The NUJS as I saw it

The NUJS as I saw it
The 'Pillar' of Justice

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Show Stoppers

I spent five years at law school amidst a mix of intelligent, beautiful, sharp, witty and wily ladies. I wasn’t a Casanova for certain, and neither did I have a large female following. But I got to hang out with friends who used to count the number of girlfriends they had dumped in their college life. Also, belonging to a batch which had girls outnumbering the guys helped matters in this regard. The fact that the topper from our batch was a female, the fact that the second topper from our batch was a female, and also the fact that the third topper from our batch was a female, is never taken into account while I narrate certain anecdotes which aspire to prove my point.     

Let me begin with a story which is again related to moot courts. It’s for no reason that I always tend to relate to this facet of law school. There are occasions when you keep abusing and maligning a thing as you could never achieve it yourself. Mooting ability is one such ‘thing’ for me. This again refers to my maiden attempt to conquer the mooting circuits in law school. Once the list of the much coveted ‘moot court society’ was out, I realized that I was pegged against a female, who happened to be one of the smartest and loveliest ladies that NUJS has ever seen till date. To prove my point, may it suffice to say that she was too smart to remain stuck in the law school for five years. On grounds of having adopted ‘unfair means’ in one of the project assignments, which I thought was a deliberate and intentional strategy on her part to quit legal education, she was detained for one year. She took recourse to the best alternative to repeating a year in the same institution. She left legal education for good, and now she can be seen in one of the decent news channels reading news on global economy. Quite a remarkable attempt to earn fame and success at a young age, I think. In any event, and coming back to the point, I was initially quite excited at have a girl like her as my opposing counsel. It was only much later that I realized the soup I was into.

My well wishers advised me to appoint spies to detect her preparations for the moot. Later, I realized it would hardly serve a purpose as she was always seen flirting around with guys at pubs and restaurants. Further, I learnt from my reliable sources that she had not even bothered picking up a copy of the moot problem so as to begin her preparations for the same. I conjectured that she would either have the genes of a Jethmalani, by far the best criminal lawyer in the country in modern times, or she wouldn’t be bothered enough to please the jury and win the contest. The only method to find an answer to that was to confront her directly, I thought. The next day, after classes, I got a chance to speak to her. Being a shy guy, I had hardly spoken to her before and approaching her on this issue had to look weird. Anyways, I wanted to give it a try.

“Hey”, I said.

“Hi, whats up”, she replied indifferently. I realized that she was attending to a crowd of boys jostling around her, and that I made myself look like one of them. It’s always so good to be a beautiful girl, I thought. 

“Fine yaar, just thought of having a chat with you”, I didn’t know why I uttered the italicized. I guess the law school culture had seeped into me, as this one word found immense importance in the daily conversations amongst people. Also, this helped giving an informal tinge to my exchange of words.

“Chat with me!!!”, she exclaimed, as if she was some nobel laureate and that speaking to her demanded an appointment.

“Ya. Why, do I need to seek permission from her highness to have a chat?”, I replied a bit sternly, probably giving the indication that I was not to be confused with those bunch of self imposed puppets of her’s.

“Wait a minute. Did you try to snap at me? If so, please be advised not to try repeating it. No one talks to me like that. You get it?!!”.

Well, this was quite a bit for me to take. I understand that I wasn’t a macho and certainly did not have the looks resembling Herculean, but, come on, I too had my ‘dignity’.

“Hey... calm down. I did not come to begin a tiff with you. Just wanted to let you know that you are up against me.”

“Against you. What have I done to be up against you?”

Now, that was a shocker for me. Was I sure that she was actually the one, who was placed to argue against me. Did I see the list correctly? Did I cross check and make myself certain about it? Boss, I thought, I would make a fool of myself had I been wrong in this regard.

“Just a second. Aren’t you the one who would be arguing against me in the moot? The one that’s taking place in a week’s time?”

I held my breadth. If I was proved wrong, she would do nothing short of announcing this to her puppets who were looking at the entire scene with curiosity. And this would be blown out of proportions to capture headlines the next day in class.

“Oh, so all this while, you have been trying to talk about that moot court competition. You see, I haven’t even seen the list. And frankly, I did not even know the schedule of the moot until you spoke of it. You see, I just don’t care. For me, ‘preparing’ to argue in the court, and that too, in front of idiots who hardly know the law themselves, is not much of a deal. An hour’s work would suffice me to beat any damn person. And now that I know you are the unfortunate chosen, I shall try my best to give you a piece of my cake.”

Firstly, I couldn’t comprehend an iota of what she intended to say. ‘A piece of her cake’, what was that supposed to mean. Was this one of those law school phrases which I still had not picked up? Or was it just an innovative way to intimate me of the perilous consequences of having to face her as the opposing counsel. But then, I was now quite sure that she hadn’t started her preparations and that my insiders were correct to that extent. She either had to be one of those stupendous lawyers to argue without having read the law, or a witch to read the minds of other competitors.

Days past by and my memorial was ready to be submitted. While submitting it, I enquired about her highness from the moot court society. I was told that she hadn’t even submitted her memorial and that the time for submission had virtually come to a close. She would be facing negative markings for her late submission, if she at all decided to do so. That gave me a booster. I had scored a point even before having to face her in the court. But then, the suspicious instincts of a human mind never seemed to abandon me and I kept thinking of the possible tactics that she would employ to give me a final jolt.

Finally, all speculations came to rest. Just on the day of our appearance in the court, I received the news that she had found a new boyfriend and that she had decided to spend the entire week with him. Poor girl, her new found love was so exuberant about the entire scheme of the likely prospects, that she debunked the idea of even appearing for her competition. Good news for me, and bad for her, I thought.

The fact that I scored the least in the competition and had to find pillars to hide behind after the results were out, wasn’t that an encapsulating a news as compared to the one about the new couple in the college campus. All throughout the day, you could hear people discussing the affair. After all, the most sought-after girl was won over by a classmate. I thought of congratulating her for her prospects and place my regards for leaving me without a competition in the moots. But when I realized that I had flunked the competition even without someone who could rebut my arguments, I shuddered to think of approaching her. The embarrassment was such that I decided to call it a day for my mooting prospects in college.

The story doesn’t end here. It was only a month after the entire fiasco that she ‘broke up’ with her boyfriend only to be single again. What was the point of having a boyfriend and not appearing for the competition, I thought. Either she was stupid enough not to have foreseen the probable future to her ‘relationship’ with the guy, or she just wanted to escape the brunt of the judges without giving the impression of being scared and intimidated by them. I employed all my analytical skills to decipher the entire situation, and quite inevitably, I ended up reaching the same conclusion every time. She had a premonition that I would be quite excited about facing her in the moot competition. Now, the reputation that she had built all these days in law school of being a smart, intelligent and beautiful girl, would fall flat if she were to lose the competition, and that too, after having had to face the easiest competitors around. Thus, the entire scheme of things. So, do we derive a moral from this story? I guess yes, but then spelling it out would ruin the joy of conjecturing it. And so, I refrain.

They say that even God can’t read the mind of a woman. Before I may be interrogated as to who these ‘they’ are, may I lay the basis for this assertion. The basis lies with the frequent philosophical chats I used to have with Atul before he got entangled with the NIFT girl. He used to look at the girls in college disdainfully and provide me with this unsolicited phrase, thereby counseling me to maintain adequate distance from them. It still perplexes me to find a plausible reason for this phrase, but for the present discussion, I do not intend to dive into the matter. The bottom line remains that even God cannot read the mind of a female, leave alone guys.