My nlsiu; My Manfred Lachs moot!

I created some sort of a small history when I strolled back into the HNLU campus last year. I became perhaps the only person in the country to have had gotten through the NLS entrance and studied in the hallowed law school campus for 15 days, left it all and walked right back to HNLU where I had already spend a year. I do fondly remember my days in NLS though and indeed very fondly recall the walk in the pathway to my classes or the big big library that they have. But mind you I only recall everything fondly now! Then all I wanted was to get back to my friends that I had left behind in HNLU, to my teachers there and probably even to my bricks and walls in Raipur. Most say I screwed up real bad when I left NLS, What I say is this: NLS was a dream, a dream that I chased hard and transformed into reality, but then I had to wake up and live my life. Life, of course lay within another hallowed campus that of HNLU, because sometimes one year can mean a lot! So much so that it creates strings you can only strain but never break.

To plagiarize a very famous mooting term, ‘however’, even 15 days can leave memories of a lifetime and more so if the memories lay in a place known as the National Law School of India University! At least for me it sure did. So after coming back and getting sandwiched in my own law school life I took every opportunity to go and visit my friends in NLS. When spiritus 2006 came I represented HNLU in as many as four sports and then came the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition, 2007.
Me and Aravind were the speakers in our humble 2nd year team and our selection in the university ended quite late only on the 4th of January. There was a sudden running around for the registration funds which ultimately had to be pooled. It needs essential mention here that our organizer in Sydney waived our fees by a considerable chunk. Being first timers there was quite some hoch-poch in pretty much every small formality, starting off from the sending of the registration money to Sydney. Then came the much feared memorial submission dates, which coincidentally were fatally close to the post-midsem exams. That left us with just about a week for the respondent memo which by any international standard is to say the least ‘outrageous’! Our dear Seniors who had previously been to the Lachs moot in 2005 going to the semis in Sydney made sure the memo was actually presentable and somewhat sustainable in the fierce battle that was to ensue.
Oh! How I remember my printout day! Manfred lachs this year had a very odd system of double side printing and the shops in Raipur are honestly not the best we could use. After about approximately 15 grueling, patience testing and claustrophobic hours in the god forsaken shop FREEDOM! The memorials were in our hands and all we had to do was to courier them. That we did.
To our utter dismay we learnt 2 days later that we had mailed the memos to the wrong address! It was the Australian teams address and there was a separate international team address! Oh my gawdd! After three months of research, a month of sleepless nights, days of page numbering and hours and hours of editing did we really have to screw up that bad. Well as we later learnt we got a negative for mailing it to the wrong address! OH! That hurt. We also got negatives for not sending the floppy or CD-Rom! Uselessly enough we had lost two marks on the memorials.

Amidst a lot of running around for funds, giving unprepared moots, appearing for hectic project vivas and somehow managing a last day practice we were suddenly chugging along on a train that was to take us to Bangalore for the national rounds. NLS greeted us with its usual cool winds and I took my time off to revisit my room, dear 108 in Himalaya where a measly 15 days had been spent, a 15 days which sounded anything but measly to me. Arjun, my energetic ‘Punjab da puttar’ room-mate was all smiles and as luck would have had it he happened to be an MCS member and I was lucky enough to take a look at the trophies in my room itself since he was holding them. I wondered if I could touch them after the competition, maybe take it back to Raipur, even the runners would do. Dreams, hopes and a bucketful of energy put me to a lovely sleep.
As the morning sun soared and I missed my breakfast Priya Pillai our national coordinator put forth the schedule and the exchange of memorials took place. We were to moot the same day up against Amity Law School. It was my first moot outside the safe haven of my university walls and I wasn’t quite what one would call a very public speaker so the tension inside the veins was quite obvious to me. I spoke my opening lines quite eloquently, “It is indeed a matter of great pride and privilege...I shall deal with issues 1 & 2...” There I was standing in the justice Hidayatullah Moot court Hall in my first moot which happened to be international and for one of the worst three seconds of my life I did not have any inkling of what my next words would be! In the middle of the moot I was blank! I was suddenly a sad audience to how fast the human brain can be when in those catastrophically THREE Long seconds I thought of all sorts of wild things including, the end of Manfred lachs, the end of my mooting career and the embarrassment that I would face for the rest of law school and probably beyond! Somewhere within those gasping choking thoughts slithered back my issues, my arguments and amazingly enough my voice. I was back on ‘mooting terms’. Actually I carried on quite merrily from then on. That was that, I was off the mark cheekily enough and Aravind commended me on the performance settling down any nerves that could have been.
Second prelims was Ambedkar Law College, Chennai and the judge pressed so hard on my concentration that I swear I really had my run for the money. The questioning also was top notch. The answering, I am most happy to concede was also jhakaas. We weren’t quite expecting ourselves to be second overall in the prelims standing so when Priya Pillai called out Team 814 all I wanted to do was to grab the opponents memo and storm the court. However, when I had the memo in hand I realized our hands were actually quite full. NUJS went on to win the best memo yet with the absolute showdown that apna ‘Anna’ aka Aravind produced in court we went into the semis. The judges seemed to like us and since they looked like they were gonna give us marks we couldn’t help but love them. Nalsar beckoned in the semis and that was a damn close shave. In fact till the very point when the results were announced I was nowhere close to being sure about us in the finals. Yet the unassuming Ms Pillai once again in her very no-suspense attitude put forth the submission “Team 814 get through!”
It was NLSIU in the finals...my ex-seniors, my law school, my moot court hall and yet nothing was mine. I represented a different ‘my’, a ‘my’ that I choose to be HNLU. I recognized Shantanu and Jayanth by face. Shantanu later went on to win best speaker. Jayanth is the picture boy of prime tutorials who had topped all the top three law schools when he wrote the entrances. How I remember staring at him for 2 whole minutes when he was casually walking in the nls campus. Might seem petty to a lot of you but for me he was always in the manorama yearbook never in flesh and blood. Today, though, was a different ball game, he wasn’t buying a laptop and I wasn’t staring, well I still was!
To court then...Mr Jayaraj from ISIL, Mr Raghavan from Dua and Dua and also a scientific representative from ISRO! Some three judge bench eh? and just when I was about to assume they were too old, pat came the questions...one after the other. Space law, space technicalities, pretty much everything. Keenly contested, nls were fabulous.
To the famous NLS Quad then and at the award function as I kept wondering how the judges in each round were so prepared with facts, right then Mr Jagannath Iyer of the 5th year in NLS was thanked for the judges briefing. Boy! He did his job damn well...about time JMC was chucked. Then an ISRO representative presented an extremely detailed, highly informative yet at times slightly uninteresting story of ISRO...of the past, the present and the future. Dr Jayagovind wrapped up pretty early and then came the much awaited results. The runners said Ms Pillai, “National Law School of India University” Hoorah! That meant winners...Hidayatullah National Law University. An astounding moment. I had won, correction ‘We’ had won. One strong hug to Aravind and for a brief second I hoped I was gay so that I could kiss him. A truly memorable evening and I take the opportunity to thank Adarsh Bhaiyya for his special help in arguments, Parth Bhaiyya for his experienced advice and Divya for her novel legal argument all of which helped in making it memorable. A special thanks to ‘Roobaroo Pradyumn’ without him we would still be cramming IPC for the end-sems and Manfred Lachs would have been just a name. I commend NLSIU for their excellent hospitality, the MCS for their efforts and last but easily a high priority thanksgiving to ISRO for helping us out with the very famous problem of ‘funding’ for international moots.


All of which is most respectfully submitted before the honorable readers. Happy mooting!