Of patents and Land Acquisition and the GATS and... Arbitration

It has been a very long semester...very very long!

I am once again your very own record man. I have participated in more moot courts than what is usually done by people who are not hyper-obsessed with the idea of bluffing footnotes and telling lies (Johnny didnt eat the sugar and if he did he must have been a lawyer...hahaha). But then, perhaps I am after all one of them! Mooting is the best thing that I do in law school, and I am sure will do in law school.

Raj Anand Moot

It all started on a dull evening when the moot court society had the problem of the Raj Anand moot court competition on IPR. The university wanted to send a good team and my seniors didnt want to go. So me and anna (aravind) became the obvious choice (Blushing!). This time though we also had a researcher, Johnny-nimblefingers aka John Cherian Ambooken. But as things turned out, we would have done much better just staying away from words like patents and trademarks. Our almost strong-hearted efforts at making a well researched memo and a high sounding oral presentation yielded absolutely no benefits because the university jury decided we werent good enough to participate. Amidst a slightly different kind of murky hotch-potch we were once again chugging along on a train! Delhi hosted the competition and we finished 7th (Sad!). The very interesting thing about it all was during the felicitation. We were told that the problem is released in March and in fact that is one of the great things about the organisation of the moot i.e. dates are fixed. It was only then that I realised that every other team had prepared for 3 months while we simply landed there with a couple of weeks of IPR know-hows. It also answered one of my bugging questions as to why the clarifications had been given along with the problem...I said they could have simple mentioned it in the problem!! The thing is, people had first researched and then asked and then after that they had been clarified...AND it was only after that time when we got the problem. So much for winning Raj Anand.

Tankha Moot on Land Acquisition

In the midst of two benchmark rounds that I gave for Raj Anand I had simultaneously registered for a moot being organised by NLIU, Bhopal: The 2nd Justice RK Tankha Memorial moot court. This time the team composed of Abs aka Abhishek Srivastava and JD aka Tutu aka Jaydeep Singh Yadav and yours truly. The team was formed very casually, graduating very quickly from being a joke into a serious national moot. Once again the memo was made, logical, footnoted and sprayed with the usual touch-ups of style. With almost properly made tickets for once, it happened again. We were chugging along on a train. Not that I hated the other train journeys too much but then right before one reaches Bhopal the scenic display is quite fantastic and thus earned a specific mention. Anyways once in NLIU we were greeted quite well (Apart from that no good driver of ours who played the song masti-masti-mast-kalandar when we reached there and made us very uncomfortable in front of the well dressed students ready to greet us). We munched on a very eagerly awaited lunch (Trains and food never go together). The moot began in right earnest and we glided through to the final I was suddenly standing in front of a huge bench that comprised Justice AK Mathur (Judge Supreme Court), 3 other judges of the MP High Court including the CJ AK Patnaik and Sr Advocate of the SC Mr Vivek K Tankha. Having gotten the opportunity of a lifetime I mooted to whatever level I could. The results were not so simple...no no not at all, it was without any trace of exaggeration EXTRAORDINARY!! We won the moot and the best memorial and I personally, was awarded the Best Speaker. With a bag full of trophies and a brain full of happy memories I was back at the very very famed Hidayatullah National Law University.

Plans were being made for participating in Jessup. That didnt quite come through very well especially due to the Surana bias involved and I suddenly found myself preparing for a very very alien moot. ELSA WTO moot court. Being accustomed to the ICJ and the domestic courts of India, basically so to say, the spheres of international law and municipal law. The principles governing WTO were quite unfamiliar.

ELSA Moot Court on WTO Law

This years problem was based on the GATS and Basic Telecommunications. Anand Shankar Jha one my seniors was my co-speaker and there was another team in the challenge rounds of the university. As it turned out this was slated to be the most awaited moot court challenge in this university. On the D-day I was back at my tensed best. The moot went on very well though...in fact I was quite content with myself...! Alas! the very last query put to me left me stumped. I thought it was a wrong question and I was left irritated to say the least. We didnt qualify and a lot had to do with me because my co-speaker had got the highest marks!! So sad. Good bye GATS...so much for the WTO dispute settlement body!

Willem C Vis Commercial Arbitration

It had already been a lot of mooting for me and especially because of the loss I faced in the challenge rounds I felt thoroughly drained and tired. I just wanted to sleep peacefully for a few nights with no memo to type, no footnote to edit...It seemed my life had become limited to coming up with silly arguments for fictional crap created by marketing idea oriented themes that moot courts!! Oh my gawdd I was actually criticising moot courts...what I loved most!! The very same day when I somehow wanted to finish dinner and catch the bust to the hostel so that I could just drop dead...Adarsh Bhaiyya asked me if I wanted to do the Vis moot. First thing I told him was what was actually quite honest: I am TIRED!!... he said you will get over it in a few days. I said I will tell you tomorrow. I was barely standing, battling a gruesome war with the inside of my super-aching head which was mercilessly hammering on my skull. That was one headache I will remember for a long long time. For the first time in many many months I felt weak, I was physically and emotionally void. The emotional part is because in my university you have different kinds of people, some who are just waiting like ever-hungry vultures to remark on my defeats...mainly because they dont have any. No defeats no victories...they have their own dull lives to battle. I pity them and think maybe they should have a moral right to pass comments on me...why? because thats all they do in their lives!! One shoudl always have a reason to live...without that men die! If within their boring no-activity lives they find time to curse me and find some solace in that... well...touche.

Anyways commercial arbitration did happen. I said yes the next day and my dream to team up with Adarsh Bhaiyya had finally emanated out of my sleeps into my life of flesh and blood. I was less committed than any other moot I have ever done. I intend to make that up now for the real thing. The challenge rounds were quite easy since we had little competition especially with Amit Bhaiyya and Adarsh Bhaiyya in the team!! The memo was also made veru hurriedly. I made one issue and Adarsh and Amit Bhaiyya one each. The results then: we won and by a handsome margine. So then I am off to Hong-Kong in the month of March!

The end-sems came and went...I gave the extra exam i.e. IPC which went well!

AND finally...The fifth semester was over. Or so I thought...but as things turned out it stretched even longer...the bus I took home took double the time it should take. 14hrs for a 7hr train journey and then...then then..finally I was at home staring down greedily at my little brother for what was to be a few happy relaxed days at home before I am once again chugging along on a train to delhi for interning with the Solicitor General of India.

Night walk to the 'dhaba'

This piece is addressed as if the day after I had taken that memorable trip to the dhaba. The date was 12th January and please read it as if it is 13th january 2006!

Hostel life is fun,
yesterday me and my bunch of jumpstart friends realised an interestingly new dimension to that fun. We in our hostels at this national school have rules, rules as regards to going out and coming into the hostel so that we can get boxed up in that piece of infrastructure which our university so proudly calls 'hostel'. Boys will be boys though...and as you all so disgustingly know, our philosophy screams out with special emphasis that rules are meant just so that they could be broken. In fact not just broken but smashed, disintegrated and thrown into one of those pathetic gutters that are freely available in Mumbai. Our so called rules are mentioned in a students manual that got lost inside 24hours of being recieved in our first semester. I somehow faintly recall reading that nobody should go out of the hostel premises after 9:30 PM. Can you belive I actually read the damn manual...Well neither can I...but then our warden Nalin sir has explained the rules so many times to us... You see, I kind of liked the nice soft spoken economics professor of ours so maybe I scrolled through the pages someday. Now, coming back to what we did with the rules is that we decided to suspend the rules a little(in fact BREAK IT and smash it and throw it and all) and go out for a special tryst with with our own Rules (No holds barred, dance your heart out rules).

It was 12:30 when the creatures of the night...I mean the dead of the night(me , pradyumn, JD, aravind, manu, john, arjun, and under-18) decided to go for the walk. G9, as we call our group, was greeted by a clear sky as the great bear and the orion gleefully beamed down at us. The constellations were discussed at some random length by me and john as we walked in groups of two's and threes. John and I also expanded on a few other variety of topics. I was reminded of srikant very much because we two normally got around discussing philosophies and stuff (John is kind of similar to sriku). Pradyumn and arjun had to pick up some cash at the ATM which fell on our route to the dhaba in a petrol pump. Being the good samaritans that we are, me and john decided to wait for them while others strolled away into the distance. Chattering merrily continued with all outlooks on life coming under scrutiny.

On the way comes a small room like structure where a warm and inviting campfire lazily burnt. Two men were warming themselves up, one was the man who stayed there and another was a stranger who had stopped on the way probably unable to resist the temptation of warming his numb hands before moving on. We threw occasional fleeting glances at them, sometimes at the fire as we continued the enriching exchange of words. Finally the stranger dressed in brownish leather jacket and dark jeans started the bike. A few stones were strewn on the roadside and as he flexed and fumbled with his aggressive start on the bike he jumped over them creating the image of a cartoonish biker boyz character. I dont remember very well but maybe me and john had a passing chuckle as we looked on at his loafer-like bike antics. Then maybe he somehow felt our sarcasm kissed smiles because he finally looked at us... Walking up to us making his mean face clear and available for the two of us he asked us what we were doing there and with a wry smile I said we were waiting for friends who have gone to the ATM to get cash for the pending dinner at the dhaba. His conversation, which seemed more like interrogation for me continued in right earnest, he further stretched his attitude asking us about our subsequent plans. I maintained my sweet charming smile as I answered, 'hostel'. His ugly and villanous face softened up a little although the unfathomable stench of cheap liqour grasped us in a perpetually nauseating wave. He said he thought we called him. Negative I answered with the smile quite intact. Now he bottled up his long hair using both his hands and finally gave us that natural inherently sick smile of his. With one final biking jumpstart he had dissappeared into the darkness. That was that he left we smiled.

Fear descended gradually as far as I am concerned but John says he was more on guard rather than anything else. We concluded very substantively taking into account all the actual activities that late night comprises - "this guy whoever he was was a drug dealer". He probably thought we wanted drugs and that was why he walked upto us. Anyway I console myself thinking he could not have done anything to us since it was always an uneven battle of two on one with John alone I am sure equal to two of his kind. Anyway the prospect of him having weapons though did scare me off and on this one john was equivocal. Just for the record, 'I WAS SCARED'. Now when I look back though, it is but ofcourse just another experience to look back on life and to feel the shudders. We trudged on from there without waiting for the ATM duo to get back (We had had enough of random drug dealers in the middle of the night you see) and reached SAHEB da - dhaba. Ordered butter chicken for the five non-vegs and the veg people had some arbitary food (I know paneer and some other mixed stuff I guess) roti and onions were the most wanted cusines as we haughtily feasted on 50 rotis!!(6 each+ 2 I dont know who). Then came the most uninteresting part of these trips, 'paying the bill', we went dutch.

Finally it was time for our stroll back into our law school life, the walk back was good and in a singular group. We reached the hostel at around 2:30 and with the slightest of chatter went off to sleep hoping against all hope, considering how lazy we usually are, that we would be able to catch the bus next morning (I managed to crack it anyway). Next morning in class Mahesh sir told us about how late night while we came back he heard our booming voices. I can only wonder what he was doing, must have been on the phone talking to his fiancee. Neways thats how things have been till I sat down to write to you people.

Kolkata Blues...Town Bus Ishtyle

Hi people,
This one is about a really rough ride in a really normal bus at Kolkata. Arjun my dear chum from law school started his internship at HRLN Kolkata today. Now both of us had to go on the same route so we decided that rather than the usual auto that 'apparates' us to and from our destinations(Harry Potter terminology), we will avail the golden gift of the WB government and use the Blue buses.

Well for once I really love Verma Ji or as the girls call him Verma Bhaiyya.... The bus, the yellow monster at HNLU. However, as far as the town buses of Kolkata are concerned... Well these are best called as blue torture mahines, ever eco-friendly and customer friendly, they are thrown mercilessly on the cluttered streets of Kolkata. Two glasses of water is what poor me had gulped down before I ventured out of Arjun's place for my law entrance coaching at LST... Ofcourse I had the sun in mind when I drank the water, little was I to know that the grisly laughter of the crowded buses would haunt me for days to come.
The bus.... Oh! disgusting. Ok first of all the obvious thing is that u dont have seats because as always everything is filled up. This is the law of state transport services the seats are all filled up right before you climb the bus. Now, just like the perfect 'Ramsay Production' horror movie the moment u think its safe to stand at ease... Voila!! there is this massive turn or a huge brake as if its the end of the world and the armageddon heroes have to save you, boy trust me you really have to manage urself from falling.

One fat lady (past middle age) was not so lucky and ultimately she produced an image of a cartoon fluttering wildly in the air holding onto one rod and clinging on till that last moment after which the fury of the swerve overcame her sweat lubricated palms and the poor woman fell face first crashing into at least four pairs of legs.

Well nothing stops the blue juggernauts and the roaring engines kept chugging along even as people helped her out. Oh no! I didnt help her... there was too much fast bangla lingo in the air for me to really understand what was being talked of. Ok so after about 7 mins into the journey after I had climbed and after our dear woman is back on her feet, there is no scope for anyone falling anymore? Why... well Kolkata buses after a particular point get so crowded that u dont quite have spatial sovreignty over a reasonable area to actually fall down. You just stand there sweating as bad a pig and about the time when u feel dehydrated, nauseated, pushed, sandwiched and physically demolished, the stop arrives and you get down to live another life and to live another day.

My shirt was history and I looked like I would be thrown out of LST with the amount of water loss that I had had... my black mass of flesh and sloshed clothing looked somewhat like a corporate guy coming staright out of a gladiator match. What with all the other people pushing around with discernibly aggressive bengali language being wildly thrown at each other, I really had a tough time keeping my feet, my hands and my ever needful bag in tandem.... Well then right just when I was about to give up...the most active guy sprayed out that elixir of life... the conductor screamed Deshapriya Park!!...

There there I had made it alive..... Freedom I thought! I will miss the aroma though...the perfect mixture of perfume, talcum and sweat... I got down wishing Arjun all the best for his day 1 at HRLN and definitely wishing and deciding that these buses are not for me...

HNLU where art thou.... Vermaji where art thou..... To the dear yellow bus that takes us back and forth to the hostel and to vermaji the dear old driver .... Live well and live long...

To the blue kolkata buses...Thank you for what the state transport department calls bus rides and I call... 'A worth blogging experience'.

Ok then till I find some other fatal incidents happeneing to me or perhaps when I am in my mood to say HOWEVER...
Adios
April 24th, 2006.

Forwards: A way of life

In the last one year or so I have received at least 200 forwards. Most of them have bought me great luck, have completely transformed my love life, granted me all my wishes within a specified period of time and given me surprises which have been good and bad. They have shown me that I am lucky and that passing on the forwards would thrust me into a land of unprecedented luck, a system of good luck that man has never known. Destiny as a concept of existence has been limited and orchestrated by the forwarding of mails. A lot of them I did pass on..... and on and on.... but no life is as it was when I was born way back in 1988.

Nothing at least for me has changed other than the fact whenever I visit my mailbox there is a new lot of mail waiting to bring me more luck. In fact all that has come of it is that all of my friends have stopped mailing me and whenever I see their name flashing ever so gleefully in my inbox its got FWD in its subject. Its almost become routine now... everybody is doing it but does that in itself mean that whatever it is, is the next best thing after electricity that happened to man. hell no! I say if at all the so called 'luck' has to be fondled or twitched around...we must; and I repeat MUST do something about our luck ourselves.

I heard some wise guy say the other day "Man is the maker of his own destiny" Well, I added that womenfolk are also able enough and hence I wonder where is the question of sick forwards shaping our well dreamt tomorrows... its a culture, a culture that I do not subscribe to. I have wasted enough time on excercising my eyes over words that serve no material or ethical cause to man.

What needs to be done is action and I demand of the readers to take that step, to wake up and smell the coffee, to stop forwarding mails... Because AOL is never going to pay 10 cents for any forward. And that my dear friend will NOT bring good luck to you and a better future for u however...it may spray upon you that extra minuite everyday which u can use to maybe smile or look at your loved one. Maybe what I personally want you to do is to wonder in that minuite once everyday... to look around today's world and wonder in that minuite... wonder what William Wordsworth wondered a long time back... Somewhat unrelated from my present discussion...
"What man has made of man!" And if u guys are wondering what exactly made me so sceptical and suddenly philosophical... NOTHING...I am just your average law student too bugged with his inbox cluttered with forwards and friends robbed by forwards.

AND DO NOT forward IT ANYWHERE BECAUSE IT WILL BRING VERY BAD LUCK TO U IN THE NEXT 24 HOURS!!!!

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!