Aditya sudarshan

Guest Column

On Leaving the Law Aditya Sudarshan (NLS ‘07) elaborates on his experience in leaving the legal profession to become a full time writer.

All of

you who are

reading this are in the middle of your law degrees, and in the ordinary course, you are all headed to practice law, in one form or another. But I am informed (by the editors) that many of you are interested in a career graph like mine, which has departed from the norm.

Firstly I should say that this is neither surprising, nor worrying. It's natural and inevitable. Like me, you've taken up law at a very young age, right after high school. And with rare exceptions, it just isn't possible to be certain about one's deepest interests, at such an age. Most of my own college-mates are still lawyers, but a fair number are doing other things- running restaurants, or businesses of various kinds, or doing photography, or history, or internet activism, or (like me) writing fiction.

This gives rise to a couple of questions. Did we all make a mistake by studying law for five years? And what should you, the hypothetical student who may be keen to pursue other interests tomorrow, be doing today, to best prepare yourself for the change?

Let me first recount how things happened with me, and then we shall see what my example May 2015 | aap@nludelhi.ac.in

suggests. I was at the National Law School, in Bangalore, from 2002 to 2007. Writing, at the time, was one of my extra-curricular interests, but not the biggest one- mooting, and later debating were. I did write short stories now and then, mostly for my own amusement, and participated in creative writing competitions when we had them- but that was all. What I wrote most of all were projects, as I imagine you do too, a research paper for every subject, 60 over 5 years. My reading, also, was dominated by Hart and Dworkin and suchlike.

This was intimidating material for all of us, I remember, and (at least in the first two years) I read very little fiction except in the holidays. In a nutshell, I studied pretty hard, and only vaguely speculated about my future career.

Among these vague speculations may have been notions of being a novelist. But I truly don't remember.

Then in the winter of 2006, I sat for the final interview for the Rhodes Scholarship, to study at Oxford. I didn't make the cut. This was a sharp disappointment, but it cleared a space within me. That same winter I began writing my first novel (later published in 2009, titled A Nice Quiet Holiday), purely to see if I could. I finished the novel in my last trimester of law school, but it remained a file on my computer.

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Guest Column A few months later, I joined criminal law offices of Siddharth Aggarwal in Delhi, as a litigating junior.

Everything happened gradually. Litigation was stimulating and gave me lots to think about and feel, but I found myself writing more and more, whenever I could. I sent out my manuscript to publishers. Of its own volition, almost, my mind was working fast t o w a r d s developing an idea for a new novel. Then my first book got an offer from a publisher. When that happened, I made a decision to quit (astonishing Siddharth, I think; he hadn't seen it coming), and to write my second novel.

This was nine months after I began in litigation. And I have been a full-time writer ever since.

The principle that I derive from this (the surprising conclusion), is that my commitment to legal studies, did not in any way curb the inward growth of my desire to be a writer.

Looking back, what strikes me is how little I brooded over this decision (there was of course some brooding), until I actually made it. The principle that I derive from this (the surprising conclusion), is that my commitment to legal studies, when I was in law school, and to litigation, when I was working, did not in any way curb the inward growth of my desire to be a writer. On the contrary, I would go further and say it helped it on.

Ever since I was first published, I have been asked whether my writing is 'influenced' by my legal background. Overtly, very little, but I am sure that May 2015 | aap@nludelhi.ac.in

the story-telling involved in building legal cases, the lawyer's necessity to objectively analyze human behaviour, and the moral discourse that is bound up with the criminal law in particular, did strengthen my fiction writing. But they would not have, had I resented or regretted doing law.

At a more abstract level, perhaps any work, done well, is good preparation, for any other workwhile impatience with one's present lot becomes a destructive habit for the future too.

There is an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, where he cautions young people who wish to write (or more generally, to leave their professional careers, and to enter the arts), that the 'temptation is as common as the vocation is rare.' I think this is a wise warning. Just as you are too young, out of school, to know for certain that you are meant to be lawyers, you are also too young to know you are meant to be writers, or actors, or photographers.

(No doubt there will be exceptions- but the exceptions will also be aware they are exceptional.)

A calling grows inside a person, and I think (when one is young) the more it is left to itself, the better it grows. There is no need, therefore, to worry about missing your calling, and in the process, to hurt your life in law school. Do your best as lawyers, and try to love the law- and if you should still find, at some point down the road, that something outside the law beckons to you- then it will have proved its authority over you. Then you will be confident in embracing it.

I wish you the best of luck!

Aditya Sudarshan is the author of A Nice Quiet Holiday (Westland Books, 2009) and Show Me A Hero (Rupa and co., 2011). His short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies. He is also the author of a number of produced plays, including The Green Room, winner of the Hindu Metroplus Playwright Award for 2011. He writes political satire for NDTV's The Great Indian Tamasha and literary criticism for The Hindu Literary Review and many other publications.

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