Self-absorbed memoir

Legal confidential: Adventures of an Indian Lawyer by Ranjeev C. Dubey, Penguin; Price: Rs.499; Pages: 299 Over three decades ago this reviewer qualified as a barrister and migrated from the UK to practice law in the Bombay high court and fulfil a subsidiary aspiration to enter public service through politics. At that time new entrants into the legal profession were obliged to sit out for up to five years in the chambers of a senior counsel earning loose change, if that, learning court craft and intricacies of the law. Instead, what I learned best was that the Bombay bar was dominated by Gujarati and Parsee sons and nephews of counsel and judges wholly driven by avarice with little interest in justice dispensation or reputation of the judicial system, and its pride of place within India’s democratic framework. Because I was well-supported by an indulgent father who regarded pupillage as an extension of my education, I stuck it out for four-plus years, during which I was the sole counsel of the Bombay Legal Aid Society which was so impecunious that it couldn’t pay even out of pocket expenses, let alone counsel’s fees. The cynicism and greed which permeated what I believed at bottom to be a noble profession, was a big turn-off. It prompted me to begin a new career in industry, even though things were looking up for me in the legal profession. Looking back, it’s a decision I’ve never regretted. What’s the joy of succeeding in a universally despised dung-heap profession which shows no signs of reformation? Neither the Bar Council of India, the higher judiciary, nor the country’s legal eminences seem to have any ideas or intent to clean the country’s patently unjust justice system which is creaking under the weight of 30 million pending cases; levies court fees for civil litigation; has failed to evolve a legal aid mechanism for the poor; incarcerates 280,000 under-trial citizens in jails, and tolerates the lowest judge-population ratio among all democracies (13 per million citizens cf. 105 in the US). Despite this grim scenario the country’s 950 law colleges and universities continue to churn out an estimated 60-70,000 poorly schooled and trained lawyers per year, who crowd the static number of lower courts and openly solicit clients, prohibited conduct practised more in the breach than observance. However readers of Legal Confidential — Adventures of an Indian Lawyer, an autobiography of Ranjeev C. Dubey described as a practising corporate lawyer, legal correspondent of several business magazines and author of two books on law (Winning Legal Wars (2003) and Bullshit Quotient (2012)), are unlikely to come across any illumining examination of these macro issues which have brought the Indian legal system into universal disgrace. Instead, it traces the career of the author who entered the legal profession with the noblest motives — “pursuit of liberty and justice” — but lost all innocence to pervasive cynicism in 25 years of practice starting in the “dog-eat-dog world” of Delhi’s Tees Hazari lower courts. “I learnt soon…