Sense of Duty

After making a decision of continuing my education with Ph.D. I was often confronted with questions and exclamations from friends and acquaintances of mine at the enormity of the task that lay ahead of me. The enormity being referred here could be summed up from some of the following questions "You might have to publish a lot?!!" "You must have unrelenting duty towards your work!" "You might have to read so many volumes of published work!" All these questions coupled with few conversations I had with my friends in course of time sought seeds of doubt in my mind if I was indeed capable of handling this task. Even today I am not entirely sure if I am prepared to take the heavy responsibility that lay ahead of me. I surely do miss that awe inspiring lectures from favorite lecturers of mine back at NITK. In this disillusioned atmosphere I have struggled time and again to motivate myself to work on varied topics. In this struggle I have quite often turned to inspiring articles, books and accounts of people who shared the same virtues that I am supposed to possess for being successful at the task that I choose.

I came across one such good article which motivated me so much that I wanted to make it a part of my blog page. Let us consider a few facts, in course of my Ph.D. I am supposed to take up atleast 16 courses!! then read maybe 100's of papers published by various researchers in the field of my research. Publish some papers myself and then finally sum up all the work in a thesis. That will be the pinnacle of this academic endeavor I have chosen to take up. And this whole ordeal might take up anywhere between 4 and 7 years of time, where I might go as close to insanity as possible at times of trying research when results just don't materialize. Imagine the role of another person going through 13,000 pages of oral accounts of details, 7000 pages of other additional documentary and 6,700 pages of other statements. And finally is about to write a thesis 4000 pages long? The amount of material he had to consult is not being included in the above counts. And the person in question had been enduring this ordeal since the past 14 years and has never wavered or gone insane. Kudos to the dutifulness of this man. And the person under question is none other than Judge Kode the honorable judge behind the 1993 Mumbai Blasts verdict.

An example of his dutifulness goes to the fact that he attended duty on both the days when his father and mother passed away. My appreciation and respect to the man who has demonstrated such dutifulness that it has rekindled my faith in the Indian Judicial system and reinforced the fact that maybe a few people existed still for whom the law and justice can hold ground in INDIA. I don't care about the fact that the judgement stays incomplete without evaluating the role of Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim in the blasts or whether Sanjay Dutt was dealt with harshly. At the end of the day if the duty of this judge alone is taken into question his impeccable integrity and astound sense of duty moved me very much. And the parallel this situation had to the task that lay ahead of me and the inspiration that I drew from it totally won a place for this man and his sense of duty in my heart and this blog page.