The image from August that stays with me is not from a courtroom. It is an auditorium that will sit empty on the twelfth of September.
The National Law School of India University, the institution that more or less invented modern legal education in this country, will graduate its 34th batch without a convocation. Degrees in absentia. Certificates by courier. Thirty-four years of a ceremony, and this year the hall stays dark because the question of who could stand on that stage without protest became too difficult to answer.
A convocation is not for the degrees; those exist on paper regardless. It is for the parents in the third row who took a train to be there. It is the one day an institution and its students perform, publicly, the idea that they are proud of each other.
I am not handing out villains. The students who protested were doing something the law protects and legal education teaches: test authority with argument. The Chief Justice sat with students for ninety minutes and listened. Even the Bar Council, which in my view made a serious mistake with that enrolment direction, corrected it within hours.
But I will admit what unsettled me. For a few hours on the thirteenth of August, the body that controls entry into this profession treated that entry as leverage in an argument about criticism. The direction was withdrawn. The memory will not be. Trust between an institution and the people entering it takes years to accumulate and depreciates in an afternoon.
The month gave me one consolation, from the top. The same fortnight, the Supreme Court ordered women co-opted into every state bar council, on the blunt observation that they had become men's clubs. Institutions examining institutions, in public. Uncomfortable, and necessary.
In early September, a few hundred graduates will open a couriered envelope alone in their flats, and become lawyers. No stage, no gown, no third row. The ceremony was never the point. This profession is argued into shape by people willing to be inconvenient. Their batch will fit right in.