My acquaintanceship with the law
A favourite lawyer question is, How did you come to the law? If it is not true for everyone else, it is at least true for me. With that single question I have had the pleasure of listening to countless stories of a new practitioner’s journey to the bar. The bar is the shorthand for the community of lawyers. I have listened to those whose ambitions for law hatched in their formative years anything from five and up; whose parents sparked, encouraged, nurtured, demanded or forced the ambition on them; who possessed qualities and attitudes so appropriate for the practice of law they took to it like a politician to graft; who were inspired by movies, books, and popular and sober entertainment; who felt justice so acutely in their breast they would not yield to any other profession. I lacked all that except the bit about parents that sparked, steered and encouraged. I never had burning childhood ambitions for law. I wish I did. I wished I had a burning ambition for something. But I lacked the required qualities and attitude. Justice? All I knew then was the comic book superhero group called, Justice League (of America, or Europe, or whatever incarnation) by DC Comics. There were legal sitcoms like L.A. Law, Perry Mason and Matlock, but those entertained me more than they inspired. Although I knew my father was a lawyer, I didn’t know exactly what he did. From the tv and movies I thought he went to court all the time. Turns out he didn’t. The few times he brought me to the office when I was a child did not impress me. All he did was write or read something, or talk on the phone. Occasionally he would go out of his room or someone would come in for a chat. Everyone there was an adult, which probably accounted for him not playing lego with me on the floor. And all of them would remark how much I had grown since they last saw me and how fast time flies. I used to think they were so tiresome in repeating that but these days I catch myself saying that of others, all the time. So my childhood impressions of legal practice left me a touch cold. When it came to choosing my undergraduate degree after college, law was not first on my list. It was somewhere on it, but it wasn’t what got my pulse racing. None of the Asian Parents Preferred Professions of medicine (I couldn’t see myself rooting around another person’s body), econ and accounts (I didn’t like accounts and thought econs was bollocks), engineering (I wasn’t a science guy), and law (last choice), appealed to me. They all felt too cliched. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be like the poet Lord Byron; ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, having adventures that stirred both breast and loins, step aside for a moment to conjure a few immortal lines and then back to further adventures. The discussion with my parents when I was filling up my UCAS application, the system which we applied through to apply to a British university, was a different sort of adventure; as significant as it was mundane. “So what course are you going to apply for?” asked my father. At around fourteen and until my early twenties I was addicted to reading classic literature published by Penguin. All those light brown and black covers with classical pictures on them. Loved it. Most of my days were spent reading and trying to mimic (horribly, of course) the writers I loved. I wrote short stories, essays and plays by hand, by typewriter, by automatic typewriter and then on computer. Never thought I could complete a novel, so I never bothered. In college I took English Literature as an A-level subject. That blew my mind in all kinds of ways. That course opened up another dimension to not just reading but life. I learned how to read a book, feel a passage and string a memorable sentence. The course imbued me with refinement in how I read literature. I no longer chased through the pages. I slowed down my reading. In doing so I had time and opportunity to better appreciate the construction of a sentence and consider its various shades of meanings. With time, I had space to explore the how, the why and savour the emotional texture of the interactions and narratives. For that I cannot thank enough my teachers, Ms Charlene Rajendran, who together with Thor Kar Hoong, inspired my love for literature. I am still far from proficient at reading literature and the fault for that is entirely mine. “I was thinking of English literature.” “What can you do with that? Teach, ah?” my mother shot back. “I don’t know. I read how some of them end up doing other things. I don’t have to teach. I can still do other things.” “Yes, but in Malaysia, you are not going to get hired for anything else. You should choose something else. Something professional. You don’t get paid much for teaching.” “Mmmm, what else did you have in mind?” said my father, defusing the tension. “Well… I was thinking of mathematics.” I was not saying this to be difficult and frustrate my parents. If there was another thing I enjoyed at the time after reading and writing, strangely enough, was solving maths problems. It was consistently one of my best and favourite subjects. That was entirely thanks to my tuition teacher, Mr Nadarajah, Mr Nada. He was a former maths teacher in school. When I was sent to him I hated maths. After my first session with him, I was hooked. I wanted to do maths problems all day. He was very nice and patient with me. He explained how maths worked. Best of all, he showed me shortcuts. I took delight in mastering them because it helped me blaze through problems far quicker compared to the
