“An apology is the superglue of life! It can repair just about anything!!”

― Lynn Johnston, Canadian Cartoonist

An apology is the most disarming among all forms of expressions. However, the notion of apology has essentially remained more or less an aspect of subjective morality. If we trace back the history, evolution and development of various legal concepts such as rights, duties and wrongs, we would by and large find their origins in moral and divine notions. These concepts have, with the civilisation of man and the evolution of the society with its inherent responsibilities, become embedded in the legal structure of almost all human societies. In present times, these concepts tend to seek their expression in the laws made by human beings and are vociferously enforced in the courts of law with expectations of permissible reliefs. Depending upon the respect or the disregard of a multitude of interests, the courts determine what is right or wrong. Rights of an individual have been defined as interests which are recognised and protected by the rule of law, the respect of which are the “duties” and the disregard of which are “wrongs”. This concept of right had its origin in moral or divine laws that have their genesis in the immemorial past with the development of conscience in the human mind.

Akin to the ideas of rights, wrongs and duties, the notion of an apology also originates from the emotions of regret, remorse and acceptance of one’s own faults and failings which are dictated by man’s intrinsically personal moral faculties. Although there are some instances where courts of law have actively taken into consideration expressions of unconditional apology tendered by persons who have wronged others, yet there are no laws or norms that can enforce an apology as a matter of rule by compelling the persons who have committed wrongs to publicly apologise for their proven misdemeanours. As the final arbiter of all sorts of legal disputes, the courts of law have been empowered by the state as well as the by the society to decide upon issues of right and wrong in the domains of both public as well as private rights in the administration of the civil and criminal justice systems. The courts, accordingly penalise the person who has committed a legal wrong by way of various sanctions such as capital punishment, imprisonments, fines, forfeiture of properties, compensations, damages, restitutions etc. In some instances, the courts also resort to reprimanding and warning or censuring the person who has committed a wrong. A menagerie of legally enforceable sanctions are also enforced on both individual persons as well as legal persons such as the state and corporations, which are sometimes found, in no less degree, to have harmed individuals or other legal persons.

With the gradual civilisation of human beings and evolution of the society and its norms, the concept and nature of sanction has travelled from being retributive in nature in the primeval times to being reformative in the modern times. Enforcing a public act of contrition by the person who has committed a proven wrong would serve to be a huge step towards the promotion, propagation and practice of the reformatory idea of doing justice. Orders may be passed in appropriate cases where the courts, while exercising their plenary powers, may deem it fit and proper to mandate a published apology. It shall establish a system of governance in the country which is empathetic towards the emotional requirements of the society founded on the principles of truth, sympathy and compassion that Gandhiji so emphatically propagated. It shall institutionalise the demand of a wronged person and of the public at large for a publicly displayed remorse to be exhibited by the offender as an acknowledgement of one’s own derelictions and delinquencies. Such overt acknowledgements would function as a soothing salve against the miseries of the suffering, wronged and victimised persons at the hands of the perpetrator of the wrongful acts.

At first blush, a judicially enforced published apology might appear altogether utopian, but so were once the basic and inalienable human rights considered during the eras they were being fertilised in the minds of the great political thinkers and social reformers. Various fundamental human rights, the dignity and honour of an individual, the reputation of a person and the sanctity of the physical body and emotions of the men had once evolved from hitherto abstract concepts. Despite their humble beginnings from pure abstractions that originated from the ethical leanings of the human mind, these concepts have become the social currency of an enlightened, conscientious and benevolent social framework. Although the rate of growth of these ideas in various societies had been extremely slow at the beginning, their enforcement progressively gathered humongous impetus at the hands of political and social revolutionaries who established these ideals in the modern era with a sense of urgency and clarity coupled with realism and pragmatism.

There are numerous instances where words of apology expressed by individuals as well as state bodies have assuaged long lasting pains carried by nations and societies for historical wrongs committed by one dominating people over the other subjugated ones. When a head of the state of an erstwhile colonial power apologises to the people of the former colony for the wrongs committed by the ruling power and its people, such words of remorse, more often than not, have a propensity for soothing billions of ailing hearts and mutilated psyches. When the German Chancellor expresses her heartfelt repentance over the horrific acts and brutalities committed by the nazi propagandists against the Jewish community and various nations states, it speaks volumes of the generosity of the leadership while past animosities are forgotten and the process of reconciliation and forgiveness takes the highway for creating a just and tolerant society. The effect is the same when white people denounce their former derogatory acts in furtherance of the grossly unreasonable idea of apartheid against people of coloured and black ethnicities. The world becomes a more peaceful place to exist when the American president apologises to the people of Japan for having used a nuclear weapon to bring the Second World War to an end.

If history is replete with such numerous instances of public apologies tendered to the wronged persons, would it not be practical and reasonable enough to inculcate the idea of declaration of remorse publicly and by way of a judicially enforced publication in order to make the grievances of the victims and aggrieved persons less severe? The answer is definitely in the affirmative. Such overtly expressed public apology shall, in no uncertain terms, foster universal brotherhood and a harmonious method of dispute resolution amongst people.

Grievances arise within human beings in a litany of ways of unfair acts committed by individuals, the mighty state and corporations. When a person is deliberately harmed, whether physically or mentally, or is inflicted pain and agony by an individual or state or a business corporation, the process of legal enforcement usually takes its procedural course. The judicial process strenuously arrives at a conclusion of commission of wrongs against the body, reputation or overall well-being of an individual and accordingly passes judgment with concomitant penalties imposed upon the person who has maltreated the other. When one person deliberately slanders another, when one spouse puts another in a state of jeopardy, when a police officer commits an act of brutality against a detainee or when a corporation or state body deliberately withholds money legitimately due to a person, the normal legal sanctions generally follow suit if the illegal acts are proven. But, the persecuted person is often left to discern the absence of a sense of remorse in the mind of the perpetrator of the unjust act. In such instances, an enforced apology published either in newspapers or at conspicuous places in the locality may actually cause the victimized people to have a satisfaction of the proper and complete redressal of their grievances.

Expression of remorse for having committed a wrongful act, as such, is a strong criterion that acts as a mitigating factor during the process of sentencing on being convicted of an offence. Likewise, an enforced apology shall make every sanction commensurate to the degree of the wrong committed. It shall promise a social regime that is antithetical to the “might is right” thinking perpetrators. We have no less number of instances where, in courts of law, tendering of an unconditional apology has served to pacify mutual animosity that may have erupted between the bar and the bench. Hence, against acts of deliberate wrong committed by individuals, state agencies and corporations, mandating a published apology shall render the court delivered justice more substantial than ever. It shall act as a powerful deterrent against prima facie mala fide actions of mighty people and organisations wielding immense magnitudes of power yet expected to inspire public confidence and trust while acting within the legally permissible parameters. It shall vindicate the innocence and sufferability of the offended person. It shall principally reinforce the principles of a welfare state that is sympathetic towards and willing to lessen the sufferings of the ill-treated person.

It is, therefore, the need of the hour to bring in necessary legislative amendments to the procedural and substantive laws to legitimise the enforcement of judicially enforced published apologies, in addition to all legally acceptable forms of penalties or sanctions, as a manner of penalising persons who take the law into their own hands and harm the lesser endowed persons with their whims and fancies. In the long run, making the wrongdoer express his feelings of being sorry by way of a published apology would rather liberate him from the entailing guilt of commission of a wrongful act and put together a society which is more just and responsive to its humane needs.

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Your destiny has beckoned you,

To bless us with your tender voice;

While memories begin fading, you add fresh leaves,

To the blossoming tree of our lives, and we rejoice.

We imagined your creation and your growth,

In our consciousness, and in our dreams;

Your movements and your smiles have brought forth,

Our affirmations, longings and faith in the divine schemes.

You tapped on our seeking hearts one morning,

And said, ‘Hey there, I’m on my way to your arms’;

The fragrance in the air sweetened and turned rewarding,

With joyous mist in our eyes, we waited for your lovely charms.

The day we watched your tiny beating heart,

We sighed, exclaimed and looked at you in awe;

The throbs sounding to us like the beats and rhythms of Mozart,

We held our breath to be touched by your little paws.

Your smiles will leave us transfixed for the rest of our lives,

You will rise to hold us one day when we will be eighty-five;

We will nurture you, groom you and push you to strive,

The happiest day of our lives will always be the one,

When thou shalt arrive…

Unbeknownst to man, come life’s unforeseen and strange battles

They stir you as if a tempest without warning hits seaborne vessels;

Whether to cut through the waves or to jump overboard and abandon, does he rummage

Thinking upon the seaworthiness of the ship and the meaningfulness of the aspired voyage.

How bad can it get, is the mariner’s query from time immemorial and the distant past

How soon shall the gigantic waves subside, and the journey may resume in fluttering full mast;

The inner self always craves for calm seas with favourable winds, bright sun and cool moonlight

The seas are but turbulent or placid when the mind of nature, with its whims and fancies, so dictate.

‘tis true many have sunk and perished for no fault of their own making while others got rescued

To a searching mind it seems one who does nothing and doesn’t undertake a journey is blessed;

Glory and anonymity, two opposite poles established by man who believes he knows symmetry

Venture out anyway in pursuit of the elusive joy of accomplishment, is all that hums life’s poetry.

You might be an avid reader of books, or an occasional reader who would read either to spend your time reading a book or read one to feed your curiosity by glancing over its cover and contents. You might even read a book after having been suggested by a friend as a must-read. An infinitesimal count of individuals are indeed interested and willing to read books just for the sake of reading them. A very tiny portion of the ones liking to read must have read each book picked by them from cover to cover. For those with a fondness of reading books, it’d be a vexing question if they are asked “Have you found the right books yet?”.

For many a book enthusiasts, it would always be a daunting task to search for and find the right books to read. The internet is gorged with hundreds of lists of the best books to read in a lifetime. One might even look into the catalogs of various prize-winning books or books included in widely acclaimed libraries or databases. The quest is further picked by the suggestions to purchase books by the online book retailers, online votes which declare the best books of the year and the suggestions and recommendations of the famous lot, for example Oprah’s book club and Bill Gate’s seasonal recommendations. Book reviews in newspapers and magazines also lend a lot of weight to selecting the reviewed books by the subscribers. These and many other information fountains deluge potential readers with such varied suggestions that it would not be an untroubled choice to zero down upon a list of books or even a single book to read for that matter. In this case, the time dissipated while enlisting the right books to read sometimes exceeds a lot more than the time one would spend reading one or more books. To add to your predicament, you may even think after reading a book as to whether you made the right choice of reading it or not.

How a book reaches one’s hands has also to do a lot with parental guidance where sometimes diktats are laid out to determine whether a book is good or bad and worth reading or not. Some books come to you as gifts while you get some just because they are being sold at throwaway prices. While some books come to you as pristinely new, some others reach you as dog eared volumes that you might have found either lying on your attic, long forgotten and unattended or at secondhand bookstores. Not the least may be said about the books that are read after being borrowed or even stolen.

Let us not go to the question as to whether reading books is an essential part of the life of a person or not. There are proponents of the school of thought that reading is not necessary for happiness or growth and there are even advocates of the idea that one should stop reading after reaching a particular age. But here we are only talking about those who are seekers and who find reading a place of solace and a nutriment to quench their inner thirst. Readers are motivated either by necessity or as a matter of a genuine interest to spend their time with a book as preferred to any other activity. Reading books has the least to do with affordability as the inclination towards reading books is as uncommon amongst those who are well off as those who. may not be able to expend a dime on a book.

The choice of spending your time by reading books might have been made by you either in your formative years or even after attaining adulthood. For some, the idea to read comes as a contagion from friends and family who happen to be book connoisseurs. You may have started reading with a love for stories or one who is in search of facts about people, places and things surrounding your existence.

Despite all these factors turning you toward finding the books that you may have read or may be planning to read, haven’t you felt it somewhere deep within you that there may be this one book you were craving for or the ones which may have answered some of your long held questions hankering within yourself? Has it ever happened that you have anyway read a book despite the same having been given a bad opinion about it or having been forbidden to read it? On the contrary, have you ever observed having avoided reading one despite strong approbations in favour of reading it? There may be instances when you would have rejected a suggestion having perceived of either the size of the book or its subject matter as being too heavy for your consumption whereas some you may have put aside assuming the material to be too mundane.

When you tend to pay attention to the time taken by you to read a book, it might be fascinating to notice how you read a book the moment it’s in your hands while there are books you might have read long after knowing about them or after them having their place for a very long time on your bookshelves. Some books, you may have read in part and left them there for sometime to finish reading it at a much later day. There are also some books that you might be thinking and attempting to finish, yet despite all your impulsive desires they seem never to get over.

Some books make you feel elated while some disappoint you for some or other reasons. Some leave you fulfilled and appear to have left you enlightened while some leave you with a regret of not satisfying you with the expectations you had when you started reading them. Some you may find challenging your long held beliefs while a bunch of them may buttress the convictions you have carried all your life. Some might come as respectful towards your feeling while some might outright insult you on your face. Some may come as pious while you may find a few utterly scandalous or outrageous. Some may leave you with feelings of pride while some others might bring feelings of shame. Some will bring you face to face with realities while others may serve to transport you to stretches of illusions. Some might tickle your funny bones while many others may leave you with seething pangs of sorrow. Some books may add to or alter your present state of happiness while in some others you may find a refuge from a terrible state of sadness, misery or despondency. Some books might have catered to cooling your inner turmoils when you must be anticipating an explosive and precipitative outburst of your emotions.

Invariably, books, much like persons and places, always leave an impression upon you. You may forget many of the persons you have met in you life, you would never, however, forget your mental engravings on a book you might have read ages ago, whether you would have read it in your solitude or in the midst of a bustling cacophony of people and noises. Coincidence plays a vital role when we meet people at a particular place or time or when we tend to be at a particular place at a particular time. If we see it from the point of view of the person whom we have met at a particular time or place, it is essentially the other person who finds you by chance at that point of time in that place.

There are always some rare instances in every book you read where you relate yourself in the place of a particular character in the book or a circumstance therein and you end up exclaiming and brooding with a profound sense of amazement at the quirky similarities between some aspects of your life and the character or the circumstance. In 1951, the American novelist J.D. Salinger published his novel “The Catcher in the Rye” which instantaneously became a best seller. Life however was not easy for the bestselling author after having his book published. Every now and then, while he ventured out of his house, he would have to encounter all sorts of people who having read Salinger’s novel would pose him with the question “How do you know so much about me and my life?”

From the vantage point of utility, let’s take for example a workman who requires a certain tool to get a job done or to serve any of his purposes. The tool gets invented by some obscure person at some place or time and remains unknown to the workman until the time he first of all needs it. Now, it may be the case that he is already aware of the existence of the tool or that he chances upon it at some place by sheer dint of luck. A second case is that the workman isn’t really aware of what he needs to serve his purpose yet he grabs his sight upon some tool with which he relates his purpose to be accomplished.

In 1967, the American-Canadian boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter was sentenced to imprisonment for life on the false charges of committing murders inside a bar. In 1975, while serving his period of incarceration, Rubin Carter published his autobiography “The Sixteenth Round”. As the news of his wrong conviction andimprisonment spread around, it inspired mass protests along the length and breath of the United States to free Rubin Carter. His autobiography inspired the singer and songwriter Bob Dylan to compose the song “Hurricane”. Not long thereafter, the protests seeking Carter’s release from prison lost steam and nothing further happened until a strange coincidence which occurred in neighbouring Canada. A group of Canadian friends came to the US and adopted a young African-American boy named Lesra Martin and took him back to Canada to educate him despite protests from the boy’s parents. Martin once chanced upon to buy Rubin Carter’s autobiography in a bookstore and read it. The story of Rubin Carter so much inspired Martin that he started writing letters to Carter who was in prison in the US and decided to meet Carter with the friends who had adopted him. The Canadian friends and Lesra Martin developed a unique bond of friendship with Rubin Carter and started a tough campaign with lawyers for the retrial and release of Rubin Carter from prison. The campaign ended successfully with Rubin Carter finally freed from imprisonment after serving decades of incarceration on a false charge of murder. This chain of circumstances leaves no doubt in the mind that an unthinkable coincidence of finding a book in a bookstore altered the course of events in respect of so many people and led to something phenomenal which was long awaited for and had been stopped being cared about.

History is replete with anecdotes of such events where a book which was written long before a subsequent event took place and at a very far-off place had such a profound effect that would change the way we see the world. “The Communist Manifesto” was published in 1848 by two Germans who were in exile in England at the time the book was written. How the book reached the hands of the Bolsheviks and inspired the Russian leaders to adopt Communism as their mode of governance, which subsequently spread its wings to China and many other countries, is still an intriguing occurrence to conceive. There must have been a point of time when some obscure person at some obscure place must have handed over a copy of the book written by Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels to the Bolsheviks, thus igniting the minds of the Russian revolutionaries with the passion for communist thought. Just like that, various books written on the concept of equality, liberty and freedom inspired leaders to revolt against colonialists which led to the political independence of numerous nations around the world from the clutches of their colonial masters.

Books that have been read by chance have challenged long cherished ideals and have paved the way for inventions and discoveries by inspiring departures from the inordinately dormant states of status quo. Books have contributed equally towards both constructive as well as destructive works by the people who have read them. Books those were coincidently read by some persons have led to the disappearance of prejudices and at the same time have fostered long surviving prejudices against a class or classes of people which have been synthesised while fomenting revolutions. History is also witness to humongous amount of events where a book having reached its reader has moved him to do what one never thought of before.

On a closer look, when we think about finding the books that we happen to read, might it not be the case that it is not you who alone has really found the book but it is in fact the book which has found you? Keeping all the variables at their own places, you read a book when you chance upon it, or, have you ever thought about it, when the book chances upon you? A book often treads towards you, mostly unknown to you and without any prediction, as a person full of informations and emotions, destined to find you at some place and time. Books, in fact change a myriad of hands before they land up with you to be read.

Books are like wandering souls with a psych of their own, lost in the wilderness of the material world and when the preordained time arrives, they fly off from wherever they are stationed to their destined hands. We readers are these prearranged destinies who give books their place of nirvana from the ominous cycle of changing hands and shelves. It is us who free these books from their Karmic bondage and allow their spirits to get synchronised within ours while creating a new world in our minds. They play their bounden parts in creating feelings and emotions within our minds and in shaping the texture of our thinking. Their ethereal essence intermingles with ours and make us think, speak, act, react and, nonetheless, dream accordingly. While doing so they bring us face to face with our own destinies. Books generate and emanate, from its author and the community of readers, a web of thought vibrations thus creating a psychic network amongst their patrons. Would it therefore not be appropriate to ask this question to yourself that “Have the right books found you yet?”

“We belong to the lower middle class strata of the society. Our only capital is knowledge, and knowledge alone would lead us to places. And to go places, we have to walk through a path of thorns and not a bed of roses”.

These simple words of wisdom came from my maternal grandfather, a revered soul, who left us long back for his heavenly abode to rest in peace forever. He was eighty-four when the Lord took him away from us after a life full of struggles, achievements and unrelenting charisma to speak and live the truth. He left for all of our folks a legacy to be honest in our disposal, truthful and compassionate in our conduct, to constantly strive to retain the unquenchable thirst of knowledge and to upkeep our intellectual integrity.

Even though old age took away from him his once perfect eyesight, yet that did not prevent him from satiating his willingness to learn more with every passing day of his little left life. He would wake up every morning, and after freshening up with his morning cup of tea, would sit down with folded legs on his bed, the way children are taught to sit and read when they are young, and would read books on varied subjects with the aid of a magnifying glass till four in the evening, barring a lunch break for about an hour and a half. This regimen of his, continued until a few days before his ultimate departure. During evening hours, he would go to the rooftop where he would tend to a little garden with the help of our domestic help and would rest himself on a mat.

I spent my three years as a law student at his place in Cuttack and the evening time at the rooftop used to be one when I frequently entered into a lively and thought provoking discourse with him. He used to tell me about his early student life starting from his days of ‘chatshali’, the term used for the lower primary schools in remote villages in that era, precisely the early 1930s. He would then take me to his days at the High school which was at a far off town and he had to cross a river and then walk kilometers to pursue his education. Merit led him to do his pre-University Science Course at the prestigious Ravenshaw College, Cuttack which then used to be manned by British scholars and academicians. The son of a modest rustic, he finally found his way to get his B.Sc. degree in Zoology from Presidency College, Calcutta and M.Sc. in Zoology from Calcutta University to become a lecturer in Zoology and rose to become a Professor. Post retirement, he never spent a single day in idleness and immediately got into the mode of further research on edible freshwater fishes and shrimps of Odisha and then sent them to be published in various reputed journals. He. also co-authored a text-book of zoology for senior secondary students in Odisha that remains the favourite among pupils till date. Add to that his numerous efforts toward guiding research scholars for Ph.D. in zoology. Today Odisha lags way behind in original and efficacious research studies and the results are strikingly low to the point of being negligible even in terms of national standards, be it any area of study.

During many discourses, he would very often ask me to read a book to him and would listen to every word with impeccable attention. To my utter surprise, his curiosity would instruct me to fetch the Webster’s unabridged dictionary and read to him the meanings and word forms of words that he wanted to know the meaning of. On completion of my law course, I left for New Delhi to practice in the Supreme Court. Along with some money, he handed me over a well preserved bound copy of a book titled “Eight Essayists”, which he had neatly retained all throughout his life from his pre-university days, with his name written on it by an ink-pen above the year 1945. All he asked me that day was to lead an honourable life, no matter what comes in my way.

He was a student for his entire life and this inspired three out of eight of his children to become able lecturers. My maternal place, therefore, always wears the semblance of a library where one would find people studying at every hour of the day. I was left awestruck to know off late that he did most of the research during the making of my maternal uncle’s Ph. D. thesis in Law, only for his curiosity to know about the development of the land reform laws in Odisha. Such was the finesse and fervor in his character, that during his days of lectureship and professorship, he would never correct the examination papers at times he was sad, upset or annoyed. My grandmother would tell me that he would make sure that his moods must never determine the fate of students who have worked hard all the year to appear in the examinations. This fact is stunning in an age where the old adage “examination is a necessary evil” is being blatantly replaced with “rechecking is a necessary evil”. The Late professor belonged to a galaxy of such men and women of unshakable integrity and credibility who steered away this young nation from its pitch dark days of illiteracy, ignorance and oppression.

The reckless rechecking phenomenon, as we see it today, does not only limit itself to academic or competitive examinations but also extends to departmental examinations for employees meant for promotions etc. Appallingly enough, the matters relating to rechecking of answer sheets are flooding the dockets of the High Courts as well as the Supreme Court and people manning such cases sheepishly refer to them as “Education Matters”. This undoubtedly, entails from the gross distrust among examinees on the competence of the examiners. This is a result of the gradual fading in the quality and academic prowess of people joining the teaching profession and /or being delegated the task of examiners.

Though, it cannot be generalized as a whole, since standards are still being maintained in a number of institutions, the likes of which are, from their very nature, rare. Few universities and Education Boards follow such standards as those of the CBSE or ICSE that are meant for courses up-to senior secondary levels or those of the IITs, IIMs, the National Law Schools, and reputed Medical Colleges etc. that impart Higher Education.

Consequently, society frowns at a lot of young professionals with an eye of uncertainty before handing them over responsibilities for the beckoning tomorrow. In this scenario, the enormous task of nation-building would get severely impeded if not treated to at the opportune moments.

Many argue that a strong catalyst for the decline in the standards of teaching professionals is their not being adequately incentivized, but a closer look at the situation would establish in no uncertain terms how huge a myth it is. Moreover, the ever increasing number of appointments of incompetent teachers without significant work load and output is leading us to the effects of what is commonly referred to as Parkinson’s Law- the more of them, the greater will be the load of work.

It is time, therefore, for policy and law makers to offer a diligent re-look into the Education system and to pluck the maligning disease of inefficiency in it at its bud so that at least our knowledge capital, the succor of the middle class, does not lose its exchange rate in the world market. Individual observance of a few of my grandfather’s practices would go a long way in diminishing the clouds of the looming crisis.