful Pratham.

These new developments point to a highly competitive juice

shop market that has seen rapid expansion in the past year. A lot of Law Schoolites have hypothesised that this is creating a bubble which is about to burst. But when we spoke to the own-ers of these four juice shops, it became fairly clear to us that there are enough juice drinkers on the street to make the juice business a fairly comfortable one for all juice shops. Each one is seeing their business thrive. There is no juice shop bubble. Pratham just likes antagonizing customers, apparently. So the next time you’re at Sri Ganesh Fruit Juice Centre, the one with the green board, call him Umesh. He’ll get annoyed. •

In the first trimester of Law School, I was crying on a friend’s shoulder in an autorickshaw, disappointed at my average performance in the university debate rounds. As

somebody who believed myself to be a good debater, it was crushing to be shown my place in the university pool. My friend’s reaction though took me off guard. Concerned about me, and wanting to reassure me, he asked me why I kept feel-ing the need to prove I was good at extra-curricular activities. Was it because I had entered Law School through the SC quota, and I felt the need to prove I was as good as everyone else? He said, “Don’t worry, everyone already thinks you’re one of us. You don’t have to prove anything.” It was meant to restore my confidence. He was trying to be a good friend. It felt like a hard kick in the gut. My AIR had happened to be enough to qualify sans the quota as well. Therefore, I was not an usurper. The implication was that I ‘deserved’ to be at NLS. The implication was that others didn’t by virtue of getting in through the quota. That was my first real encounter with caste at Law School. That if your diction and pop culture qualified, you were one of us. It is one of the sharpest memories of my life. Not just what was said, but what was unsaid, and how it made me feel.

I am extremely aware of the position of privilege I enjoy. I went to an Anglican Christian school for three years which is among the top 5 in the country, was born to two highly edu-cated parents, and have never faced economic hardship in my life. However, I am fully aware that skipping one generation, my ancestors weren’t allowed to sit inside a classroom, their shadows would pollute people if they walked past and that they worked with their hands and animal hide. I am aware that my mother belonging to an upper caste had to face tremendous so-cial sanction and repercussions for marrying outside her caste twenty five years ago, a decision which many people in our gen-eration still don’t have the courage to take. The caste system

excluded people from the lower caste from gaining access to Sanskrit, Hindu education at top schools fifty years ago. Chris-tian missionaries willingly took in everyone if you were will-ing to learn English and say ‘Amen.’ Then, English became the language of the market. My father went to a Christian school. And I benefitted in a twisted way from this discrimination. As somebody who sang in a Christian church choir as a child, I never fully understood how discrimination worked, until my grandmother read Ambedkar to me. And I didn’t appreciate its power till I met people in Law School.

At the outset I want to say that of all the things I am grateful for, having studied at NLS is among the highest. I had the oppor-tunity to study under some amazing professors, develop useful skills, and forge friendships that will last forever. It taught me

to question everything and express myself un-abashedly. The place will always be a part of who I am which is why I feel that it is import-ant that I am able to critique it with as much honesty as possible. Anything else would do the institute disservice.

As the supposedly top Law School in the coun-try, an institute which has produced some fantastic human rights lawyers, and created an amazing vision to improve the quality of legal representation in India, as a student body at large, we’re a disproportionately apolitical bunch. Yes, the Law and Society Committee and the Legal Services Clinic and now IDIA have always gone out of their way to ensure that ques-tions of inclusion, diversity, religion and politics are brought to the mainstream but there’s always an alternative vibe to it. I was particularly impressed by LawSoc’s activity for incoming freshers about recognising their privilege. We say that NLS al-lows everyone a space to pursue what they want. Yes, the spaces exist. However which spaces are the most crowded provide an interesting insight into our conscience. We need to stop pre-tending that people go to Allen and Overy partner talks and

Confessions of a “One of Us”Anonymous ALUMNI CONTRIBUTIONS

If your diction and pop culture qualified, you were one of us. It is one of the sharpest memories of

my life.

9 QUIRK

a screening of Jai Bhim in similar numbers. We are content to politicise mess coupons, but turn a blind eye to who is picking up our trash.

One of my immediate seniors was unpopular because he would keep discussing questions of caste on 19(1)(A), on ug-students, and through his committee. I know several people who thought his activism was shrill, and unnecessary because caste was not an issue that affected NLS. Of course, NLS was that temple of education which honours merit over anything else; of students who got in on merit and worked hard to win the moots, debates, scholarships and jobs. So on several occa-sions, I have witnessed certain classmates emanate a “what else do you expect?” schadenfreude-like attitude when people who got in on the quotas have failed courses, lost years. As if, that is what happens when you don’t deserve to be here. That nev-er happened when somebody who from the general category fell behind or failed courses. A junior, who was unaware of my caste status, once vociferously told me once that the best way to reign in NLS’ falling standards was to abolish the quota system, those people are bringing us down, that’s why our India Today ranking was in jeopardy. Another junior tried to explain to his classmates how we should advocate positive eugenics because let’s face it cer-tain castes were just more intelligent and capable than others. An extremely successful senior told people over the mess table how she would “never date somebody who was an SC.”

To be fair, I haven’t encountered a single instant wherein any member of the faculty or administration has even exerted the tiniest of micro-aggressions towards students belonging to any of the backward classes, and in that, NLS might be a free space. However, as a student body, I don’t think we’re as guiltless as we would like to believe in our Chetta debates on organic change. The first instance when I felt that students were genu-inely squirming about their privilege and thinking about caste was during P. Sainath’s single credit course on development, dissent and the media. His classes, I believe, genuinely forced people to think about law and society outside the sanitized and academic distance we are used to. One of the juniors did insist to Mr. Sainath in earnest after class that the caste system was useful as it helped organise society. But, P. Sainath is a celebrat-ed, sophisticated English journalist who is listened to. Would people still have been willing to listen if the same questions had been asked by a Dalit journalist with vernacular experiences?

It’s something to think about.

The advocates of meritocracy across the world have a very identical criticism of affirmative action. This is true for many white US students I have spoken to regarding African-Amer-ican representation at US universities. They will always point out how certain people who have availed of the reservation system are extremely rich, drive around in fancy cars and don’t need the quota at all and that the criterion for affirmative ac-tion should be financial alone. We know there’s a very simi-lar attitude at NLS as well. Pointing out individual examples as though caste has ceased to exist and it’s just another scam being pulled by the powerful. I agree that lack of opportunity due to dearth of funds from your primary schooling imme-diately excludes you from access to higher education and a chance to better your economic prospects. However, reducing

it to this discussion assumes that one can buy themselves out of caste. That might be a gift of a capitalist economy which cares about your output and contribution to the economy over your lineage. However, the manner in which caste pervades our personal lives, the people

who we make friends with, the people we marry, the people we idolise or give recognition to. Much of our lean-in femi-nism focusing on climbing the corporate ladder, does so while standing on the shoulders of domestic help from lower castes, perpetuating the same system of oppression with no attempts at reconciling these contradictions.

I am not qualified or intelligent enough to come up with a solu-tion to our dilemma when it comes to representation in high-er education. As campuses across the country begin to finally have conversations about caste following the horrific suicide of Rohith Vemula, a tragedy we all must take blame for as a system, it could be a moment for our alma mater to reflect seri-ously or it could be another missed opportunity like hundreds before it. The point of this piece is to highlight, from my per-sonal observation that caste pervades the NLS student body more than we are willing to admit. First, by our silences and lack of engagement with the issue of caste within NLS and out-side it, because this engagement offers no rewards or connec-tions which can be vetted on your master CV. Second, because through our casual comments on meritocracy and hard work, we try to delegitimize and demoralise the presence of a section of the student body which is also legally entitled to the same educational experience as everyone else. •

We are content to politicise mess coupons, but turn a blind eye to who is picking up our

trash.

10QUIRK

NLS Alumni Association: A New Hope

The alumni is the pride of any instition. Our college has been around for almost 30 years and it’s only recently that

a formal NLS Alumni Association has been set up. Needless to say, we at Quirk are very excited and hopeful about the endless possiblities that lie ahead.

Quirk: Could you tell us a bit about yourself ?

NLS Alumni Assiciation: The initial and interim Governing Board of the NLSIU Alumni Association hail from the first five batches of NLSIU and board members are: Dayan Krishnan (Class of 1993), Senior Advocate based at Delhi, Rahul Mat-than (Class of 1994), co-founder & Partner of Trilegal based at Bangalore, Umakanth Varottil (Class of 1995), Professor at National University of Singapore, Pramod Rao (Class of 1996), General Counsel of Citibank India based in Mumbai, and Sid-dharth Raja (Class of 1997), co-founder of Samvad Partners, based at Bangalore.

Why did you decide to start the Alumni Association?

The decision to either restart the old Alumni Association or start afresh was taken at the NLSIU Silver Jubilee event and among the decisions taken was to constitute an Interim Com-mittee to examine a few items, and place them for the consid-eration of the wider alumni body. Given the wide prevalence of social media –LinkedIn and FaceBook – the NLSIU Alum-ni were brought together on those social media platforms for ease of communication and interaction, and indeed to consid-er, comment and provide feedback on the work of the Interim Committee. The email database as available from the alumni directory created for the NLSIU Silver jubilee event was also harnessed.

The establishment of the NLSIU Alumni Association was made possible by interested alums and most crucially, the members of the Interim Committee constituted for the same. The Commit-tee members were: T. Srinivas Murthy (Class of 1995), Pramod Rao (Class of 1996), Nithya Nandan (Class of 1998), Smitha Murthy (Class of 1999) and Kunal Ambasta (Class of 2012).

Our college has seen 23 batches graduate but it’s only recent-ly that this AA has taken form. Why now?

This is actually our second attempt at having an Alumni Asso-ciation – there had been an Alumni Association set up in late 90s, which turned moribund for a variety of reasons. The key difference one could say between then and now is the presence of social media platforms that provide ease of connectivity, link people together and have the ability to nurture the bonds

among alumni. The new Alumni Association hopes to build it-self with these platforms as key building blocks.

We realise that the future of AA will be decided by the elect-ed trustees, but where do you imagine it to be headed in the next few years?

Bearing in mind that the constitutional document of the Alum-ni Association envisages trustees / governing board members elected by ordinary members who would steer the Alumni As-sociation and hence be responsible for the direction and deliv-erables, one can speak with broad generalities: Being relevant to the community, alums, to the students currently at NLS and finally to NLSIU – our alma mater – will be key to the future of the Alumni Association.

The constitutional document of the Alumni Association en-visages a variety of activities that can be undertaken and also envisages Regional or City Chapters (and indeed on social me-dia, we have alums in various cities within India and in various parts of the world already electronically linked).

The activities that further the connectedness and contribution to, by and among alums, NLS students and NLSIU will hence define the future of the Alumni Association.

What drove you to initiate this process? Why do you care so much about this initiative?

There’s a shared journey that every Law Schoolite has undertak-en – at a residential / hostel based 5 year education (with very many honourable day scholars) – one tends to know or atleast have an opportunity to know about 9 batches, and this builds deep bonds and connectedness.

The friendships (or rivalries) built then and thereafter profes-sionally, as time goes by, or when one learns of the accomplish-ments of the folks who have had this common/shared journey, are indeed a source of pride and joy.

Finally, then, is the belongingness or nostalgia, reconnecting with folks one knew who may have got dispersed around the world, and finally, a spirit of contributing back – whether to community, alums, students or the institution. These are few of the drivers many of us have in wanting to see the formal Alum-ni Association come through and be around.

How has the response from alums been so far? (As per ex-pectations, below expectations, above expectations). How do you think, it will evolve?

We are quite heartened by the response but it would also be right to say that it can be much, much more. The evolution lies

CONVERSATIONS

11 QUIRKin the sense of belongingness, activities that are relevant (to the community / alums / students / NLS) being undertaken and seen through. The challenge lies of course in proving that it’s for real and that it’s relevant.

We are very excited about the inaugural alumni day. What are your expectations from the event?

We are also very, very excited! The opportunity to meet faculty, staff and students and to hear back from all of you (and perhaps share some of our own experiences/journeys) and indeed relive some of our student life (whether with quizzes or football or basketball or a cultural evening) are all things being looked for-ward to. Gathering what’s relevant for the Alumni Association vis-à-vis the institution, faculty, staff and students will also be enabled by this maiden initiative.

What can we expect in the near term from the alumni asso-ciation?

The Alumni Association’s partnership with the SBA (and var-ious committees such as SIPLA and the ECell) has already yielded a revamped Alumni page, an Internship Policy, Single Credit courses policy, Collaboration of Alums and Students for Entrepreneurship Studies / Support project, and a workgroup focused on establishing a framework for alum support of stu-dent activities and of course the inaugural Alumni Day. These and many more relevant collaborations can be expected going forward as well. Among alumni themselves, a set of social gath-erings and interactions have happened in Bangalore, Chennai, NCR, Mumbai in the last couple of years.

What role do you think the college administration should play going ahead in the Alumni Association?

This would be more relevant for the college administration to determine. However,, from the alumni perspective, having an Alumni office that coordinates the enrollment and alumni ac-tivities would be welcome though either the SBA or the Alumni Association itself can foster the same.

Taken from NLS’ perspective, an enhanced interaction of the alumni and the administration and faculty can yield many ben-efits and also serve to aid the grading of the university by UGC which has made Alumni interactions a component of universi-ty evaluation.

How has Law School changed since you last saw it?

Certainly – the campus & the academic block has only grown and expanded, in a very functional and yet aesthetically pleas-ing manner.

At the time of your graduation, how did you envision NLS to be in the future years? Did it turn like how you imagined it to be?

As an internationally recognized & socially relevant center of excellence for legal education – providing legally qualified pro-fessionals for all aspects of society, and in many respects it is indeed that.

What is your view on ‘falling standards of NLS’?

The question cannot be fairly answered at this stage especially by alumni hailing from oh so far back! The fact is that we don’t know whether standards have risen or fallen, or indeed wheth-er the curriculum or method of instruction are delivering the intended education. Are we happy to collaborate for a review & bring our professional experiences to bear - that answer is an unqualified yes! •

Sex and the CGPA

Every year, at NLSIU’s Convocation, a gold medal is handed out to the best graduating Girl Student of the year. This is in addition to the medals handed out to the

top ranked students. This affirmative action medal is a vestige of a time when women were scarcely even seen on the rolls in higher education, let alone seen performing exceedingly well. While most avenues remain a ‘Man’s World’ even today, we thought it is worth asking- is academic performance at NLS still correlated with having the coveted Y chromosome?

The Hard Facts

A recent Census of the undergraduate population conducted by a team at NLS strongly indicates that it is not the case. The data indicates that women overwhelmingly outperform men in aca-demics- 72% of all 6 pointers in NLS currently are women while

almost 70% of all students with CGPA below 4 are men. These results are not surprising- in fact, studies conducted across the world, both among schools and college students are consistent in this observation. Women, who were not allowed an educa-tion some 100 years ago, are now doing better than men. Now even though this is finally a stereotype we can get behind, un-like ‘the wheels’ because we can’t drive, there is still a need to examine this connection especially in an Indian context where it has rarely been attempted before. So we did what Spadika does best. We did a survey.

We hypothesized that this polarization of grades is probably because women work harder for exams, submit projects on time and are more likely to be attentive and take notes in class. And the results seemed to suggest the same. Of the 145 un-

Radhika Goyal (Batch of 2019) and Spadika Jayaraj (Batch of 2016)

12QUIRKdergraduate students (79 women and 66 men) who filled the survey, more than 70% of the women said they submit proj-ects on time, while less than half of the men said they do the same. As one male student interviewed put it, “It’s one day after deadline and I’ve done zero words in both projects.” There were also zero women who said they submit projects on last-last day (compared to 10% of men). The same trend exists with studying for exams and taking notes in class where women display a lot more diligence than men. Moreover, this is something they’ve carried on from their school life, where a much larger number of women claim to have been toppers in school as well. So what drives them to work so hard and take academics more serious-ly?

Playing it safe

For many it’s just the way they’ve been brought up. As Ritika Ajitsaria, a third year student says, “Girls are just taught to be more careful and are less prone to taking risks because of the upbringing they have.” This is a common sentiment where women feel that they have more social pressure to be ‘proper’ and disciplined which contributes to their approach towards academics. Gopika Murthy, a top-ranked student from the fifth year says, “When girls are brought up being told that they must be responsible, sincere and think of the consequences of all of their actions, it seeps into all aspects, including academics. I learnt early on that I was better at academics more than in other things, and to remain good at it, I work hard.” This pressure to perform is not just self-imposed; parents tend to place greater importance on the academic performance of girls as well. On a scale of 1-5, a significantly higher number of women claimed that academic performance is highly (4-5) important to their parents. These results appear counterintuitive, because one would expect that in a patriarchal society, the academic per-formance of future baby-makers should not matter much. Per-haps, for parents whose children are studying at an infamously ‘liberal’ university far away from home, expecting academic performance is merely another form of making their children conform and ‘behave’.

However, an even more telling reason behind the difference in grades seems to be the tendency for women to be risk averse. Studies conducted all over the world have been conclusive in showing that women are generally less likely to take risks, prob-ably due to the consequences being much worse for them. And the opposite also rings true. A student, who does not wish to be named, attributes his taking such risks for the adrenaline rush that he gets when he knows that he needs to submit a project in the next three hours. Certainly, upbringing has a lot to do with this, but it also suggests that there is generally more at stake for women for them to give everything up for a shot of adrenaline. For many women, maybe more so in India, a higher education

might still not be an entitlement, and they still have to fight to get here. “I’ve definitely had to face more obstacles to come here,” says Ritika, “In terms of leaving the city, going to plac-es to give entrance exams, going to coaching centers.” This is reiterated by an observation made by Mohnish Mathew, a sec-ond year student, who recalls, how some brilliant girls in his batch back in school were all sent to a particular college in the same city because their parents didn’t want them to leave even though quite a few of them were from affluent families. “They could have done excellent things at places like Shriram (SRCC), they got the percentage, they got the 98, but their parents didn’t really encourage them.” So for women who do make it, college might not be something they can take for granted.

Great Expectations

For other women, this need to prove themselves goes into fight-ing societal expectations. Madhavi Singh, the designated note taker for nearly two years in a row now, acknowledges that somewhere in the back of her mind she wants to ensure that ten-fifteen years down the line, her husband should not be in the position to tell her to give up her job to take care of a baby. In society, there are still skewed expectations from women to sacrifice their careers for their children, a pressure it is safe to say no man faces. “I don’t want to be in a position where I’m working harder than most people in my batch and fifteen years later in an alumni meet they are ahead of me because I was busy for three years taking care of my children.” She admits to wondering sometimes why she’s working so hard if at the end of the day she’s expected to give up her career after marriage. “It’s my nightmare,” she adds. She’s not alone in harbouring this fear. For other women, it might be the desire to establish themselves before they are expected to settle-down, or to ensure that they are doing well enough that marriage is not the only alternative available to them.

What Madhavi also seems to imply is that it is much easier for men to build successful careers than it is for women. As one student puts it, “Guys have male role models in college and outside who have succeeded despite being bad at academics.” An anonymous fifth year student says, “I grew up with the firm belief that there are no limits on what I can achieve, and this is something I still believe. Perhaps this contributes to me slack-ing off with respect to projects and exams more than others.” Interestingly, this student is a woman which makes it clear that women aren’t immune to developing such a sense of entitle-ment and it has more to do with how one has been socialized. However, as things stand now, a variety of reasons stand in the way of women in general feeling as entitled to success as men, such as expectations imposed by families,the presence of the glass ceiling and fewer career interruptions for men.

13 QUIRK

Chill scenes in MHOR

Does this sense of entitlement translate only to slacking off in the realm of academics? The data seems to suggest so. On average, more men than women participate in moots and de-bates and sports. Moreover, a casual glance at the Debate No-ticeboard Facebook group reveals that men spend more time practicing their debating than women. We see more men than women wanting to practice a few days before project submis-sions or a week before exams. Of the people surveyed, more men also claim to privilege extra curricular activities even at the expense of academics. Therefore, clearly, for more men it is not aversion to hard work in general but just towards aca-demics.

Several respondents were also of the opinion that the environ-ment in the MHOR needs to be taken into account. On a scale of 5, a significantly higher number of the women surveyed rated their hostel’s conduciveness to studying at 4 or 5 as compared to men. This is not just due to the higher access to a variety of

‘distractions’ but also to attitudes passed down through seniors and peers creating the pervasive notion of Chill. Chill, which has been described as a “garbage virtue which will destroy the species” requires you to be laid-back, not care too much about stuff lest you look uncool, and start your projects as late as you can so you can boast about it later. Perhaps such attitudes are also found among women, but for women, as the data indicates there is also higher peer pressure to perform well in academics which perhaps functions as the opposite of Chill.

Before you say “Not all men…,” we will say it ourselves: Not all men submit projects on last last day (almost 50% of our male respondents said they submit on time), not all men start study-ing the night before the exam (the only respondent who said he started studying more than 14 days before the exam was male), not all men subscribe to the ideal of Chill. We also ac-knowledge that our conclusions can possibly be disproved with more data. However, looking at the worldwide trend of women outperforming men in academics, we appeal to the Vice-Chan-cellor to institute a Best Male Student award because in the ac-ademic rat race, men are the real victims. •

Possibly about Flying Cars

The article’s general tone against those opposing change may or may not have to do with those opposing the cou-pon system. The author may or may not be biased as

he is a member of Mess Comm. Any resemblance to a person or argument raised with regard to the coupon system is deliberate and to be taken in jest and/or with offence depending on whether the author can outrun you. All strawmanning is also deliberate and is intended to cause frustration.

It’s been about a year since it was discovered that cars can be made to fly pretty easily if you replace petrol with a mixture of various difficult-to-spell chemicals (the easiest of which is xerocanthiusphatimoxide). Not only could they now move in the air reducing traffic, but also at four times the speed pet-rol offered. Various associated benefits were also found such as lower environmental harm, noise pollution being removed from where the population resides and allowing people to of-ten say with more conviction that they’re “on top of the world”.

But a recent government circular has banned the use of these cars; only vehicles that have a “worthy of flying” certificate will be permitted to fly. The criterion for the certificate being granted includes having wings or blades, a pilot with specific qualifications, cramped seats and “a general perception that the vehicle is not a car”. It goes on to specify, so as to prevent confusion, that parachutes, gliders and the mentally unstable who underestimate gravity while jumping off a building will

not be prosecuted for an attempt to violate the law.

The government did not cite any reasons for its ban, the bene-fits mentioned earlier notwithstanding. However, three protest groups that form a prominent vote bank would likely have in-fluenced this decision.

There were those who’d plastered “inconvenience” in black paint all over the walls of the transport ministry. They’d have to buy the complex chemical from petrol pumps in cans and not use the usual straight-into-the-tank pipes, which threw their well ordered lives into complete disarray. The cars take off on turning the keys, which made them question both whether the car was on and whether their lives served any purpose. If they forgot to buy fuel, they were stranded without their personal transport for an entire journey, which caused more mental ag-ony than your average chemotherapy session.

Then there was them hitchhikers, of course. They’d always stuck their thumb out for a lift and never planned on driving so as to pay back their social dues. Suddenly it was unlikely their thumbs would be seen from a 1000 feet above the ground unless they bought jet packs, which they couldn’t because not buying is what defines them in the first place. So one day the transport ministry found them standing outside their office (mis)quoting political scientists on the duties of the state and those strange creatures that paid for things.

Aditya Mehta (Batch of 2018)

14QUIRKFinally, but possibly the most vociferous of the lot, were the old-ies. Their hair had turned gray in cars and, by their dentures, cars would stay on the ground until their last breath. Their rea-sons sometimes overlapped with the above groups, but their distinct identity stems from the fact that they rarely confined themselves to reasoned debate. Rhetoric and flourish are what defined them. So if one flying car one day slowed down, it was photographed, advertised and analysed for 657 times longer than it would take them to conform to the system. It didn’t

matter that slow cars had similar, and greater, problems. Only those concerned with flying cars were to be wept over. And God knows those tears were photographed too.

The ministry is considering holding a poll soon. Let’s hope I can keep my faith in democracy at the end of it, and for once we find that the bureaucracy got it right. •

Like an ideal student in an ideal college, my life had been focused mainly on myself and whatever activities I wished to pursue in Law School. Like most, my inter-

actions with organs of the university were limited to whenev-er I wanted something to be done for my own ends. However, things changed this year and I was forced to look at our univer-sity from a different perspective.

I will focus in this article on how, in my experience, I have felt the absence of institution building processes at our college and why perhaps it’s exigent to discuss it.

I must first define what I believe an institution is. An institu-tion is formed when some people with a somewhat unified pur-pose come together and share a vision for how that purpose will be realised. A successful institution creates a self executing framework which is an engine to the ideas underpinning its existence. It runs on the ef-fort of people, and yet, continues to live be-yond them. It disentangles challenges of the present by designing structures so that it can focus its energy on becoming better in oth-er ways. So a simple example in our context would be to have an exchange policy drafted after adequate consultation with all relevant stakeholders and then to focus our attention towards making a better equipped exchange office or getting better colleges as our exchange partners. That being said, simply declaring a vague common vision may not be enough for the creation of an insti-tution. A true attempt must lie in turning desired institutional values into habits that members of that institution imbibe into their daily lives.

Per this definition, perhaps NLS is not an institution and sadly not even remotely engaged in any effort to become one. It is not uncommon for us to experience random ad hoc executive actions aimed entirely at short term gain. Faced with these we are forced to re-invent the wheel or, as in many cases, entirely

dismantle them. I am willing to share the blame for these faults as well. As the SBA, we have often discarded larger institutional aims and sought reliefs centered solely around convenience. In the case of Turnitin, which has the potential to usher great ad-ministrative convenience, we have stayed silent about its proper usage because it requires us to perhaps work much harder on our projects. As students, we have often demanded legitimate rights such as medical make-ups or attendance condonation but rarely have we engaged in united policy making or rule drafting for such demands. We experience the sweet taste of success of such demands in the short term, but rarely do we ever push to make them institutional. What we overlook is that these demands are often satisfied with executive discretion with little guarantee that they would continue. This puts all of us in a place where we are forced to engage in the most futile and

energy expending struggle to request such benefits year on year, often with a misplaced focus on ‘legitimate expectation’.

Our affinity to make demands based on short term convenience has a deep impact on NLS as an institution. The instances when we have turned away good faculty because of our concerns regarding excessive workload (In re Mr. Murali Neelakantan’s course being

offered and turned down thrice) or poor grades (In re a vote against having Sitaram Kakarala take a portion of the Politi-cal Science II course) definitely reflects the kind of momentary gain we seek. The price of placing grades over knowledge is not concentrated to any one batch but to an institution. Even out-side academics, most of our committees and student bodies are run with little thought beyond an academic year. A recent trend has been to offer lengthy complaints on online media about everything wrong in college, but such passion has not found its way to the empty classrooms during one credit courses and guest lectures. A recurring question posed to me during the time I stood for SBA elections was how I proposed to break stu-

Where is institution building at NLS?Apurva Ranjan Shukla (Batch of 2016)

A recent trend has been to offer lengthy complaints

on online media about everything wrong in college,

but such passion has not found its way to the empty

classrooms during one credit courses and guest lectures.

15 QUIRKdent apathy. My answer used to be a carefully constructed set of words which used to change form depending on who would ask the question. Diplomacy aside, I think the true answer to this question is ‘if you seek, you do’. That’s the only manner in which this apathy can be broken.

The fault is only partly ours. Rule making and a clear outline of policy happens when organs within the university administra-tion are accepting of change and willing do their job perfect-ly. It would be unfair to place responsibilities on students in place of the university administration doing its job with efficiency and a clear eye for the future. I believe we need to think deeply be-hind the causes of not having clarity or focus on how basic organs work, despite our nearing 30 year existence. However, ultimately as students these factors are often out of our control. Thus it becomes imperative to understand our role and ability in areas we can control. When accorded with all the responsibility of making changes, a great degree of power vests with us. We ought to bring proposals to ensure progressive change, carry collaborative lobbying efforts, interact with key stakeholders in the administration and faculty on civil terms and finally support these ‘just institutions’ when they are creat-ed, morally or otherwise.

Would anyone be against institution building processes? I high-ly doubt it and think that it’s mostly about lack of thought being given to this issue than any the active prevention of the pursuit of this endeavor.

Any institution works well because there is a delineation of roles and everyone does their job. At the moment, there is very little clarity within the students as to whether Examination Department’s role is that of a sec-retariat to the Undergraduate/Post-Graduate Councils or whether its role extends to main-tenance of academic standards. To illustrate, the decision on whether a makeup needs to be supplemented by sufficient proof is not in the rules and is simply a requirement imposed by an executive decision. The role of the Exam Department should ideally be limited to confirming the veraci-ty of the makeup against the corresponding hour missed in the attendance register and the signature of the faculty advisor. In the ideal design of an institution, it is the faculty advisor who should demand proof. That not only reduces administrative costs but also puts the correct actor with presumed domain ex-pertise in charge of this particular action.

From a design perspective, would it not be simpler to eliminate attendance marks altogether and keep attendance requirements at 70%, as stipulated by BCI? This removes the annoyance of

makeups, allows students greater academic flexibility, treats everybody as mature adults and enormously reduces admin-istrative burden. For the exceptional scenarios of people fall-ing below 70% in their attendance have a uniform, carefully considered and planned procedure. Make the perils of being in such a situation clearly known and its implications strict. Estab-lish to me how it deteriorates academic standards and you have my 1000 bucks. An ideal system should not conflate strictness of law with administrative harassment.

There are several other issues on our campus which call for our attention. It ought to be fairly evident to anyone that the three aca-demic programs at our university and stu-

dents studying therein are not integrated one bit. As our small college is expanding its footprint and assuming a more univer-sity like form, integration is necessary and one small way that could be done is to revise our housing policy. Let’s remove this weird hostel separation requirement we have at present and let all students live together. What better way to learn from our more mature (and possibly wiser) counterparts in the MPP and LLM program than to share a room on the same hostel floor? My point here is simply that, regardless of your opinion on the outlined policy, discussions like these are crucial but sad-ly, absent at present. Such discussions are unique as they are geared towards achieving additionality and increasing value to our university experience and not just putting bandages over bruised wounds.

Similarly, should it not be the prerogative of the official IT Com-mittee in college to undertake a study on what college network

requirements are (not hard at all) and take re-sponsibility to bring that change? Students are more than willing to provide all assistance, but ultimately the call on all matters lies with the various official committees. It is often only due to passivity that one is forced to centralize de-cision making with the Vice-Chancellor.

I believe a larger issue is one of lack of com-munication and coordination between organs

of our university.

One significant lesson I learnt this year is the crucial role of collaboration in any policy making and execution. Any reform, be it concerning infrastructure upgradation or academic inno-vation, requires a committed team behind it. A team that con-stantly engages with the problem it is tasked to solve. One of the biggest challenges Nayan and I face daily is getting bod-ies within the administration to meet, take responsibility for a problem and collaborate with us to solve it.

Communication of reasoning behind certain decisions, such as

An ideal system should not conflate strictness of law with administrative

harassment.

One of the biggest challenges Nayan and I face daily is getting bod-

ies within the administra-tion to meet, take respon-sibility for a problem and

collaborate with us to solve it.

16QUIRKkeeping improvement examinations in abeyance or a pre-com-munication regarding stricter enforcement of simple rules like project submission deadlines, on a public forum like ugstudents is genuinely hard and perhaps scary, but it ensures smarter and reasoned decision making. It leads to a higher degree of com-pliance as information asymmetry is reduced and a variety of views are pondered over. Moreover, frank communication leads to an increase in trust between stakeholders. There is a senti-ment at the moment amongst the students that Examination Department and the Undergraduate Council are out to make their lives harder. These organs believe that students play a se-ries of devious stratagems and will do all they can to reduce academic workload. Both perspectives are not true and an ex-change of individual aspirations and restraints is the only way to break this suspended state of apathy.

It’s easy to believe that a lot of things are amiss. When things have been directionless for sometime, we fall prey to terrible

institutional habits and decay. This doesn’t mean they cannot be changed. We should not forget that we have a far more liberal structure than most other universities and our focus should be on becoming better. What we require is strong top-down com-mitment to this mission, as institutional interest will need to be prized over narrow individual interest, and more transparent communication between all parties.

To borrow a few lines from Obama’s most recent State of the Union Address,

“Progress is not inevitable. It is the result of choices we make to-gether. And we face such choices right now. Will we respond to the changes of our time with fear, turning inward as a nation, and turning against each other as a people? Or will we face the future with confidence in who we are, what we stand for, and the incred-ible things we can do together?

So let’s talk about the future.” •

Some disclaimers before we proceed. These are insights based on observations during my time here. Though I don’t know

how disciplinary committees have conducted themselves in the past, or how they’re going to in the future – this is more an assess-ment of the concept in itself. I also recognize that my perspective is limited to MHOR and SDGM, and that the DISCO-WHOR experience is different in many ways. However, while they may differ in their methods, both SDGM and DISCO in principle per-form the same function. (In fact, DISCO tends to be more hands-off in many ways) In that sense, when I say SDGM, I mean both entities

It is widely perceived to be the case that we live in one of the more permissive and liberal campus environments. Being in a space that allows a high degree of freedom is in principle an amazing thing. We can explore, interact and relate to the people around us, (as well as ourselves) in whichever manner and set-ting we’d like. It allows us the essential opportunity to discover and develop our own norms and codes of conduct, within the freedom enjoyed. Arbitrary restraints only hinder this process of evolving as individuals and as a community. For an individ-ual level, it’s the process of determining your own precepts of restraint, those that come from within, when you could have chosen none. As a community, it’s determining standards of appropriate behaviour that allow us to coexist in our individual pursuits of those precepts.

As it stands, we exercise a high degree of control over this process, and what we do for leisure here is almost entirely our

choice. But while most of us are far enough from any real paren-tal influence, let’s admit that we are under the authority of the college administration. By virtue of being a residential campus, the college also has an interest in ensuring that we conform to a Code of law, order and behaviour that it has articulated. (The “Principles of Conduct”, they’re called) That there is disagree-ment over the substantive content of such a code is clear - we’re constantly in willing violation of it. It’s effectively a dispute over defining what freedom should legitimately mean for students in this setting.

Let’s also admit that we have little control over the Code that is enforced. In this situation of no influence over a Code that is meant to govern our freedom, the question then is, whether the community’s conception of freedom, and the conception embodied by the Code can be harmonized. Take heart, because as that beautiful KT Thomas report put it, there are “rising in-stances of drug abuse, sex and drinking among students”.

Clearly, we’ve figured something out.

The curtailment of liberties by any Code of conduct, will be contingent on its method and mechanism of enforcement. In our case, the mechanism that determines the extent and degree to which the words of the Code tangibly affect behaviour, is actually an acknowledgement of their dissonance with the stu-dents’ perception of legitimate freedom.

SDGM is a recognition of the fact that the Code doesn’t truly reflect the community’s conception of freedom, in so far as it is

Letting beAditya Chawla (Batch of 2017)

17 QUIRKa mechanism that can appeal to both.

For the college, it is a body that exists to enforce the Code that it has articulated. As a group within the student body, it is best placed to monitor and address violations of this code. For the student body, a student run entity such as SDGM, will always remain cognizant of the aforementioned dissonance between the norms of appropriate behaviour among students, and the Code the college would have us conform to. (The obvious ex-ample, is that intoxicants are prohibited, but there is a general norm of ‘live and let live, amongst the students.) Thus, SDGMs operation can and should be informed by the appropriate balance it is capable of achieving be-tween its two aspects.

Barring some aberrations, the practice of SDGMs during my time here seem to reflect this. There has been a general policy of leniency towards those partaking and imbibing in the appropriate spac-es. Intervention mostly occurs for repeated viola-tions, blatant disregard of the code, or to address behaviour that the student body itself might take issue with (causing destruc-tion, nuisance etc., intoxicated or not)

At the same time, extreme violations are referred to the author-ities if they can’t be handled internally; first years are given a healthy dose of fear, along with perm being strictly enforced; raids at the behest of the wardens sometimes deprive us of our miscellaneous consumables, (although no booty being found would seem quite suspicious).

This mixed approach is essential to the continued existence of SDGM, and the system that we’re beneficiaries of. This is be-cause signalling is an important aspect of these functions. The

committee must consistently project to the administration that an appropriate degree of law and order is being maintained; it must also signal to the student body the real boundaries of our liberties, beyond which we strain the balance sought.

SDGM fails its function, if it acts in excess of the signals to be projected to the administration; it also fails if it falls short, in that a perceived failure to maintain order and discipline may make the administration consider direct intervention.

Controversy regarding how the SDGM conducts its business surfaces fairly often, in our public fora as well as in private set-

tings. Concerns regarding overreach, dis-cretion and arbitrariness have been a com-mon refrain. While there have been very grave instances of overreach (Last year’s SF debacle comes to mind), some of the crit-icism levelled is misplaced, if it loses sight of the larger principle underlying the exis-tence of such an entity.

At the same time, while discretion is essential to their function, it seems that these excesses tend to occur when members with-in the committee also lose sight of that principle.

It is thus essential to realize that the moral content of SDGM doesn’t come from the substantive rules they’re supposed to be enforcing, but by the very nature of being a student run body appointed to enforce a code we disagree with. It cannot be a conduit for people whose opinions may be in conformity with the code, but only a mechanism that sustains the environment in which we can coexist with our differing opinions and pur-suits. In being a part of this community, we can only but allow each other that. •

While discretion is essen-tial to their function, it

seems that these excesses tend to occur when mem-bers within the commit-tee also lose sight of that

principle.

Panopticism in Law SchoolSregurupriya Ayappan (Batch of 2020)“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside

your skull.” - George Orwell

The principle that governed Bentham’s architectural plans for the ideal prison would ensure that even the few cubic centimetres were not your own anymore.

The Panopticon was a mode of “obtaining power of mind over mind”. It consisted of an annular building in the periphery that was divided into well-lit cells which held prisoners and could be observed by a supervisor from a central tower. The prisoners’ inability to determine whether they are being watched at a giv-en point of time and the apprehension that they are under sur-veillance causes them to constantly police their own behaviour. The Panopticon assures that the automatic functioning and

actual continuous exercise of surveillance is rendered unnec-essary due to perfection of power which is dis-individualised and automatized.

Foucault coined the term ‘Panopticism’ to describe this dis-cipline mechanism which amplifies the effectiveness of pow-er and penetrates through society using a “faceless gaze that transforms the whole social body into a field of perception.” Sartre theorised that the apprehension of the ‘look’ forces the observed to occupy a certain position and holds them captive without any escape due to the vulnerability of being seen. The ‘look’ both creates and invades physical spaces, thus trapping the prisoner psychologically. Every person by virtue of being a temporal-spatial object fears the value judgements and un-

18QUIRKknowable appraisals of the observer. The faceless gaze succeeds in enslaving people and enforcing discipline by keeping them in a constant state of vulnerability.

The Benthamite physics of power is also used in Law School. The NLSIU Act identifies the end to be producing research scholars with a strong sense of social responsibility who will use their skills in legal services, litigation and law reforms. Howev-er the ecosystem cultivated by students in Law School, in the form of senior advice and RCC incentive structures leads to students joining the corporate world. This difference between the declared and latent objectives of the institution helps ob-scure where the power is actually centred. It implies the power comes from without the system and extrinsic factors influence the power dynamics. It abstracts and makes it difficult to iden-tify the institutional interests, as driven by the actions of stake-holders in the Law School environment.

The faculty, while at first, are accomplices in setting up the system, unwittingly become its prisoners. Their subjectivity is moulded by the internalisation of the externally imposed norms. Their freedom to design their own course outline, mode of instruction and schedule extra classes makes them monitor their own performance in pursuit of achieving total quality. The principle of the Synopticon, in which ‘many’ watch the ‘few’, also influences their behaviour. While they deliver lectures, they police themselves because of the apprehension of being monitored (e.g. Heard In Law School). If their rhetoric reflects that their ideology is contrary to institutional interest it may invite sanctions.

The architecture of the academic block and the presence of se-curity cameras also resemble the Panopticon. Instruments like curfew for the first years, the institutional e-mail interface and the library register also effectuate enclosure. Ironically, in ad-dition to the insidious action of self-monitoring, there is overt self-policing as well. The various student bodies implement a set of rules and regulations, most of which have been drafted by the students themselves, through systematic allotment of sanc-tions and, rewards in the form of considerable freedom.

This freedom is itself illusory and confines students by forc-ing them to modify their behaviour in a manner reflective of the free environment. The changes in dressing habits and the manner of speaking are illustrative of this as in many cases it is

compelled by the value judgements the student fears are passed by his/her peers. A number of activities are given the status of rituals or unwritten rules by packaging them as ‘law school tra-dition’ in discourse which helps in indoctrination. Traditions like treats where seniors take it upon themselves to introduce juniors to the great joy of consuming alcohol, the awkward iso-lation felt due to being surrounded by others who are partaking in the said activity subtly coerces the student into succumbing to it.

The most important panoptic mechanism is the cut-throat competition between the students to achieve an extra line in the list of accomplishments that will adorn the curriculum vitae. This is not limited to the examination system alone but also extends to extra-curricular activities. The CGPA system is perhaps, the metaphorical watchman. The high rate of failure in some courses creates stark inequalities that play on the inse-curities of the students. The lack of prior exposure to academic failure heightens their insecurities and spurs self-policing be-haviour to increase productivity.

As in George Orwell’s Oceania, the greatest danger of detection does not lie with the Thought Police, hidden microphones or televisions but with fellow citizens. The resistance to the sur-veillance mechanism in place is limited to a small percentage due to presence of peer inmates. This manifests itself in various forms – fear of being overtaken, exposed or the intricate web of peer politics, self-image or reputation and rumours. This appre-hension in itself is effective in regulating behaviour, instilling docility, conformity and productivity.

The residential nature of the university enhances the visibili-ty of the students and it is not feasible to maintain the secrecy around their actions. The few locations are inhabited by other students and hence, each student becomes both the observer and the observed and consciously monitors and modifies his/her behaviour. Visibility is the trap.

“Is it surprising then that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

- Michel Foucault •

19 QUIRK

My ExperienceDorian Persaud

Dorian arrived in Law School from Osgoode Hall, Canada as part of an exchange program. This article of his was

printed in the first edition of Quirk published in January 2005.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. As the taxi approached the main gate of the National Law School of India University, Perv announced ‘this is law school’. ‘Cool’ I thought. The place seemed smaller that I imagined but nice. The school was surrounded by such dense vegetation and certainly evoked an exotic feel. Having backpacked around North India on a budget, the university seemed like a nice place to live for a little while. Then I went inside.

While I had finally located my cubicle, I stated in disbelief. Like Bilbo Baggins standing unannounced in Gollum’s case, I stood in the glow of the afternoon light filtering through the cloudy window. On the desk and bed frame was a layer of dirt and inch thick. There were cob webs hanging from the ceiling. Through the dirt it appeared as if the walls were painted beige. The closet was just as filthy having been used for a few months. There was nothing to do but take out a rag and start scrubbing. The whole time I was whistling Paul Simon’s Home-ward Bound.

When I entered the washroom I definitely wished I was homeward bound. The con-crete floor and chipped yellow tiles were uninspiring. However, it was the mildew covered walls of the shower stalls and the squat toilets that really made me reconsid-er my decision to come on exchange. How could I possibly study at a place were I don’t feel comfortable taking a crap or a bath? God of Small Things I need you now…

I had to remind myself of some of the reasons I came I India. This was supposed to be a wonderful opportunity to have a cross-cultural experience, see the country of my ancestors, do some interesting volunteer work with an NGO and maybe even meet a wife. (I wasn’t serious about the last one but my friends seemed to think that I would come home married. If the girl with the dancing eyes hadn’t turned me down I probably would have.) Looking back, adjusted to many of the things that had so irritated me at the beginning of my trimester. I adjusted to the squat toilets and the showers. I never quite got over the concept of mandatory attendance but I did get used to the constant cho-

rus of “yes maam’s” and “present sir’s” that would be sung at the beginning of each period.

And then there were the rules. These rules are of course en-forced, in large part, by the security staff and students. I think the security guards are supposed to be like Athena looking out for the protection of Law School-ites; but they’re not as com-forting. They seem to be more interested protecting students from themselves than from outsiders. They look lazy but if you approach the girls hostel I found out that they can get quite lively.

How the rules are enforced by the Student Discipline and Gen-eral Management I’ll never understand. SDGM truly completes the Big Brother effect described by George Orwell. Whatever you do, somebody is watching. It’s a wonder there isn’t a siren in the rooms that go off when someone masturbates. Were it feasible, it might have already been there. For all the Che Gue-vara t-shirts, I haven’t detected the hint of revolutionary zeal

at NLSIU. There is a culture of complicity at the Law School that I have yet to com-prehend. For a community that hasn’t mas-tered forming a line in the cafeteria it has mastered falling into line with respect to the rules. Fucked but fascinating.

I suppose the only thing lacking on my exchange was the romance and sexual en-counters that are usually part of the Amer-ican and European university experience. In A Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde wrote that the way to a woman’s heart is through her eyes. I agree. I was told that

foreign guys pick up a lot of girls based on their ‘exoticness’ and the fact that they have an accent.

Well, mine didn’t seem to do me much good at law school, so I’m not sure what’s to be said of the ‘accent theory’. Mind you, it probably didn’t help that I looked like the male version of Medusa with my wild hair. That alone may have been enough to turn some hearts to stone.

My law school experience is not a tale of two cities – experienc-es forever linked in time and space. I’ve found that law schools and law students are very similar no matter where you go. We are some of the most creative, detail oriented, ambitious people on the planet. Very likely some of the most miserable as well.•

FROM THE ARCHIVES

For all the Che Guevara t-shirts, I haven’t detected the hint of revolutionary zeal at NLSIU. There is a culture of complicity at the Law School

that I have yet to compre-hend. For a community that hasn’t mastered forming a line in the cafeteria it has

mastered falling into line with respect to the rules.

20QUIRK

A Case for a common-entrance exam for NLSIUSidharth Chauhan (Batch of 2008)

Any recent graduate of Law School needs no introduction to Siddharth or more fondly known as simply ‘Chauhan’. The

20 months when he taught at Law School left an indelible mark on each student he taught. Always giving his all to Law School, his legacy still remains strong to this date. Writing in January 2005 for the first issue of Quirk, this article by Chauhan strikes an astonishingly prescient tone.

The entrance procedure for admission to NLSIU has been un-der the scanner on account of the consistent increase in the number of applicants each year. Some general criticisms of-fered are that the test inherently favours those with good En-glish-medium schooling and that the high fee structure as well as requirements for ancillary spending create an ‘elitist’ profile of students. Another point made is that despite the provision of financial aid schemes, only the ‘well-off ’ would have access to preparatory recourses. I do not intend to address these issues directly in this note. I propose a reform that might enable a slightly more diverse profile of incoming students. Though a common-entrance test for admission to NLSIU and the Law-schools that have subsequently followed its model, is not an exhaustive solution to the shortcomings in the admission pro-cedure, it will, nevertheless be a step in the right direction.

The inclusion of institutions for the purpose of such a com-mon-entrance exam, can be left to the discretion of an apex body comprising of members from the Bar Council of India or eminent academics. The modalities of designing and adminis-tering a common-entrance procedure can follow the example of similar tests conducted for engineering, medial and manage-ment institutions.

The primary motive for a consolidated entrance system is that it will bring about standardization across different institutions. It can work on the ‘rule of thumb’, that the applicant with better performance in test gets an earlier right of preference in respect of the seats available at the institution of his/her choice. Hence, the ‘brand name’ of the particular institute will be an import-ant criterion and it will precipitate direct competition between various colleges.

The first benefit of implementing a common procedure is that it removes the need for individual spending on multiple admis-

sion forms, which as per current practice are highly prices and deter a substantial number of people from even applying for the preliminary process. A single application process will be conve-nient to applicants and also amount to a net saving of recourses spent in conducting the same. The criticism offered against this argument, is that separate entrance-tests also serve as income earning opportunities for institutions.

Second, a substantial number of high-school students are de-terred from applying to individual institutions on account of regional considerations i.e. they are generally averse to the idea of moving to campuses in far-off locations. This tendency holds truer for prospective applicants who do not come from a legal background and are unsure of their long-term prospects with a law degree. A common test for several institutions will circum-vent this trend.

The only argument against a common law-entrance exam that deserves attention is that of possible ‘brand-dilution’ or the dis-regarding of some distinct criteria demanded by individual in-stitutions. It is true that in case of NLSIU, several people would feel that it enjoys a head-start over other five-year law courses in India in terms of recruitment prospects for students. This argument only proceeds on the idea of the need to maintain high standards in an institution – evaluated on how students perform through Law School and thereafter and not in the en-trance-exam. On comparison of the test results for eminent law-schools like NALSAR, NUJS, NLU et al with the NLSIU list and it will be clear that the same individual applicant may not have performed consistently across the different tests. The entrance-tests are, therefore, not conclusive indicators of legal aptitude and for all the practical purposes there would be lit-tle to differentiate between the incoming batches in the top 4-5 law-schools. The argument for a common test is made to cover only the institutions following the NLSIU academic model in the short run. However, with more and more of the ‘old-school’ law departments in colleges and universities starting give-year programmes following the same structure, the coverage of the test can be widened on the conditions of an institution fulfilling clearly laid-down standards relating to administrative efficien-cy, quality of faculty and provision of infrastructure. •

FROM THE ARCHIVES

21 QUIRK

Dear Law School-ite,

I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but chances are very high that you either are, or on the

path of becoming, a boring person.

It’s not really your fault. It is the product of generations of wis-dom that is handed down to you from seniors, wisdom that amounts to essentially this: be afraid. In our collective imagi-nations, we have made Law School into a monster with project submissions at its teeth, six-day weeks as its claws, and the tri-mester system itself as its dark heart. We pat ourselves on the back for passing each trimester and submitting each project. We struggle through days of watching TV shows and the occa-sional all-nighter right before the exam. We have succumbed to a culture of complaining, where more time is spent thinking and cribbing about what you’re doing than actually doing any-thing. I will admit that I have fallen prey to this myself often in Law School.

Sadly, what I’ve learnt is that this not only destroys your en-thusiasm for your own college experience but also makes you a pretty damn boring person. Exhausted by the imaginary strug-gles of doing the bare minimum work required to get through college, we tend to think that there is just no time for pursuing anything with any real interest or passion. Most of us stop reading, stop painting or dancing or sing-ing (except at Univ Week). We start joining committees to get them on our CVs and then do the bare minimum over there as well.

Occasionally, it makes sense to go through that very CV and think about what you have on it that makes you interesting. What do you have on there that you could talk intelligent-ly about to a person you met at a party? Which part of your CV is something that you achieved rather than just a position you were at? In the hyper-competitive world that we live in, is anyone particularly interested in either a laundry list of bor-ing generic positions of responsibility overloaded with multiple committees and a so-so performance at many middling moots? Are they interested in how you got through sixty courses and exams and projects (i.e., what all your peers did) and how diffi-cult it was? Nope. These things are not inspiring and they’re not valuable. They make you boring.

The first step to being an interesting person is to stop telling yourself how difficult Law School is. We are in class for five hours a day. This includes your breaks and your commute (in

most cases). In many classes, we switch off mentally or physical-ly, taking this time to nap, work on other things, daydream, or read. Compare this to several other Law Colleges in the country (and the non-undergraduate courses even in NLS), where stu-dents are in class till 4 or 6 every evening. Compare this to a law firm, where you will be at work (and working hard) for perhaps 12 hours a day. Hell, if you think law firms are drudgery, think about the entry-level requirements of any profession - to do well you will have to work very hard for many, many years. If not anything else, do what we’re very fond of doing and com-pare yourself to colleges in the West: how many classes in all five years of Law School do you read a hundred pages a day for?

Once you realize that Law School is not difficult, you also real-ize that you’re wasting a lot of time. I have a challenge for you: for one trimester, refuse to do any college work after six in the evening. From say three to six, devote yourself with energy to whatever task you’re doing. This time is more than enough to make good projects, read for class, and study for exams, provid-ed you do it about five days a week and don’t spend more time worrying about how hard it is than doing it.

You’ll find you have a lot of free time on your hands. Now, use it. If you came to Law School as one of those lucky people who know what they want to do with their lives, spend your time identifying your next goal and taking

concrete steps towards achieving it. If you want to do an LLM, work towards research and publishing papers. If you want to be in a law firm, read more than necessary for every class so you’re turning in papers and answers that are so far beyond the base level that a teacher can’t help but give you an O.

However, if you, like most people in Law School, have no idea at all what you want to do, you’re going to have a different task. You must work towards finding interesting things. You must attend campus lectures and go into research centers. You must go off campus and explore Bangalore. You must run marathons. You must party like you mean it. You must open yourself to opportunities till you can find one that you find so exciting that it keeps you up in the night and wakes you up in the morning. And you must stick with it even when it stops being exciting, even when Law School gets hard.

Note: this cannot be something you do half-heartedly. If you write, you can’t be the person who writes the occasional over-la-borious poem. You must know everything anyone has ever said about writing. You must read. You must write every day and

Open Letter to StudentsSakhi Shah (Batch of 2017)

What makes you unique or noticeable? What

makes people sit up and notice you?

22QUIRKwrite different things.

It doesn’t have to be a moot or a committee. If what gets you out of bed is League of Legends, play till your fingers bleed. Then find a way to create something or engage with it. Make video tutorials about your favorite game. Write a blog post based on your favorite book. Write a Quirk article on Happy Hours in Bangalore. Write a collection out of the stories that your grand-parents told you. Being passive is not acceptable. You must cre-ate something of value to the world, something that will have measurable standards of success, such as people following you on YouTube or being published by Quirk. (Sadly, a personal re-cord of how many shots you can down without passing out is probably not valuable to the world.)

Perhaps you will end up finding your passion in life. Perhaps (and more likely) you will simply learn transferable skills that you can use to build a life and a career you enjoy.

Becoming a non-boring person requires sacrifices. One of the most important will probably be traditional achievements. When your friends became Conveners of committees or do moot court competitions, you will question whether you are hurting your future prospects by not having a laundry list of such activities on your CV. Even if you do go the traditional achievements route (and we do need Convenors and mooters, we always will), you must question at every stage whether what you are doing that is remarkable. Bringing the deficit of a com-mittee down by a few lakhs is awesome. Organizing the same festival in the same way that people have done for ten years … maybe not so much. Another sacrifice will be that of time. Join-ing a charitable initiative or a journal in fourth year because you need to look like a good person in your applications isn’t enough for you to do remarkable things in that initiative or journal. Doing amazing things requires you to pay your dues and learn how things are done so you can build something truly

wonderful in whatever field you choose.

Three and a half years into Law School (and many applications later) I have learnt that a CV can only be two pages and it is usually not enough for a laundry list of stuff. The only things that are staying on there are the things where I did something remarkable, and I’ve found that the remarkable is only hidden in the nooks and crannies of my work. It’s the stuff I stayed up nights to do. It’s what got me out of bed in the morning. It’s what was not average.

I’ve also learnt that you can’t fake interestingness. Most inter-viewers, prospective clients (and prospective love interests) have seen enough people with the full gamut of achievements on their CV. There is a point when you realize that your CV is identical to that of most other people you know (or worse, that it is not and you have not done anything). In such a situation, what makes you unique or noticeable? What makes people sit up and notice you?

And most importantly, beyond anyone else, what do you want out of Law School? What do you want out of life? And how are you going to get there?

Law School is not the real monster. The real monster is a culture of mediocrity that we are slowly and surely building in our ed-ucational institutions, workplaces, and personal lives. Though this culture is not your fault, its only solution lies through per-sonal effort, sacrifice, and experimentation. You (even the first years) have been here long enough for the transition period to be over, and chances are, so is your starry-eyed period. When the dust clears, who are you going to be? And what is Law School going to be, because of you?

Regards,

Sakhi. •

Narayana Murthy: Hopes and Dreams

Narayana Murthy started up before it became cool. As the co-founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy has taken Indian

IT to new levels and is, today, one of the most respected business leaders in India. Naturally when he visited NLS campus recently, Quirk Team could not resist the opportunity to interview him.

India has some really good educational institutions, say IISc or NLS, but they do not feature as significantly as other uni-versities of the world. Moreover, ground-breaking solutions to world’s biggest problems are not emerging from our coun-try. What do you believe is the cause?

The process of changing higher education has to start with changing our primary and secondary education. The reason we

don’t have higher education institutions that have made world shattering discoveries in any field is simply because we do not help our children apply what they learn in the classroom to first understand the nature around them, and then to design solu-tions that make life better. No, for example, why do you think the sun looks red when it is setting?

It has to do with dust particles … refraction …

You’re almost there.

When refraction happens, red is the longest wavelength.

Yes, it has to do with scattering, right? And when it scatters, when the sun is setting, it travels the longest path through the

CONVERSATIONS

23 QUIRKatmosphere – and red has the longest wavelength. But the point I was making is, we don’t ask children this. For example, when you go the moon, say in the afternoon, what will you see there? Do you see a bright sky, a dark sky, what would you see?

There is no atmosphere, so you’ll see the normal dark sky.

Because there is no atmosphere, there is no scattering, there-fore it looks like there is night, but the sun is still there. It’s very bright. But the point I’m making is simply this – we do not teach children these concepts in this way. If we want that India discovers and creates an institution in the top thirty or twenty in the world, first the quality of the students has to improve. It’s not the fault of the students – they’re bright! But they’ve been taught all along to learn by rote. They’re not given the opportu-nity to question. That is where the work has to start. It cannot be done at IITs, or NLSIU, or IISc. It has to be done at primary and secondary schools.

In foreign universities, especially in the United States, univ-erersity students play a large part in influencing policy. How do you think we can improve that in India with our existing institutions?

It requires our bureaucracy to become more open-minded. The biggest bottleneck we have right now is our bureaucracy. You see … politicians come and go – they also face elections once in five years so to some extent they feel they are accountable. Therefore, they can be convinced. But bureaucrats are there all the time. And the Indian babu is the most rigid one. It’s the most fixed-mindset one. So therefore, if we all sat down and said how do we make sure that every one of our MPs has a research arm wherein bright students like you can go and find employment or can even do internship and look at one issue of public policy … that is the way. But unfortunately … you see, we wanted to provide research grants to MPs for hiring people like you. Unfortunately, the gov-ernment was against it. They said you can’t do this, it’s not right. Only when we become open-minded, when we are willing to learn from people who have done work in these fields, is when we will improve. The best thing to do is to allow youngsters freedom.

Do you think one of the biggest challenges India faces today is the brain-drain? You have lots of great minds coming out of Indian universities but American universities poach them all because they’re given better opportunities.

I don’t think you should use the word ‘poached’. It’s not the right thing. See, as a citizen of India, you are entitled to a passport. You can decide to go to any country you want. You can live wherever you want. You can study wherever you want. I used to be the Chairman of the Rhodes selection committee for five

years. Every year we selected one student from this campus. There were so many people who had applied! No one is putting pressure on them to apply. No one is poaching. Youngsters find that going to Oxford is a great privilege, studying there is a great privilege. It provides great opportunities. The solution for is to make our institutions as famous as Oxford. Then automatically, children will stay here. Why will they want to go?

Since you’re in the technology sector, a huge debate is hap-pening right now regarding net neutrality and it ties into the issue of how we get internet access for the next billion people in the world. A lot of people say that Facebook’s idea of Free Basics should be encouraged because at least they’re trying to do something, while others disagree because they think it will principally change the structure of the Internet. What is your view on this?

I think net neutrality is very very important. The impact and the power of internet is access to information from a wide vari-ety of sources. In some cases, competing sources. So therefore, any mechanism that may even remotely slow down that process or create obstacles for that process should be opposed. There-fore, I think net neutrality is very important for a country like India. The day you say, “anyway these people don’t have access, so let’s give them some access” … it’s a kind of elitism.

That is also the accusation against people who support net neutrality, that they are elitist.

You see, it’s like good values. You have to be honest. What is elitist about being honest? What is elitist about

everyone having reasonably fast good access to internet?

What is the number one reform that India needs right now?

I would say that if there is one reform that is so important for India, it is to completely lib-eralize education. Just as in 1991, we did eco-nomic liberalization leading to the resurgence of the Indian industry. Allow private univer-

sities. Allow foreign universities. Allow any professor to come and teach here. Allow any instructor to go wherever they want. Let the market decide! See I’ll tell you before 1991, I used to ask a lot of my friends who were in the ’67 batch of IAS – now they’ve all retired – why don’t we have current account convert-ibility? They would say, “No no no, this would be a very bad step. People will stash money and that’s why we’re not allowing it.” But in 1991, in a matter of one week, thanks to Narsimha Rao, we introduced current account convertibility. Today we have 350 billion dollars in foreign exchange, at that time we had 1.5 billion. Unfortunately, even though we have seen the positi-tive impacts of economic liberalization, we have still not passed that on to our education system. What medium you want to

If you take a couple of electives on finance, on strategy, on choosing an idea, validating it – that would be good. Why not? Something like an Entre-

preneurship I and II. If you don’t like it, don’t take it. That’s the beauty of an elective, right?

It would act as an enabler.

24QUIRKstudy, or want your child to study – that should be left to you. You know what the result is – we have deprived the poor of ac-cess to good education. We have deliberately kept them down.

Recently in NLS, there has been an interest in starting up. What do you think an institution like NLS can do to promote this entrepreneurial spirit?

University is all about education. Education is all about learning to learn, right? Whatever helps you to learn the power of entre-preneurship – there’s nothing wrong. For example, if you take a couple of electives on finance, on strategy, on choosing an idea, validating it – that would be good. Why not? Something like an Entrepreneurship I and II. If you don’t like it, don’t take it. That’s the beauty of an elective, right? It would act as an enabler.

Sadly, electives find no place in NLS to this date. But given that the new year has just begun, what would be your one wish for India to happen in 2016?

Mr. Murthy: I think every expert, every thinker has provided data to show that having GST will make life simpler for busi-ness people, for governments, for consumers … for everybody. I hope that this will be passed in 2016. You know, UK came to a point similar to this in 1974. 41 years ago. I was working in France at that time. They just did it, 3 months … finished. •

Free Riding on Santa’s SleighShikhar Garg (Batch of 2018)

A string of events has led to the situation where I have a Secret Santa who is sending me rather pleasant and thoughtful gifts, without having a giftee allotted to

me, essentially allowing me to free-ride the exercise. One may wonder why I’m complaining about this, and that would be a reasonable question to ask. The problem is that this makes me think of the person who is unhappily wondering why he/she has not received any gifts yet. Hence, the moral dilemma.

There remains a large amount of ambiguity when it comes to determining if one is supposed to find out the identity of one’s Secret Santa. Somewhat extensive research involving asking bleary-eyed and possibly inebriated Cauvery residents at 4 in the morning and a perusal of the rules of the exercise has failed to settle the question of whether one is supposed to find out who one’s Santa is. If one is supposed to uncover the identity, it makes it a bond-building-with-strangers exercise. If one is not supposed to know the identity, Secret Santa would become a personalized gift-giving system without the hassle of uncov-ering identities and generating any social obligations between the Santa and the giftee. Ultimately, the unanswered question is this: whether Secret Santa is supposed to provide one with thoughtful gifts from a stranger with the intention that such personalized gift-giving lead to a friendship or is it merely to provide the giftee with thoughtful gifts that may be desirable without the hassle of obligations?

Let’s examine the first case, where one is supposed to discov-er the identity of one’s Secret Santa. This would make Secret

Santa a community building exercise, which is a very laudable objective. However, one must also keep in mind the potentially undesirable consequences of this noble objective. If one were to discover that their Secret Santa or giftee is somebody who they generally dislike, one may resent the obligations that the Secret Santa system has created, for one may not wish to establish any sort of relationship (along the lines of an acquaintance) with their Santa or giftee. So instead of creating a sort of camaraderie between people, it has created the possibility of placing people in very awkward situations. Imagine drawing the name of your ex-girlfriend, that one person on campus whose nose you broke or that one night stand you never spoke to again.

In the second case, which in my opinion is the idea behind Se-cret Santa, the point of Secret Santa, when the identity of the Santa is not to be revealed, is to provide participants with per-sonalized gifts, from what can be called as “the universe,” or a secret benefactor, with the sole objective being to provide those who have signed up for the exercise with a pleasant experience and thoughtful gifts without the obligations that would accom-pany identity-revealing. This would not be unlike the belief of children in the magnanimous (yet morally judgemental) Santa Claus. This would make Secret Santa a co-operative scheme, re-lying on the co-operation of participants to establish a sustain-able good trip-generating system, by gifting their giftees things that they would like. Now the problem with this system is the inevitable creation of free riders that accompanies every scheme that is based on co-operation. These free riders can be created

25 QUIRKdue to multiple reasons, with a couple off the top of my head being one such as signing up for the exercise and then back-ing out, but the same not being reflected in the picking up of chits with names due to say, a problem in communication. This would lead to a situation in which someone is receiving gifts without having a giftee to give gifts to. This creates some sort of moral obligation to find the person who still hasn’t received any gifts due to his/her name not being picked up by the free rider. The other reasons being the simple ignoring of one’s duty as a Secret Santa due to reasons of laziness or impecuniousness. The writer strongly condemns those who fall in the second category. In either case, a free rider has been created (refer: R. Arneson, The Principle of Fairness and Free-Rider Problems), which en-dangers the sustainability of such a co-operative scheme. This leads to the question of possible sanctions that can be imposed on the free rider, which can fuel a debate for quite a while as to the nature and severity of intended punishment.

It is fairly clear from the above analysis that there is no way to settle the debate. The first option will lead to unwelcome po-

tentially awkward situations, but can be used to eliminate free riders, while the second will eliminate this awkwardness, but will potentially lead to existence (and thriving) of free riders.

So the next time you sign up to participate in Secret Santa, en-quire first as to the nature of the scheme. It is quite possible that you may end up with a person who you may not wish to be obligated to send gifts to, or a Santa who may not send a sin-gle gift your way. Or you could end up like me, receiving gifts, without being anyone’s Santa yourself. To whoever had a lousy Christmas and a crappy new year, the unintentional free rider apologizes. •

From 19(1)(a) to a Digital NLSAditya Patel (Batch of 2016)

19(1)(a), the board squeezed in between the Moot Court Hall and the Estate Officer’s cabin, has seen a visible reduction in frequency of use, being used now for general Law School noti-fications and for Litigation Advocacy exam schedules. However this was not always the case.

19(1)(a)

In the year 2011-2012 it was the center of two controversies.

The first controversy concerned the Freedometer (2011); a chart put up by two fourth years where people could post any word they liked anonymously. What was published on the sub-sequent days on that chart transformed the lingo of a genera-tion of Law Schoolites. Creative new words, often hybrids of English and Hindi, were immediately and readily inducted into the Law School lexicon. Not everyone enjoyed this and there were vociferous protests, although it seemed that the protests stemmed, not from offense at any of the words but from the fact that there was something to protest. Jurisdictional issues were raised, as to the permissibility of anonymous posts on 19(1)(a); the board was controlled by Stud Ad, and no post could go up without the approval of a Stud Ad member. Constitutional is-sues were also raised as to whether the words on the Freedom-eter were reasonably restricted by 19(2). A 19(2) board was put up next to the 19(1)(a) board by two students. There was a buzz about 19(1)(a) around Law School, whichever side you were

on, you were thinking about 19(1)(a). The matter was decided in a packed GBM in the first year classroom where both sides argued with all the standard elements of a Law School GBM; fraying tempers, ad hominem battles and the inevitable calls for calm, passionate speakers, the thumping of desks and the usual jurisdictional-existential issues of whether a GBM could dis-cuss such an issue. A vote was called. The result of the vote was that the power to decide this issue did not rest with the GBM but with Stud Ad, through an internal committee vote.

The second 19(1)(a) controversy, slightly smaller than the pre-vious one, centred around the pasting of the resumes of a hand-ful of professors at NLS juxtaposed with the courses they taught at NLS. The results showed that the teachers picked did not teach the courses that they were experts in (according to their CVs). This was hugely polarizing, with the student community divided into three; vociferous supporters of the move calling for systemic change, vociferous opponents criticising the motives and methods of the person who put up the CVs and a large qui-et fringe of people consisting of a wide range of students, from apathetic seniors to hapless first years.

In 2013-2014 the board was witness to a movement called #NLSSpeak. Started by a student of the second year, the move-ment sought to respond to an allegedly homophobic slur writ-ten on the bulletin board of a professor at NLS. The post drew

26QUIRK

strong reactions either in support or in vociferous opposition at the methods employed by the propagators of #NLSSpeak. Though the movement ultimately died down, it still generated consciousness about a particular issue on campus, entrenched by the vocal debate and discussion it engendered in hostel rooms and the corridors of the Academic Block.

However two of these three controversies happened way back in 2011-2012 and the third one happened two years ago. Be-tween these episodes, there has been declining activity on the board.

This was not the case earlier. A student of the Batch of 2013 re-calls his experience of 19(1)(a) “I remember posts on the ways in which things were done at Law School - committee politics, stances on ongoing political issues. Later on, there was briefly a time when Stud Ad would occupy it more actively by shar-ing short pieces, a recap of recent legal developments. Around election time, it would descend into bedlam around election time, with campaigns, man-dates and what not.”

None of this happens on 19(1)(a) anymore. Dibyojyoti Mainak, Batch of 2015 sees this as a direct product of the increased proliferation of online discussions. “The actual discussions have moved online over our Facebook groups and over the NLS mail.”

Mainak sees this as an inevitable change, “This shift is good and dynamic and natural. Our free speech forums change over time.” Online communication has democratized access to a public voice in Law School. Before online access, it used to be really hard to post on a public forum. To post on 19(1)(a) meant physically putting up a chart in a central Law School corridor with a very high possibility someone else was in the same corridor as you. Even with anonymity, posting was a vis-ible public affair; a huge deterrent for many, especially juniors. It was also a tedious affair for many, for whom the physical effort expended in posting on 19(1)(a) was not worth the op-portunity cost of valuable Law School time.

Cyberspaces

Online discussions changed the equation completely. Now ju-niors could post on a forum familiar to them, where despite everyone seeing your post there was no inhibition due to lack of physical proximity with actual people. Busy (or lazy depend-ing on how one views them) people didn’t need to trudge to the Acad to post a thought, a few smartphone swipes would do.

This has made it easier for sub-groups within Law School to coordinate activity and facilitate discussion, from the Debate

Noticeboard, for debate scheduling and matter sharing to Mess Comm pages where merits and minutiae of mess policy are heatedly argued, to the SBA Noticeboard, the spiritual succes-sor to the 19(1)(a) board that has become a venting board for any and every grievance a Law School-ite might have.

Political discussions, earlier on 19(1)(a) have now turned to ugstudents, the mailing list of all nls ids of Undergraduate stu-dents at NLS. Recently an email by a fourth year student calling for a Beef Party on NLS campus sparked a long conversation thread with unflinching supporters of the Beef Party clashing with people strongly opposed to the idea of such an event on campus. Nuanced arguments mingled with below-the-belt ad hominem remarks, cries of spam, and searching questions as unflinching supporters of the Beef Party clashed with people opposed to the idea and neutrals who had questions about the enterprise. Another discussion on whether CDMC buying fire-

crackers violates the principle of secular-ism resulted in a multi-layered Facebook comments thread. Irregular committee ac-tivity continues to be a mainstay as a gen-erator of long email threads on ugstudents as seen with the recent fiasco over ADR ranks shows. A recent move by the Mess Committee of the MHOR to introduce a coupon system in the mess has produced a sizeable corpus of ugstudents threads and Facebook posts.

More exclusively, Batch whatsapp groups coordinate most intra batch discussion and many Law School-ites subscribe to mul-tiple WhatsApp groups with different sets of people with the likelihood of heated discussions constantly going on in each group. There have never been more opportunities for a Law School student to express their voice. This mushrooming of online forums has “resuscitated conversations among partici-pants that may not have otherwise taken place” says the Batch of 2013 student quoted earlier.

The ease of posting something online has seemingly multiplied the number of grievances visible to any Law School-ite, result-ing in an air of general cynicism about the unsolvability of Law School problems. While the Mess has always been deemed substandard and the Internet always a perennial problem, nev-er before have these problems been constantly been highlight-ed with consistent outrage. As more and more complaints and rants pile up, the perception Law School has about itself di-minishes into gloom. Personal interaction has been minimised as Law School-ites can now socialise with their friends, watch a movie and comment on the latest MCS Offering policy all while sitting on a soft mattress in their room.

The ease of posting something online has

seemingly multiplied the number of grievances

visible to any Law Schoo-lite, resulting in an air of general cynicism about the unsolvability of Law

School problems.

27 QUIRKSome people dismiss this volume of Facebook outrage and dis-cussion as a sign of increased pettiness and narrow-mindedness of the Law School community. With the vile ad hominems and personalised attacks on online forums being seen as a sign of an uptick in cyber-bullying. However closer examination seems to suggest that the general tone of most online discussions is largely rational and the few who do play spoilers to discussions with instances of ad hominems or cyber-bullying are largely in the minority. A similar minority has been witnessed regularly at GBMs of the past or on 19(1)(a) posts, putting doubts on the claim that online discussions have resulted in a falling stan-dards of Law School discourse.

The real problem

A more meaningful question to ask is perhaps why Law School’s discourse has rarely in concrete tangible real world action. A Beef Party never materialised, Teacher CVs being posted up were not used to generate any meaningful demand for reform of courses in Law School and most outraged polemics calling for systemic changes in the way hostel functions have not materialised in a set of amended hostel rules as yet.

This inability of discourse to translate into ac-tion cannot be pinpointed to one single factor. One reason is perhaps that the energy spent on outrage dissipates any will towards making efforts to effectuate concrete change. Most of the problems agitated have systemic causes that require more than a simple discussion to solve. Another is that Law School-ites are perhaps too utopian in their vision for what constitutes desirable action. Instead of being pragmatists and acknowledging that any form of action on a problem comes with its own problems, the Law School community strives for a perfect, problem free solution that inconveniences no one. It is impossible to have Mess Reform without some acknowledge-ment that payments for Mess Bills need to be made on time. Or for example, to improve Internet speeds without banning access to high resolution streaming websites. Thus arguments against a proposed action that highlight certain problems be-come the reasons for which that proposed action is not in fact carried out. Inaction is thus preferred to imperfect, but mean-ingful action.

Law School discourse is also characterised by a self-obsessive streak. Some of this is natural and understandable; Law Schoo-lites will be more concerned with issues that impact their daily

lives, like non-functioning shower-heads and symposiums by speakers on campus. However this has often been to the exclu-sion of discussion on important issues that take place outside campus that are important to us as a community of Indians and not just Law School-ites. There are noticeably less ‘Likes’ and online attention paid to posts that seek to highlight national is-sues such as the recent Rohit Vemula suicide or the Dadri lynch-ing than there are on posts discussing how to deal with dogs on campus or ranting about patchy Internet networks on campus. The recent FTII protests were barely discussed on campus de-spite the sentiment that we in Law School are also constrained in our freedom by similar administrative constraints like UGC Rules and BCI Regulations. There is a fundamental insensitivity towards the world outside our red walls that makes the com-munity appear petty and self-centred. Recent attempts by the SBA representatives to issue statements of condemnation on the Jadavpur University police action and the Dadri lynching were blocked by students who prioritised jurisdictional issues of SBA representative competence to make such statements and

baseless questions of consent rather than on the merits of what the statement would contain.

There are no easy solutions to these problems. It is natural, and justifiable human tendency to focus on the problems that affect us more than those that affect others, partially due to self interest but also due to an ability to effect

changes to problems closer to us than seemingly intractable issues like caste violence and communal-

ism. However the question still lingers. If American universities in the past have sparked movements that have stopped wars, if Indian university students have agitated not just for basic rights as students but for rights of the marginalised and downtrod-den, should there be more active discourse within Law School on how the student community can influence broader social and political change in the nation outside our walls? With the tools of critical thought and reasoning our university imparts, Law School-ites are best placed than most in society to make positive things happen. The discourse we have can be critical in developing path-breaking solutions, not just to our Law School problems, but to problems in the world around us. The NLSIU Act mentions that one of the Objects of our institution is to “develop in the student a sense of responsibility to serve soci-ety” through the legal education we receive. Perhaps our public discourse needs to reflect this as well. •

With the tools of critical thought and

reasoning our university imparts, Law School-ites are best placed than most in society to make posi-

tive things happen.

28QUIRK

SBA Office Bearers: A Work in Progress

The SBA President and the Vice President are the main point of contact between students, admin, faculty and various

other stakeholders in the Law School Community. For 2015-16, the President and the Vice-President of the Student Bar Associa-tion are Nayan Banerjee and Apurva Ranjan Shukla, both fifth year students and co-incidently roommates. Unlike most Uni-versities in this country, students at NLS are given a huge say in how college policy functions and it is the SBA President and Vice President who are the conduits to push for student interests in anything the college does. As part of an accountability initiative, Quirk Team put the Class Representatives of all UG batches in a room with the SBA Reps in the hope that some hard questions would be asked. Here are excerpts from what transpired

What things are you hopeful of achieving this year?

Nayan: First, get Exam Rules amended. The other thing that I really want to see is the Alumni Sponsorship Fund, which would give us a proper idea of how to engage with the alumni. Third thing is the internet.

Shukla: We are also hopeful of getting the SBA constitution amended. No one has asked me this, so I’ll take liberty to ram-ble. My point is that no one has asked about the committees yet, or about the SBA constitution. And that shows, as a side obser-vation, how the SBA has moved forward. Until 2001-2002, the college didn’t have direct elections for SBA and CoCo would choose. This is why even now in the Constitution, if you look at the way our powers are framed, they are primarily for coordina-tion of student activities. We are supposed to sit and talk to CoCo about matters of general importance. So the ideal system envisaged in the Constitution is one in which everybody is doing the job properly, but well, there has been centralisation over the years.

What were your ideas about how this job would turn out

Shukla: You clearly underestimate the kind of things you will do and the sheer scope and magnitude of the work involved.

Nayan: You’re managing a lot of different things and interests. You are the point of contact for everyone. Literally anyone who wants to contact anybody in the college contacts will most probably go through you.

What advice do you have for next year’s office bearers?

Shukla (laughs): Well, grow a thick skin firstly. Not everything that people will say to you needs to be taken seriously. Your job is to focus on public interest. Some people will always create a noise about anything you do. Do your homework well. Know

what the previous office bearers did and try and carry that for-ward to ensure no time is wasted. Also, work well with the NLS Alumni Association.

Nayan: I don’t think there has been any continuity with how the SBA functions year to year. Presently, there is no direction in which the SBA itself is seeing itself, in 5 years, in 10 years. So the focus on continuity is imperative. Also, know that you’ll are the main point of contact for a lot of random people. You will be handling different calls from a lot of different people, from recruiters to ISKCON members. It’s important to be used to talking to a lot of people a day, checking your phone, email messages regularly and replying promptly is very important for this job. Being professional is key.

You guys have emphasized delegation of work to various other student bodies. What are you guys left with to do by yourself, considering most work is devolved to bodies like SAC and CoCo?

Shukla: The fact is that even though you create these structures it’s not like they will work by themselves. We need to constant follow up with each body and prod them. It’s not that you will set up SAC and exam rules will be sorted without our involvement. Everyday a lot of work is spent following up and prodding vari-ous entities to work. Your attention is spread over many things; Say some CR wants some extension, the CR can do it. However if the extension policy itself needs to be changed, then we have to get involved. If you work with committees to come up with

a draft framework for alumni to fund com-mittees, it would be Nayan who would have to spend six hours drafting it.

Nayan: Also, you guys are thinking only of undergraduates. There are a lot of postgraduate things we need to take care off. So for instance Prof. Japhet who is chairman of PG Council and is also the head of the scholarship committee, which pertains to undergraduate and postgraduate students You set up the scholarship committee but leave it to adminis-tration it will remain bureaucratic and the entire process they set up may not be the best from a student’s perspective.

College definitely requires more individuals to take self ini-tiative and participate in college related activities. How can the SBA do that?

Nayan: Urge people, mobilise. An SBA president should urge people to take up responsibility and take initiative.

Shukla: Well, it’s best if self-initiative comes from within, but over time the role of the SBA has changed. It has become one of

CONVERSATIONS

I don’t think this po-sition should be seen as

one of a fixer.

29 QUIRKfixing issues of convenience, not so much as to how to organise college affairs in general, which is indeed quite worrisome. I don’t think this position should be seen as one of a fixer. If our job becomes just about these daily fixes, who will focus on the long term things that the institution also needs like building alumni relations or dealing with faculty members.

Nayan: Of course, it’s not completely mutually exclusive. How-ever if you keep having to toggle between the two, it has some costs because two people only have limited time on their hands with academic commitments and personal lives. However I don’t blame people for coming up to us with these problems because the problems are structural.

Will Internet ever be fixed or should I switch to Free Basics? What is happening on that front?

Shukla: So the issue with Internet is that it is fine for most people, but for people for whom it’s a problem, it works hor-ribly. Those are mostly people in middle cubies or some parts of campus like select parts of Ganga. To people it seems like internet is a simple thing, you just take some tools and fix the damn thing. However there are a lot more background things to consider. What’s happening at BSNL office, how is the network transmission coming to campus, how is it getting distributed on campus, how is it going to each router, distribution within hos-tels etc. Mistakes can happen at any stage of the process and we need a dedicated and competent IT office to maintain this.

We have made a few mistakes as well though, mostly mistakes of strategy. For the longest time, the admin told us we had to get an external consultant. However when we got one and ap-proached Nagarathna Ma’am, who is the chairperson of the IT Committee, she had a problem with it. Her concerns would in-volve college spending money and issues of how can the college give the contract to a specific company given ours is a govern-ment college. This set us back quite a bit because till this point we assumed the proposal would go through.

Nayan: Vice Chancellor also has limitations, he wouldn’t want to act unilaterally against any of the bodies that he has set up, like the IT Committee. Their recommendations carry great weight in whatever decision the college takes.

Shukla: You need to go to each individual stakeholder and con-vince them about the merits of a move in order to get things going. Sometimes we are forced to just bypass this process and go to the Registrar and tell him the financial requirements for getting an external consultant and he would say that he is fine with it however, it is the IT Committee Chairperson who would need to approve it. We would go back to her saying that the

Registrar has ok’d it. Then she said that Chandrashekhar, the college IT guy won’t be fine with it. There is a lot of motion that keeps happening between these things. There are clearly some structural issues.

So another reason for everything taking time is because it has to be done through a tender process. Getting a new router installed on certain places in campus meant issuing a tender. Sometimes there would be different tenders for the wire and the router.

Nayan: One is right to ask, why can’t we bypass all this and go straight to VC. Well, the power of releasing money is with Registrar, so even if you go to VC, he wouldn’t want to bypass the Registrar.

Shukla: Moreover, there are external checks also on how col-lege spends money.

Nayan: Another fact to keep in mind is that the VC has con-stituted the IT Committee. He has empowered them to take

charge. At some level they want some degree of respect, they want their position on that body to be respected once you have given them that. When you are dealing with people you are dealing with personalities and egos, perspectives. Hence bypassing through VC is an issue.

What has worked though with regard to the Internet?

Shukla: Audit is set up, so that’s worked. Even though it’s caught up in a bureaucratic mess, it will happen sometime. Alumni Day came around and we got really busy. We want to have it early next trim.

Having dealt with the alumni a lot, over the past few weeks, what specific things have interactions with alumni have re-vealed to you?

Nayan: So we’ve put out our internship policies and stuff, but here’s the thing - even if alumni are coming down, suppose to offer a course or have a talk, we want students to express inter-est. Oftentimes, they would call to inform that they are inter-ested and want to know if college is. It’s wrong from our stand-point to deny this, but it’s really disheartening to see lack of interest. Like mostly recently Mr. Savi Hebbur who is a partner at Linklaters in London was here for a talk but only some five people show up. Why will they want to keep engaging in terms of academics with Law School if that is the case?

I think that certain alumni wish to come back, maybe not for offering courses, but specifically for professional change, devel-opment of professional skills etc. There is a criticism that I’ve heard of, from alumni, that a lot of recent NLS graduates have

Right now elections hap-pen in this really silly

secretive manner. They become more about who

is friends with whom and who you know and other

ancilliary gossip.

30QUIRKissues of attitude, but not of intellect. Like how they’re behaving and performing at their internships.

Shukla: Another thing that has been pointed out on more than one occastion is how some committees and college teams have been really unprofessional. Alumni have expressed great dissat-isfaction about how there was no response after the money was received, or about the manner in which they were approached. This definitely weakens trust between us and them.

What do you think SBA should do about the dog menace on campus?

Nayan: See, I would have just one thing to say about dogs. When I was in first year there was a dog called Symbi. That bitch saved my life. Symbi was amazing. Imag-ine you have come back after you’ve had a hard day in class or something. There is that creature that is just delirious because you exist. So that’s one experience but at the same time there was an asshole in the senior boys hostel. When I walk in he’s just there on my sheets. Dogs have personality, they are like persons alright. This is the reason in law why you can’t really evict or throw them out unless they are really dan-gerous and harmful. The conclusion being that they are here to stay and we need to manage them. So SNHP does have a dog database, where they have recorded all dogs with pictures and personality descriptions. So SNHP is doing a good thing, a lot of them have been neutered this year. There is a proper vet who comes down to check them but more than that, we can’t really take care of dogs on campus

Shukla: We can do other things as well like prevent other dogs from entering the neighbourhood.

Nayan: Definitely and there are opportunities where commit-tees can actually converge together. So for instance, CDMC and SNHP could work together to get a wall fixed and discussion plans with Narayanappa sir about it. And as simple as that.

Shukla: Committees have a lot more capacity to handle all this. They should ask first years to pester Narayanappa sir. Sanction-ing of funds is not much of an issue. The problem lies in follow-ing up, which obviously, committees are better equipped to do. We could be using our effort for much more better things than being outside his office at 4 o’ clock each day.

Nayan: I think that’s one specifically frustrating thing where you consistently feel like there is an opportunity cost to your time, so you have to necessarily prioritize.

What is the one thing about SBA that you badly want to undo? What is the one change you want to make to the func-tioning of the SBA?

Nayan: See, when you are in a committee and you have a meet-ing you are discussing things with multiple people, there is a feedback loop and a certain level of accountability. You don’t have that with the SBA, where only two people are managing. When you have so many talented people in Law School, do you really want to put your eggs in only two baskets? We need more people who can be dedicated to specific tasks that we have to carry out, because our attention is diffused among a myriad of

problems.

Ideally, the office of the SBA needs to be expanded. Someone needs to be put for ensuring information flows within col-lege. What I think we also could do, is have someone who is more responsible for contacting people personally, managing a database of general contacts that the SBA has and being there for exploiting it An-other thing I want to do is ensure proper

representation of PGs. Ultimately we are living separately and having separate classes, neglect of PG on our part at some lev-el is inevitable. Also SBA elections should happen earlier. The SBA representative-elects need two three weeks to settle in and learn the ropes.

Also, it’s time to institutionalise campaigning in some way. Have more regular debates, have a particular date by which ev-eryone should announce their candidacy.

Shukla: Right now elections happen in this really silly secretive manner. They become more about who is friends with whom and who you know and other ancilliary gossip and ego tussles. Never about matching candidates with what the job require-ment are, what they stand for and what their ideological lean-ings are.

Nayan: I think there should be institutional things you agree upon. Like meetings between candidates and batches, you should be able to force candidates to do that. Would make the manner of campaigning more transparent and hopefully less conflicted. You should also not have separate elections for Pres-ident and Vice President. You should just have four candidates out of which people vote for two. The top two candidates would become President and VP (according to votes). Things might become more pleasant when it doesn’t become solely a clash between two personalities and instead a competition between many people. •

When you have so many talented people in Law School, do you really want to put your eggs in only two baskets? We need more people who can

be dedicated to specific tasks that we have to carry out, be-cause our attention is diffused among a myriad of problems.

31 QUIRK

It was the afternoon of 9th January 2016 on the occasion of the inaugural NLS Alumni Day when

Quirk Team caught a num-ber of alumni to ask them one simple question: If you

had to go through Law School again, what is one thing you’d do differently?

“I think I’d play more football. I didn’t play enough at that time.

I’d definitely moot a lot more. And ensure I attended each one

of V.S. Mallar’s classes.”

Dayan Krishnan (1993)

“I would … to be very hon-est, I would probably pay atten-

tion to my projects more. I spent a lot of time doing random stuff.

I don’t regret that. But maybe a little more conscientiousness for

my projects.”

- Anupama Hebbar (2008)

“Nothing different, actual-ly. All of what my journey was, I enjoyed it completely. The ability to think deeply on issues and to appreciate what was out there –

that was the biggest thing Law School equipped me with.”

Pramod Rao (1994)

“I’d stay more often in Law School. I used to stay outside.”

Suraj Satish (2012)

“I would probably moot, which I never did. I’m a litigator now and it’s my bread and butter.”

Arun Sri Kumar (2007)

“Oh my god. Let me think about that. I would not get scared by the competition that I faced in Law School, especially when it came to mooting. I would look in and find more confidence in myself. I think I suffered from a lack of confi-dence, and now I can go back and see where I could have tapped into it and I would do that.”

Priya Rao (2000)

“I would not moot! No mooting! I should have applied for commit-tees earlier … done more stuff … but we’re only answering this be-cause you’re asking us. We don’t really regret this. I think it’s been long enough that all my regrets have resolved themselves.”

- Asma Tajuddin (2010)

“Nothing really, but the best thing about Law School? The mess ta-ble. All the conversations there. I would not change that.”

Akanksha Sharma (2013)

“Chill out a little more. I was a complete nerd.”

Murali Neelakantan (1996)

“Nothing really. I did my course, I did my projects … with the help of my teachers of course. To fine-tune the areas of practice that I wanted to

develop myself in – banking and real estate. I’m happy I did that. And Law School provided me a

with a playground to do that. I’m really grateful to Law School.”

Vikas NM (2008)

“I probably would have come out of the closet when I was in Law School.”

Govind Naidu (2002)

“I wouldn’t have been so embarrassed of my non-mainstream Indianness which effectively came out only after Law School. I would have asserted my difference from the get-go. I’m Goan and Catholic and there was always a sense of apology. It was not direct. It was kind of round-about. Law School was so dominated … either by North Indian Hindi culture, or by Bengali or Tamil culture there was no space for anyone else. You felt like you had to fit into the tracks and trundle along with the rest. I’m sorry I submitted to this Indianness.”

Jason Keith Fernandes (2000)

MONTAGE

32QUIRK

A look of horror on my faceand my mouth begins to mumbleI feel my heart begin to raceand my footsteps start to stumble

I slowly get up off my seatas my face starts turning blueMy life begins to feel off-beatForsooth! I need to poo!

I rush into the nearest stallsquirming with uneaseMy pants and boxers I let fall, I unclench and release

Amidst a din of gassy sounds My face begins to glowWith the rhythm of machine gun soundsI reach a steady flow

I squirm and struggle for many an hourAnd time begins to bendWhen suddenly, like Hiroshima,It comes to an explosive end

A rush of joy runs through and throughI keep my head held highWith a solemn face I leave the looExhausted I let out a sigh

But joy gives way to woeful moansFor when I let one ripA sound I heard that chilled my bonesThe soft murmur of a drip. •

Once upon a time and space,Lived a princess, known for her face

Though she was personally proud of her mindIt was convenient, as suitors were never hard to find

And suitors she would always needAs none could ever satisfy her greed

Cinderfella, Mr. White, Aladdin all had triedBut she merely moaned, purred and lied

Fake it till you make it, she firmly held And so she searched for nirvana on her bed

Little did she know that it was all in vain, She had been cursed by a man she put in the friend zone lane

“No man, no woman in all of the shireWould ever be able to light her fire”

And so she spent her days and nightLooking for someone who could be Mr. Right

Twenty men had come and gone And yet she continued to feel forlorn

One night, in the land of dreams She looks up to the heavens and screams

“Help me please, Why do I feel so frustrated?”Came a voice, “Have you never masturbated?”

“There is nothing that I haven’t tried,Missionary, BDSM and from behind.

“God helps those who help themselves,” said the voice“When you have fingers, why rely on boys?”

And so finally that night the princess learned And not a day passed where she yearned

For no man no woman in all of the land Could satisfy her as well as her hand. •

Brownian Motion Princess and the ‘O’By Vnshjj (Batch of 2017) By Radhika Goyal (Batch of 2019)

POETRY