Summer of 2018!

“Law is a jealous mistress.” But we the lawyers practicing before Higher Courts in India, have a month-long summer vacation. The mistress takes a back seat. We usually travel around this time of the year. But this year a new job of my wife doesn’t allow us to leave Ahmedabad. Though I like reading books and watching Prime & Netflix Originals, this summer these two proven a strong and time – consuming company for me.

Books are my first love followed by another book-lover Khushi, my better 51%. Actually, I took reading seriously just to impress her. Otherwise, I was that 90% of “avid reader” who loves Chetan Bhagat. Ohh, I forgot to tell you that I am also a political commentator. A deep interest about Indian Politics made me join twitter. But, this Twitter consumed most of my time to understand the wary reality of trolls and the Darkness of the world comes knocking to the pixels beneath my fingers.

The summer vacation starts with Anita Gets Bail -- a book authored by Arun Shaurie. Mr. Shaurie has quite a good reputation across the political lines. Actually, he is one of the few Right leaning intellectuals. His book “The Courts and their Judgments” was a good read when I was reading my Law at M. S. University of Baroda. In his current book, he touched upon almost all the current topics which troubles Indian Judiciary such as Judge Loya Case, Kaliko Pul Case, Coup of Four Senior Most Judges of Supreme Court of India et al. The book proves ‘Confirmation bias’ to a person who sees everything is wrong with Indian Judiciary. From Backlog of cases to rot of Corruption in the system. It also raises a long-standing question of trust deficit with the Higher Judiciary. The book is a good read for lawyers and must read for the conspiracy theorist.

The Spy Chronicles—RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace. Unlike the title suggests, this book does not provide insights about workings of Research and Analysis Wings (RAW) and Inter-services Intelligence (ISI). It has a quite unique format, the entire book is based on conversation/dialogs between A.S.Dulat (Ex-RAW) and Asad Durrani (Ex ISI) and the talk was moderated by Mr. Aditya Sinha. Through this book, both ex-spooks share their experience about dealing of Indo-Pak relations. Much of the book revolves around Kashmir and the Policy and mistakes made by both the agencies for brought the Kashmir to where it is this days.

There we come to Supreme Whispers: Conversations with Judges of the Supreme Court of India 1980 – 1989. The book is authored by renowned scholar of constitutional & Judicial history of India, Mr. Abhinav Chandrachud. Being a first-generation lawyer, I am always curious to know the inner workings of Supreme Court corridors. The life style of Judges, Ideology of Judges, politics of Judges and reality of Judges. We are indebted to Prof. George Gadbois for having the judges not only interviewed but also the interview notes were prepared and preserved and granted permission to Mr. Chandrachud to author a book based on those notes.

And then I read The People V. Tech: How the internet is killing democracy (and how We save it) authored by Jamie Barlett. This book makes you paranoid about the reach and involvement of Artifical Intelligence in our day to day life and, how it changed our rational thought processing system. This book led to me to another book viz. Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts right now by Jaron Lanier. These books are must read to expand our understanding of our mind and how it is changing the decision-making power of human being by exploiting the inherent psychological fallacies of human mind.

What I believe is that the status – quo-ist self of human being are terrified with a thought to enter into unchartered territories. I don’t think that all what is written in these books are ‘a version of sceptics/paranoid’. I believe change is inevitable the modes will be changed and not ‘kernel of our socio-democratic system’.

As mentioned, the books are not the company I have had in this Summer. In this summer much of the time I spent in USA (virtually) through Person of Interest, The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, House of Cards, Wild Wild Country and the Girlfriend experience. Fleabag & McMafia took me to United Kingdom and Russia. Black Mirror & West World, I find these two very dark and unmeaningful.  

When i started writing this post, i wanted to write book reviews of the books i have read in this summer. But it bores me. Moreover, there are so many professional critiques. And as said by Carly heath of Slugline "anything more than 8 minutes bores me". And there is a research which concludes that humans' attention span is shrieking. And my attention span makes me Human!!!

Opinionated I:

Nothing is really changed. And I am writing this in context of Indian politics. Nowadays, the opinion-makers do over time to prove that the Judiciary lost its independence to the new dispensation at the helm. But if we read the History of these Institutions and democracies around globe, we can be more than convinced that what really changed is the name of the beneficiary of the establishments. The beneficiaries change and the outgoing beneficiary of previous establishment would try to paint the incumbent establishment a fascist as they are no more beneficiaries of the establishment.