Dear Mr Mahadevan,
"I found every one moving in a hurry in the Supreme Court premises."
Kindly and very magnanimously excuse this irreverent streak in me (which has caused immense harm to the advancement of my career in LIC) wanting
to burst forth at times paying no heed to my frantic efforts to
restrain/suppress it, making me now recall the following passage from
"The Impeachment of Warren Hastings" by Thomas Babbington Macaulay :
"There remained the endless marches and counter-marches
of the Peers between their House and the Hall: for as often as a point
of law was to be discussed, their Lordships retired to discuss it apart;
and the consequence was, as a Peer wittily said, that the judges walked
and the trial stood still."
(Emphasis supplied --- PR)
I may be permitted to take the inexcusable liberty of modifying this
gem in the light of my continuing experience with the very lowest tier
('Trial Courts') of our 4-tier system of 'administration of justice'
(ha!) into : "The judges, lawyers,
litigants, members of staff of courts, tea and snacks vendors, casual
rubber-necked visitors to courts, etc., all walk, nay, frenziedly hurry
about but THE CASES STAND STILL."
The very thought of multiplying this by what is happening on similar
lines all over India is enough to make even the stoutest of the
stout-hearted despair and give up but we go on, claiming to 'administer
justice'.
In the Yakshaprasnam portion of the Aranyaparvam of Mahabharatam,
Dharmaputhran (Yudhishtiran) answers one of the Yakshan's --- who was none other than Yamadharmamaharajavu, his own father who poses 126 difficult questions
to Yudhishtiran --- questions
: "What is the most miraculous thing in the world?" thus "Even on
seeing a dead body being taken to the crematorium we think that this is
something that happened to that poor luckless fellow but will not befall
us and carry on with our everyday, mundane, pointless affairs and
that's the most miraculous thing in this world."
If Dharmaputhran were alive today his answer would conceivably have been : " It is what passes for 'ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE' IN INDIA that is Bharat that is the most amazing, astonishing, astounding, awesome, bizarre, creepy, curious, freakish, frightening, ghostly, incredible, inexplicable, outlandish, monstrous, scary, strange, unreal and weird thing in all the world."
Thanks for your time and patience.
Keep well.
Regards.
P. Ramanathan.
