It is not uncommon for school and college students to make a beeline for the Madras High Court Bench here for educational field trips, but the visit of Velliveethiyar Corporation Girls’ Higher Secondary School students here on Wednesday turned out to be special.
A group of students, seated in the visitors’ gallery in court hall number 2, had a pleasant surprise when Justice R. Sudhakar, the administrative judge leading a Division Bench along with Justice V.M. Velumani, began interacting with them from the dais in the open court.
Noticing the presence of the large number of students in school uniform inside the court hall, the judge wanted to know the class in which they were studying.
Surprised
And he raised his eyebrows in surprise when the girls told him that they were studying in Class XII.
“Do you mean the class in which teachers grill you and ask you to answer the same set of questions again and again for an entire year? Generally, class XII students will not be allowed to go anywhere but for the school. How come you are here?” he wondered as the lawyers broke into laughter.
Later, after the hearing of a case related to shifting of a liquor shop, the judge asked the students to pen a Tamil essay on the title ‘Kudi Eppadi Kudiyai Kedukkum’ (how does liquor destroy families) and announced attractive prizes for 10 best essays on the subject.
More topics
When M. Muniasamy, counsel for Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (Tasmac), suggested that the students could also be asked to write essays on the importance of nationalising rivers, the judge agreed to add that topic too and directed the counsel to sponsor the prize money.
Later, he asked the students to add two more topics, ‘Environmental degradation caused by seemai karuvelam (prosopis juliflora) trees’ and ‘Benefits of growing trees in hill stations.’ The students were told to forward their essays through their school teachers to the Registrar of the High Court.
