I believe Tolly in Kolkata used to pay Rs 100 or so for the entire year. And then monthly. This arrangement changed recently to Rs 1 lac a month or maybe annually. That too because of some litigation where Club got away easy. The club is sitting pretty over 127 acres and real estate sharks have been sakami slicing nearby areas. The Golf Club nearby has already suffered encroachments.

The mukut got replaced with topi. That's all. Bells and whistles morphed into varities that are less recognisable but normalised as protocol, tradition, convention and optics required for reasons of the state.

By the way do you know who minted tons of moolah when Lutyens went about building Delhi? The common ancestor of Khushwant S, Karan T, Valmiki T etc. Map out the blood lines. Interesting picture will emerge.

Karan Thapar, in my humble opinion, is a tool and a useful fool for Pakistan and allied vested interests. His utterances of late prove it time and again. His clipped accent has lost currency in today’s India, and this is evidenced by the fact that he no longer asks tough questions or hosts those with whom he is ideologically at odds. I felt ashamed after the interview he conducted with Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. Stooge.

I challenge you to get a membership at the Wellington Sports Club or the Bombay Gymkhana with any amount of money in 2026. These clubs are watering holes for those born with silver spoons. In Delhi NCR, the Delhi Golf Club and Delhi Gymkhana are out of bounds even for people who paid lakhs and applied in the 1980s. We Indians, frankly, deserve to be called pathetic, because members of these clubs use their access as a social filter. It’s disgusting. The irony is especially rich, considering that the British once had boards outside these very clubs banning entry to “dogs and Indians.”

Club pays yearly rent of Rs. 1000. Expectation is that they will use it to create sports facilities for people in the locality. However, till date it remains an exclusive club and the public objective of providing sports facilities to public at large (because of which it is getting the lease on a nominal rent) remains unfulfilled.

Hence this! Fully endorse this move!

"The tribunal observed that the club, "under the garb of distinctive character which is a relic of the Imperial past", was restricting membership to those "having blue blood in their veins thereby perpetuating apartheid and shattering the most cherished constitutional goal of securing social justice and equality of status and opportunity"."

"The club sits on 27 acres of prime Lutyens' Delhi land, leased from the government at a nominal rent of Rs 1,000 a year. Yet inspections found that only a tiny fraction of its spending went towards sports, while substantial sums were allegedly spent on hospitality expenses, including "wines and cigarettes". Decades of waitlist, membership fees in lakhs that was collected without interest, and alleged family fiefdoms eventually prompted an intervention by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT)."

Source: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/delhi-gymkhana-takeover-bureaucrats-ias-ips-court-battle-delays-elections-nclat-supreme-court-7-lok-kalyan-marg-2905053-2026-05-23

All these elite clubs have are on leased public land (which btw belongs to you and me as much as it belongs to a club member); and are paying far below market rate prices for the lease. Anything given below market rate should benefit the entire public. These gymkhanas should serve as sports centres for all the people rather than the rich (considering they are paying below market rate prices for the lease and have leased it for the "public" and the "good of the public", i.e., health).

If they still want to have exclusive places, then pay the market rate bitch

"The thing with clubs in Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai is that they give memberships to a broader cross section of society, plus corporate memberships."

No, they do not. 1 crore+ fee in many Mumbai clubs is certainly not accessible to "broader cross section of society"

Read this article by Karan Thapar. It will give you the root cause of the tensions and why Modi wants to teach them a lesson. Karan Thapar has been consistently writing articles against the BJP since they entered the Delhi gymkhana management a few years ago. This is what he snootily writes, while discussing a club in Calcutta:

“I had been invited to talk to members of the Bengal Club. It’s a world apart from the Punjabi dhabas that Delhi’s clubs have been reduced to. Here, the British connection is fondly cherished, painstakingly maintained, and thoroughly enjoyed.”

This dig is directed at certain people from the BJP who entered the Delhi gymkhana management roughly during the Covid era.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/the-good-life-of-the-raj-in-a-calcutta-hotel-and-club-101725724069329-amp.html

The thing with clubs in Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai is that they give memberships to a broader cross section of society, plus corporate memberships. But Delhi Gym and Golf Club have been monopolised by the Congress ecosystem and memberships dominated by Congressi netas, babus, defence deal fixers, journalists etc. Corporate memberships generally not permitted. This is why the BJP people are pissed off and even many elite professionals (outside the Congress ecosystem) don’t like the club.

Several clubs came up during the British Raj as exclusive watering holes for the British and then extended to Anglo Indians and Brit loving Anglicised natives. Some elites felt shorted and apparently became very nationalistic and set up their own networking zones. Posh plots got leased out or enlarged for a song. The governing philosophy as elite zones for the cognoscenti didn't change just because Independence happened.

How the "public" benefitted is extremely debatable other that tall tales.

Here is a nuggets from Kolkata. Two prominent (essentially golf) clubs are prime properties which belonged to erstwhile estate of Tipu Sultan when his family was exiled to Kolkata just like Nawab of Lucknow.

The earnings from the leases to the club is supposed to be used for the descendants and public welfare. Forget Tipu and his folks or how had/good he was etc.

Successive WB govts, the self proclaimed seculars ever concerned with minority welfare or their supposed communal opposition (and now the ruling party here) did absolute zilch when it came to following the money.

I request anyone interested to find out how much these two clubs as annual lease fees to the WB govt and the current bump. Then compare with the land value appreciation across all these years. Okay the last 50 years. Or just the last 15 years.

Do the same for other well known Kolkata clubs. Don't be surprised if you get similar numbers for Delhi or Mumbai.

What are some instances where you've seen the extremities of how a senior treats their junior (law firms + chambers)?

Extremities in the sense how good and and how bad, both instances.

Starting off with one, I've heard (unverified) of how a now retired senior counsel smashed his junior's laptop for not getting the exact same judgment he had asked to get. (PS - Also heard he got the junior a better laptop after that) - Kindly note unverified and second hand knowledge.

Hello folks, let's help each other out. Write your college name, the name of firm/in-house that came for placement and the month they came in and how many people they took/might take. For instance Argus came to Top 3 NLUs this April.

Ex:

(College), (Firm), (Month), (No. of selected students)

I don’t come from connections, but have built enough connections through peers in engineering and finance that I can bank on them to bring in some small to mid ticket size transactions(20-50cr). Would you advise on having a word with the partner on this or not ? Currently working at a not so family run t1.

To start, maybe no. The pay won’t be as good, even if decent, the learning will not be as much as a law firm and you’d have trouble moving later, if at all. Always better to start at a law firm, Tier 1/2/3 whatever that may be. But ofcourse, take it if no other option and keep looking to move for atleast 3 years of the start. Move then, better pay, better things you can contribute to the company too.

As someone myself who Interned with a tech startup in Bangalore for 3 months, I would not recommend you to start with an In-house role. If you have options, definetely without a doubt start at a law firm as ultimately even if you want to get into an Inhouse role, your PQE of 2-3 years would allow you to start as a manager in a tech related in-house role. Otherwise, if starting your career at an in-house, you'll not only take long to climb up the hirearchy, but also limit your understanding of the transactions taking place by only focusing to one businesses needs. Thus, start at a firm and move to in-house with better pay and role after a few years of law firm practice.

It is a tiered issue. Jats vs Rajputs vs Brahmins. All of them against Yadav. Yadav vs Meena. But Meena vs Gurjar. Everyone against Banjara. Al. If then against Muslim. But Sunni vs Shia. Layered with Ashrafi vs Pasmanda.

And the game goes on. True the British played their part. But we started playing well before they or the Mughals came in. And we are still at it. Will not and cannot stop. It has been on for 5000 years.

Sanjeev wil do zilch. Maybe he will agree to have CAG audit al the Shree schemes of the TMC govt. But I doubt he will actually rock the boat despite the rhetoric. He will be too busy figuring out how to bring in big ticket investments and managing headline expenses. Ofc optics will be there.

Ideally the new govt should appoint a full time team of expert investigators and lawyers to pursue and dismantle the organised loot that took place.