Justice Rohinton Nariman speaks

 

Indian Courts has let down Indians

 

How to spot the chancers who are ‘winging it’ at work

We are bad at assessing others’ skills and performance but true slackers will always slip up writes Emma Jacobs in The FT

“This one is going to be pretty special,” teased the Australian reporter’s Instagram post. How right he was. Accompanying a television crew to interview Adele, the British pop star, he discovered too late that he had missed an email containing the preview of her new album, 30. Talking about the album was the entire reason for their encounter. “This is the most important email I have ever missed,” he said. The interview was binned. 

The story emerged on the same day that Boris Johnson delivered a speech ostensibly about the UK creative industries to the CBI, the UK’s largest employers’ group. Instead, he lost his place in his notes — pleading “forgive me” — and swerved into talking about Peppa Pig. I’m no expert on public speaking but asking the audience for forgiveness might be an error. 

As examples of winging it go, these were both spectacular fails, criticised for being unprofessional and disrespectful. We’ve all been at meetings, watched panels or seen speeches where participants are bluffing, having failed to do their homework. Some (many?) of us may even have been the bluffers. 

Winging it has appeal. It’s a lot less work, for starters. And it can appear charming: making its practitioners human rather than robotic, fitting the business vogue for authenticity. A few people can genuinely pull it off. 

However, beware the faux-wingers (FWs). Anyone who has been to school will be all too familiar with the person who rocks up to an exam claiming not to have done any revision, concealing the fact they studied hard. Falling for an FW’s spin is a mistake that might cause you to fall flat on your face. 

One classic FW tool is spontaneity. It looks effortless but can be hard work. I called an FW friend I’ve known since university, where he would procrastinate by evaluating different types of biscuits. Today he is a senior barrister. Unsurprisingly, he’s left the biscuits behind, and prepares for cases with rehearsed arguments, strategy and detailed answers, reams of notes, including gags and analogies that appear to have been made on the spot, to keep the audience engaged. “You have to work harder if you want to riff,” he says. 

Another friend prepares sports stars to go on television. He works with two sportspeople (frustratingly, he won’t name and shame) who have very different attitudes. One puts the work in and appears fluent and natural at press conferences, the other puts no effort in and clumsily and inaccurately tries to parrot the words he has been fed. 

Chaos is Johnson’s schtick. The broadcaster Jeremy Vine once wrote an entertaining post about watching the prime minister prepare for an after-dinner speech by jotting a couple of random notes down just as he was about to go on stage and then forgetting half the joke. Only to see him do exactly the same thing — and the same speech — at another function. On many occasions, the prime minister would appear to be a classic FW. 

Those at the top of their professional game may be permitted some genuine winging, not needing as much prep because they are experienced. But as demonstrated by Johnson’s recent performance (which appears to be a case of genuine winging) and the Adele interviewer, there is no excuse for an experienced professional who fails to cover the basics.  

It can be hard to tell the fake from the genuine winger. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organisational psychologist who has researched confidence, says we are not very good at assessing performance, either in ourselves or others. And, as he says, the more “inept you are, the less good you are at evaluating your performance”. (In other words, the Dunning Kruger effect.) 

One of the paradoxes of the modern world of work, Chamorro-Premuzic says, is that “the more complex, skilled, and well-paid your job is, the harder it is for others to tell if you are performing well or not”. In other words, greater complexity makes performance harder to judge. 

Those who are overconfident often end up doing too little work: they might pull it off, but there is a strong chance they won’t successfully wing it. “Having less confidence can enhance performance as it means you prepare and study”, Chamorro-Premuzic points out. Which for all the worriers out there (like me) is a great comfort.

The Challenges to Justice in India

Supreme Court Justice Chelameswar On the ‘Role Of Judiciary In A Democracy’ like India

The chilling death of Judge Loya and the discharge of Amit Shah

Will the next Pope be the last one - Yes, says St Malachy The Ominous

A 12th century clairvoyant has foretold the end of papacy!

 

Pope Benedict’s sudden resignation has stunned the world, and pundits are searching for motivations beyond his plea of old age. To complicate matters, there’s also a strange 900-year-old prophecy involved.

According to a famous prophecy made by St Malachy in the 12th century, there would be 112 more popes. Pope Benedict, who resigned, was the 111th. And whoever is elected Pope in the next few days will be the 112th. During the papacy of this final pope, says the prophecy, Rome—and the Church—will be wiped out! To quote its ominous words: “The City of Seven Hills shall be destroyed, and the dreadful Judge shall judge the people.”

Rubbish, one might say. We’ve heard a lot of lunatic Doomsday predictions, and the Mayan prophecy is still fresh in our minds. But this time there’s one small difference: St Malachy actually described each of the 111 popes till date with eerie accuracy, summing up each one with a vivid Latin phrase. And so far he’s never been wrong.

For example, he described Pope Paul VI (1963-78) as ‘Flos Florum’, meaning ‘Flower of Flowers’. Paul VI’s coat of arms, as it happened, featured three iris blossoms. His successor, Pope John Paul I, was described as ‘De Medietate Lunae’, or ‘Of the half moon’. This was puzzling, because the description just didn’t seem to fit. But one month later, when John Paul I suddenly died, one realised that he’d become pope at the time of the half moon and died by the next half moon. His successor, Pope John Paul II, was described as ‘De Labore Solis’, or ‘Of the eclipse of the sun’: it turned out he was born during a solar eclipse!

People have been talking about the prophecy of the popes with increasing frequency since the 1970s, as the end of the line drew closer. In 2005, when John Paul II, the 110th pope, died, people looked at the prophecy again, in anticipation, and found the next pope described as ‘Gloria Olivae’, or ‘The Glory of the Olive’.(Editor's Comments - the relation to Ratzinger is unexplained though!)  But what did this mean? Some people thought it somehow signified Israel; others said it meant the new pope would be a Benedictine, an order symbolised by the olive. Sure enough, the conclave ultimately elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a Benedictine priest from Germany, who—to seemingly reinforce the prophecy—took the name Pope Benedict xvi, after the founder of the order.

St Malachy, a clairvoyant bishop, while on a visit to Rome in 1139 CE, is said to have fallen into a trance and seen a vision of all the popes till the end of time. When his prophecies were published, the Vatican tried—for obvious reasons—to suppress them, but failed. In his final prophecy, St Malachy refers to a pope he calls ‘Petrus Romanus’, or ‘Peter the Roman’, adding darkly, “In extreme persecution, the seat of the Holy Roman Church will be occupied by Peter the Roman, who will lead his sheep through many tribulations, at the end of which the City of Seven Hills shall be destroyed, and the dreadful Judge shall judge the people.”

So which one of the current papal candidates is ‘Peter the Roman’? Sure enough, one of the front-runners is named Cardinal Peter Turkson, so it could very possibly be him! But, more importantly, what will be the ominous “many tribulations” that the people will be led through? What will be the events leading up to that ultimate “destruction”? And who is the “dreadful Judge” who will appear in judgement? Cardinal Turkson is now aged 65, so we can presumably expect the scenario to be played out anytime within the next twenty years—before, say, 2033.

Cardinal Turkson may not necessarily be the one, though, for Peter means ‘the rock’, and that could be a metaphor, not simply a name. As in the case of Nostradamus, St Malachy’s clues are sometimes cryptic, and become clear only after the fact. Pope Benedict XV, for example, was referred to as ‘Religio Depopulata’, or ‘Religion laid waste’, and when he became pope in 1914, nobody could understand the relevance of this. However, as his papacy unfolded, World War I and the Russian revolution made the meaning of the phrase terribly clear. But regardless of who the next pope will be, one thing is evident: the prophecy mentions only 112 more popes. There is no 113th.

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(The writer is an advertising professional.)

The hangman’s justice

 

For many years now, The Hindu has opposed the death penalty on principle — often in the face of intense public disapproval. We oppose it for ordinary killers and mass murderers, communal pogromists as well as terrorists like Muhammad Ajmal Amir Kasab. Ever since that traumatic night we now denote by the veiled abbreviation 26/11, Kasab has justifiably been the face of evil for millions of Indians. He took part in a monstrous plot against the people of India and Mumbai, killed innocent people with abandon, and showed no remorse for his actions. It is no surprise, therefore, that his execution Wednesday morning has been greeted with approval across the country. No loss of human life, however despicable the individual might have been, ought to be a reason for celebration. Instead, this should be a time of national reflection: reflection about crime, about punishment and about that cherished bedrock of our republic, justice. For several reasons, the hanging of Kasab is at most a crude approximation of this quality, more closely resembling an act of vengeance. Kasab was neither the architect of 26/11 nor its strategic mastermind; the men who indoctrinated and controlled him remain safe in Pakistan, where most will likely never see the inside of a courtroom. The haste to hang Kasab makes even less sense when others guilty of hideous terrorist crimes have secured deferment of their sentences because political lobbies acted on their behalf — among them, the assassins of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Chief Minister Beant Singh of Punjab. It is also a sobering fact that criminals responsible for claiming more Indian lives than Kasab did — among them, the perpetrators of countless communal riots — live as free men. Not one of these things excuse or mitigate Kasab’s crime. But they do make it imperative to ask: is the hangman’s justice the only kind we can conceive of? 

The arguments against the death penalty are well known. There are pragmatic ones — in this case, that Kasab could have provided valuable testimony in future trials of yet-to-be-arrested 26/11 perpetrators. There are moral and technical ones; even in the United States, with its highly-functional criminal justice system, new forensic techniques have shown dozens of innocent men were executed, though this argument does not apply to Kasab whose guilt is proven well beyond even unreasonable doubt. The most compelling argument, however, is this: the application of the death penalty is, as the Supreme Court itself acknowledged earlier this week, increasingly arbitrary. Capital punishment has become, as the medieval philosopher Maimonides many centuries ago warned it would, a matter of “the judge’s caprice”. It is also simply not true that capital punishment is integral to fighting terrorists. The absence of the death penalty in, say, France and the United Kingdom has not made these two nations softer in their ability to combat terror than the U.S. The grief of 26/11 was personal for many in this newspaper; like others, members of staff grieve for lost friends. Yet, the horror of 26/11 ought not stop us from dispassionately debating the need for the death penalty.

Family Matters Should Be Argued Only By Married People, Not Spinsters says Judge

A petition to Chief Justice of India asks him to remove Justice Bhaktavatsala of Karnataka High Court for his retrograde views against women against the tenets of the Constitution

From the petition:

On August 31, he went out of his way to counsel a young woman whose stated reason for not living with her husband was that he used to beat her. Justice Bhaktavatsala said, “Women suffer in all marriages. You are married with two children, and know what it means to suffer as a woman. Yesterday, there was a techie couple who reconciled for the sake of their child. Your husband is doing good business, he will take care of you. Why are you still talking about his beatings? I know you have undergone pain. But that is nothing in front of what you undergo as a woman. I have not undergone such pain. But madam (Justice BS Indrakala) has.”

The court asked the woman if her parents were present, at which her father walked up to the bench. The judge remarked, “Ask your father if he has never beaten your mother!” When the woman said her husband would beat her in the open, in front of everyone, Justice Bhaktavatsala remarked that it was she who was bringing it out in the open. The court was told that the husband would beat her in the middle of the night and had thrown her out of the house.

When the woman’s advocate produced photographs showing her swollen face, the court said, “You have to adjust. Are you just behind money? There is nothing in your case to argue on merits. You have to give him a divorce or go with him. Have you read about actor Darshan. He spent 30 days in jail after beating his wife. But they are living together now. What is on your mind and what is on your agenda?”
...
This is just not an isolated case in another case reported , a young advocate had not imagined she would be receiving a lesson on married life when she took up a case on behalf of an estranged wife. She was summarily told by Justice K Bhaktavatsala that she was unfit to argue a matrimonial case as she was unmarried. While the lady advocate was citing the allegations against the husband, Justice Bhaktavatsala stopped her midway and asked, “Are you married?” When she replied in the negative, the judge said, “You are unfit to argue this case. You do not know real life. Why are you arguing like this? He is your (client’s) partner,not a stranger. Family matters should be argued only by married people, not spinsters. You should only watch. Bachelors and spinsters watching family court proceedings will start thinking if there is any need to marry at all. Marriage is not like a public transport system. You better get married and you will get very good experince to argue such cases.”