The Madras High Court Judge Chitra Venkataraman on Saturday earned the rare honour of being the first woman judge to hoist the national flag during the Independence Day celebrations on the Madurai Bench premises.
She also garlanded a life-size statue of Mahatma Gandhi and took the guard of honour from the Armed Reserve Police personnel even as scores of students from nearby schools looked up to her and other judges for inspiration.
Ms. Justice Venkataraman was also the first judge to hoist the tricolour in a traditional Indian dress appropriate to the occasion. She wore a cotton sari sans the colonial waist coast usually worn by woman judges.
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Judges P. Murgesen, A. Selvam, R.S. Ramanathan, C.S. Karnan, T.S. Sivagnanam and M. Duraiswamy participated in the function also attended by law officers, advocates, court staff and their family members.
A blood donation camp was organised in the High Court dispensary by the Government Rajaji Hospital here, followed by cultural programmes by the children of court staff and lawyers practising in the Bench.
The cultural programmes were conducted in the portico of the Bench as the inauguration of a meeting hall, which was airconditioned recently, by the Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan on July 25, had been postponed.
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The High Court judges in Chennai are deputed in batches to the Madurai Bench every two months. It has been a practice in the Bench since its inception in July 2004 to request the senior most among them to hoist the national flag.