I’m a student - used in the most elastic sense - at an NLU.

Like most law schoolites I know, I’ve been reading Legally India with interest these last few months. Like all good websites, LI appeals to every mood of a law student. Taken too long a lunch break while interning at your legal sweatshop? Feeling guilty? Want to assuage that guilt by reading about Important Things like court orders, conveyances, mergers and stamp duties? Open up the Legal Pulse page and scratch your academic itch. Feeling lazy of a weekend afternoon? In the mood to make some popcorn and watch a K-serial?Open up the comment space on any blogpost on any blog on LI, and lo! Welcome to the Great Inter-NLU Bitchfest. It’s true. Imagine - tens of law students and associates from a pan-Indian spectrum of law schools, gathered in one place with their metaphorical loincloths tightened and their metaphorical muscles oiled, ready and willing to sacrifice temper, dignity and (not least) grammar at that most holy of all altars - Validation on the Internet.

Validation of what and by whom, you ask? Validation by anonymous commenter Tintu (college unknown) to anonymous commenter Pintu (college unknown) that NLSIU is better than NALSAR.

Well! Everyone holding their breath in trepidation at NLSIU can sit down now! Everyone biting their knuckles, the suspense is ended! The battle is won! What your moot court trophies and Harvard Law Review papers, your placements and your festivals could not achieve, an anonymous argument on the internet has. These are people, you realise, who have taken a national competitive exam to secure a seat at institutes that blushingly revel in the title ‘the IITs of law’. These intellectual powerhouses, these cerebral champions, cast aside their projects and their football games and their sitcoms, their sutta-breaks and their siestas, their due diligence and their DRHP drafting, run to the closest telephone booths, don their red capes and red chaddis, and fly to Legally India to take offence and launch offense in defence of their beloved alma maters, whose existence and reputation (undoubtedly!) is entirely dependent on the result of these anonymous catfights.

The sheer futility of it is stunning.

But so is the hilarity. Which means I’m, for one, not complaining; I’m merely sitting back, balancing my bowl of popcorn more carefully on my potbelly, and watching the Kasautii Zindagi Kay of the internet.

(Which is not to say that Kian is Komolika, because Komolika was a mean and evil person with a taste for dramatic prints in sarees, whereas Kian is nice and hopefully does not wear sarees. )

(Kian is, however., the Ekta Kapoor of the internet, and for this I thank him profusely.)

Note - If you do not get sarcasm, kindly avoid this blogpost. Note 2 -NLS being better than NALSAR is a hypothetical example chosen at random, and of whose veracity I am not guarantor.