A packed room at the Bombay Bar Association (BBA)’s meeting called to protest against the Emergency, tales of renowned criminal lawyer Ram Jethmalani’s ‘ghoda-gaadi (horse carriage)’ in pre-independence Karachi, carving out the state of Maharashtra from the larger Bombay state in 1960, and the spontaneous reaction of the judges of the Bombay high court who rose early from proceedings after receiving the news of Jayprakash Narayan’s death in 1979 – senior advocate Nitin Thakker, 79, is the keeper of the storied history of one of the oldest high courts in the country and the events that shaped the young nation’s “city of dreams”.
57 of the HC. Thakker said that neither of his two children picked law as a career but 11 years after their wedding in 1969, his wife Nalinee too studied law. Because there was no AC…The resolution was passed with an overwhelming majority,” said Thakker, we were all standing with all the doors open.
With humble beginnings in Kalbadevi, once a hotspot for cloth trade and home to a large Gujarati community, Thakker is now a resident of the upscale Altamount Road. His father, Gordhanbhai Thakker, a lawyer and later a judge, worked closely with freedom fighter Bhulabhai Desai. His mother Sarlaben Thakker too distributed information pamphlets about the movement. He treasured a memory of his principal, a Spanish priest who spoke Gujarati and had the novel idea to raise funds for a new school building in the early 1960s. Thakker was present in Room No. “Hardly any lawyers participated in the general body meeting or debates we held before that. But that day was chock-a-block. There weren’t enough chairs.
“They had a screening of (the film) Mughal-e-Azam and we, the children from Gujarati-medium, were asked to sell tickets,” Thakker reminisced. In 1975, during the Emergency that Thakker describes as a “blot on our democracy”, BBA passed a resolution to abstain from court as a mark of protest. A grandfather of three college students, he said, his entire family’s affection is mostly concentrated on Atom, their seven-year-old goldendoodle.
