The Lost Generation

The Diarist’s final post explores the Lost Generation of law school students. Like always, the words are witty, perceptive, optimistic yet tinged with a tear drop of mournfulness..It’s something that should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it, but isn’t; it always comes as a bit of a revelation that not everyone who goes to law school actually wants to be in law school..Merely being in constant, loud odds with mess food, curfew rules, the weather, the locals and the workload must not be confused with the quieter, more disturbing disconnect that is not wanting to be in law school at all. Indeed, medical students display in the hundreds the former propensity, whereas I am yet to find a medical student who is not proud to be a potential doctor. In contrast, I know several people who would sooner jump off a cliff than work in law. Most of them had their epiphanies at some point early in law school and have since quietly stepped off the wheel while the rest of us hamsters just kept on going. They’re around, though, and they’re worth watching mostly for the diversity of their lives – and also, just a little bit, to gain a sense of perspective into our own..In the grey early mornings, some of them practice football in the stadium. In the evenings they have another raucously happy round. If you look out of your hostel window at night, they look like little metal figurines slipping about under the stadium floodlights. Sometimes you see them in class, but they slip in after everyone else, slide into the last row and leave as silently as they came. There is an abiding sense of civil disobedience about their coming to class, making projects and otherwise doing the bare minimum is takes to keep but a toehold in college..Some others play music; that one boy in the corner room on the fourth floor of hostel spends all night jamming by himself. In the mornings he is asleep, drooling through CivPro, but law school by moonlight is his law school. Some nights if you look out of your window, you can see him walk down to steps of his hostel and play soft Clapton, the notes seeping one by one into the still, quiet air. The streetlight bounces off his guitar and you can see his long fingers slip up and down the frets. For this one moment, you, your midnight tea and the balladeer under your window are in a more benign universe conceived in his imagination; not the one you have to go back to in the morning and the one that he will sleep through..There are still others who were serious writers and debaters in high school; the ones who organise the first fee-rise protest through an efficient system of email-and-text exhortations and impressive sloganeering. They cobble together the college’s first weekly newsletter complete with seditious editorial and feminist critique of Vidya Balan in Kahaani. They hold weekly Discussion Groups and rigorously enforce the Book Club Rules. They speak, write and debate late into the night; if you pop out of the moot room next to the library at about 1 am on a Saturday and look up, you will see the light still on in the old Legal Aid Room and the muffled sounds of distant laughter and faraway hands vigorously clapping on tabletops in support of some or the other proposition by some or the other speaker..You sit outside for a while, eating your egg roll [hat tip – Vinay-da, purveyor of the finest rolls known to man] and listen to a group of people happily living a life that runs on tracks just parallel to your own. While you moot downstairs, they debate upstairs; while you spend nights on your paper submission, they wake early to get the newsletter to the printers. You think fondly of the time you first discovered public international law and they speak up only to explain how much they disliked that – and most other – class. You would rather be in law school and they would much, much rather be somewhere else..To paraphrase a philosopher, I got 99 problems but this ain’t one. Minor annoyances aside, I enjoy being a law student, which is convenient because it takes up all of my time. But if I pause to look around – on the way to class, on the way back from the library, in my balcony late at night – I see those who would rather not participate, who live in stubborn dissention on the fringes of the rat race that is law school..I can romanticise it all I like, but the fact is that five years is a long time to be in a place that is unsuited to your interests. Quality pre-University career counseling is sadly lacking in India – or was, when I was preparing for law school – and most of us had completely incorrect ideas about what the practice of law looks like. None of our law school prep coaches thought fit to explain what it is exactly a lawyer does, although they had been to law school, quit corporate jobs and veered off the beaten path themselves..By now, most of us have developed a fairly clear idea of the opportunities that are available to the average NLU graduate and the career arcs that follow. One unexpected up-side to going to law school is that a law degree is an acceptable precursor to many careers in the liberal arts. I am told that a law degree also overqualifies you for a job in broadcast media and opens up many opportunities in journalism in general. Even for those of us convinced that all roads lead to the Bar, the idea that we are not limited in our career paths except by choice, is a pleasant one..Still, as they say in my native village, one does not climb a tree to eat a peanut. All right, they do not really say that in my native village, but they should. It makes sense; one should not have to suffer through five years, terrible food and many months of insolvency law [shudder] to discover that one would rather be a news reporter. Today the speed with which viable career opportunities are increasing, does not match the speed at which college aspirants are being informed of them..This could have been yet another article about The 5 Different Kinds Of People You Meet In Law School, but that trope stops being funny when you realise that most of those people are not happy and are desperate to leave..I leave law school once and for all, in a few days. I have a job I want in a field I love in a city that I call home, but many others are not so lucky. There are hundreds of eighteen year olds in much feted law schools across India who would rather not be there, and educators everywhere need to make sure that they are the last of the Lost Generation.