Nine Extracts From Court Judgements That Will Make You Scratch Your Head

[Rajendra Prasad’s case] exposed the disutility and counter culture of an obsolescent obsession with crime as distinguished from crime doer and the sentencing distortion that develops almost into a paranoid preoccupation with death dealing severity as the saviour of society in the land of the Buddha and the Mahatma and in a world where humanity has protested against barbaric executions by State agencies even with forensic ‘rites’ Courts read the Code, not in judicial cloisters but in the light of societal ethos. Nor does the humanism of our Constitution holistically viewed subscribe to the hysterical assumption or facile illusion that a crime-free society will dawn if hangman and firing squads were kept feversishly busy.

The summum bonum of the aforesaid discussion is that all the aforesaid material which existed before the learned Executing Court standing slighted besides their impact standing untenably undermined by him whereupon the ensuing sequel therefrom is of the learned Executing Court while pronouncing its impugned rendition overlooking the relevant and germane evidence besides its not appreciating its worth. Consequently, the order impugned suffers from a gross absurdity and perversity of misappreciation of material on record.

The appellants, after crossing two scores and one, nurtured the ambition, which is quite a usual feature to human nature unless the innate nature is distracted by some kind of aberration, to prosecute medical education and for the said purpose they appeared in the examination and obtained the requisite marks to be selected. At that stage, the old Page 22 saying “the proposals conceived in mind are not always concretized” or the beginning does not achieve the end or for many a reason, as it appears, took the principal seat and the two students were declared to be ineligible to take admission to MBBS course at the stage of counselling held on 23rd June, 2015 on the score that they suffered partial colour blindness. In such a situation, the appellants being determined and affirmatively obstinate not to...

A growing impression in contemporary existence seems to acknowledge, the all pervading pestilent presence of corruption almost in every walk of life, as if to rest reconciled to the octopoid stranglehold of this malaise with helpless awe. The common day experiences indeed do introduce one with unfailing regularity, the variegated cancerous concoctions of corruption with fearless impunity gnawing into the frame and fabric of the nation’s essentia. Emboldened by the lucrative yields of such malignant materialism, the perpetrators of this malady have tightened their noose on the societal psyche. Individual and collective pursuits with curative interventions at all levels are thus indispensable to deliver the civil order from the asphyxiating snare of this escalating venality.

To sum up, personal liberty makes for the worth of the human person. Travel makes liberty worthwhile. Life is a terrestrial opportunity for unfolding personality, rising to higher states, moving to fresh woods and reaching out to reality which makes our earthly journey a true fulfilment-not a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but a fine frenzy rolling between heaven and earth. The spirit of Man is at the root of Article 21. Absent liberty, other freedoms are frozen.

Our standards must be so framed that we are not reduced to a level where the protection of the least capable and the most depraved amongst us determines what the morally healthy cannot view or read … If the depraved begins to see in these things more than what an average person would, in much the same way, as, it is wrongly said, a Frenchman sees a woman’s legs in everything, it cannot be helped.

Punitive therapeutics must be more enlightened than the blind strategy of prison severity where all that happens is sex starvation, brutalisation, criminal companionship, versatile vices through bio-environmental pollution, dehumanised cell drill under ‘zoological’ conditions and emergence, at the time of release, of an embittered enemy of society and its values with an indelible stigma as convict stamped on him — a potentially good person ‘successfully’ processed into a hardened delinquent, thanks to the penal illiteracy of the Prison System.

To look only to the built form and its permissible extent without considering these other factors is to betray fundamentals of town planning. After all, a livable city is one that is both equitable and sustainable. Mr. Chinoy’s argument is one of seductive simplicity; yet, its implications are profoundly alarming. Just as sailors in ancient mythology learned to beware the alluring songs of Sirens, tempting them to their doom on treacherous shoals, we too must be cautious in accepting an argument that not only bodes ill for the future but attempts to realize that which was never intended. Hindsight is usually the lack of foresight. It is a luxury neither our cities nor we can afford

National Anthem is to be sung with magna cum laude and nobody can ostracise the concept of summa cum laude. […] The national anthem is pivotal and centripodal to the basic conception of sovereignty and integrity of India. It is the marrow of nationalism, hypostasis of patriotism, nucleus of national heritage, substratum of culture and epitome of national honour.

The producer and the director have allowed the National Anthem of Bharat, the alpha and omega of the country to the backseat. On a first flush it may look like a magnum opus of patriotism but on a deeper probe and greater scrutiny it is a simulacrum having the semblance but sans real substance. There cannot be like Caesar’s thrasonical brags of “veni, vidi, vici.” The boy cannot be allowed to make his innocence a parents rodomontade, at the cost of national honour. In our view it is contrary to national ethos and an anathema to the sanguinity of the national feeling. It is an exposition of ad libitum.