Two days after he and a brother judge handed down a blistering verdict in the Centre for Public Interest Litigation & Others vs Union of India & Others case, cancelling 122 telecom licences and severely indicting a former minister, now a jailbird, Justice ASOK KUMAR GANGULY was at peace in his study at home, behind a desk piled with papers and books, listening to Rabindra Sangeet on a laptop. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. The quiet Ganguly had turned 65 the day before: perhaps that explained the slice of cake that came with the tea. He had just retired from a judicial career that has won him huge respect and admiration. Earlier, in his farewell speech, he had thanked his orderly, whose job was to help him into and out of his judicial robes and hold his chair, and said that vestige of colonialism irked him. He had had a very busy final month: his name was on 27 judgments in the four weeks ending with the 2G sledgehammer. Now the driveway to his Lutyens bungalow was deserted. At the end of February he will repair to Kolkata, where he has an ancestral home, and where his son is a practising lawyer and his daughter teaches English. An honest to goodness life indeed.

CHAITANYA KALBAG

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