My colleague and I were to meet at the court complex for my initiation into how courtrooms work. As a joke-quip, I said to my colleague, "See you in court!"
And so, for the next handful of hours, for every query of mine regarding a legal process, her example would begin: "So let's say you and I are involved in a dispute." For the entire day spent there, we were constantly up against each other in some exemplified dispute or the other.
The fact that anyone could enter the court complex, walk into a courtroom, and detonate a few kilos of C4 or hurl country-bombs is unsettling. I was expecting a moderately-serious, Namma Bengaluru Metro-level security checks at the entrance. Zilch. So the first thought as I stepped into the court complex building hurling my backpack (which, by the way, had a combustible material -- Macbook Pro) was this macabre what-if. What if I was a low-esteem terrorist trying to blow a junior judge's courtroom to make a mediocre point?
You're in a conversation with someone in a room abuzz with chitter-chatter of so many other voices it's impossible to distinguish the words of any one conversation. And yet, your ears perk up and your head turns when you hear your name.
I think for lawyers it's their case numbers being called out by the clerk. In every courtroom that had some senior (read, very old) lawyers sitting in the bay, right under the nose of the presiding judge, one or more was dozing off. It was either pre-lunch fatigue or post-lunch food-coma. There was nary an attempt to be subtle either. It was full-on. Chin-touching-your-bands-level head-drooping. I was partly hoping to be in a courtroom that one of these sleeping lawyers let out a loud snore in the middle of a judge's dictation.
Have you seen the defense attorney give up and conduct a pointless chitchat with a random lawyer seated next to him while his client was being grilled by the opposite's lawyer and the judge and the client makes statement upon statement weakening his position? I can now say I have.
My colleague's enthusiasm to help me understand legal processes is palpable. Just that occasionally I feel the eyes of a stern judge on us as my colleague animatedly explains something to me amidst the proceedings. School-day traumas of being caught by the teacher for chitchat and a summary dress-down or banishment from the class came crashing.
But I also wanted to tell my colleague, "should we bet on if we'll get caught talking by this judge in their courtroom?"