Alumnus Update: Anirudh Belle — Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Blog

Anirudh Belle pursued law at the University of Oxford as a 2019 Scholar. He plans to continue his education at Oxford as a doctoral student on the DPhil in Law programme.

In this week’s post he shares his experiences at his time at university.

“Sir, life is very strange. The moment you are very clear about what you want to do, things happen… Life never comes to the aid of those who merely yield to some demand out of fear. But if you say, ‘This is what I really want to do and I am going to pursue it’, then you will find that something miraculous takes place. You may have to go hungry, struggle to get through, but you will be a worthwhile human being, not a mere copy, and that is the miracle of it…

You know, in biology there is a phenomenon called the sport, which is a sudden and spontaneous deviation from the type. If you have a garden and have cultivated a particular species of flower, one morning you may find that something totally new has come out of that species. That new thing is called the sport. Being new it stands out, and the gardener takes a special interest in it. And life is like that. The moment you venture out, something takes place in you and about you. Life comes to your aid in various ways. You may not like the form in which it comes to you – it may be misery, struggle, starvation – but when you invite life, things begin to happen. But you see, we don't want to invite life, we want to play a safe game; and those who play a safe game die very safely. Is that not so?”

~ J Krishnamurti in ‘Think on These Things’

Beginnings: choosing to study law

‘Think on These Things’ by J Krishnamurti

For a long time, I had been putting off my desire to study the law. Reading law at university was an expensive proposition and the thought of spending many years on a second degree seemed impractical. Whenever the thought surfaced in my mind, I would get nervous and remind myself of the risks; I convinced myself that I simply had to ‘put up’ with life in a regular corporate job and that it was ‘okay’ that I did not enjoy it. And then, on a December morning in 2015, I read this passage from J Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things. Something inside me instantly opened-up. Never before had I experienced such clarity. Confronting my desire to study the law, with neither fear nor judgement, I felt alive and so deeply compelled. I quit my job that same day and told my parents of my decision to prepare for law school. In Krishnamurti’s words, I decided to “invite life” … and life, indeed, did “respond”.

I scored a top mark in my law school entrance exam (I had never, till then, topped an exam). A few weeks later, I was enrolled on the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) programme at the Jindal Global Law School, on a full scholarship.

Winning the Inlaks Scholarship

At law school, I developed a particular interest in private law. Towards the end of my studies on the LL.B. programme, the desire to read on the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) programme at the University of Oxford, therefore, came almost naturally. The private law scholarship at Oxford is unmatched, and the BCL is among the best postgraduate (taught) law programmes in the world. I was fortunate to have wonderful teachers and mentors at law school like Professor Shiv Visvanathan, Professor Malvika Seth and Professor Amit Jyoti S Gomber. With their encouragement and advice, I worked hard to prepare my profile for the BCL. On ultimately receiving an offer of admission, I was elated. One week of celebration, however, gave way for the cold reality to set in that the programme is expensive. I would need a scholarship should there be any real chance of my reading on the programme. My teachers urged me to apply for the prestigious Inlaks Scholarship, an opportunity which I frankly thought was quite intimidating and possibly out of my league. I reminded myself however that I am passionate about the law and clear about my motivations. I was confident of putting these across in my application and proceeded to give the Inlaks scholarship a shot.

Applying for the scholarship was a comprehensive and rigorous experience. In addition to submitting a paper application, I was interviewed, in two rounds, by a panel of eminent scholars and legal practitioners. I was put to test on the content of my application, my chosen subject area, on current affairs and also on ethically and morally contentious issues. While this was certainly challenging, I was most taken by the panel’s courteous and friendly manner. They clearly wanted me to show my best self to them, and they created an environment to enable this.

Receiving the news that I had won the scholarship was surreal. One was grateful and overjoyed. I think it felt even more special than receiving my admission letter for the BCL. Krishnamurti’s words came back to me at that point – I felt the truth in them just as I did four years ago.

I was going to Oxford.

Arriving in Oxford: College Life

Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford

I arrived in Oxford one week before the start of Michaelmas Term in 2019 (the academic year at Oxford is divided into three terms – Michaelmas in autumn, Hilary in spring and Trinity in summer), and was shortly thereafter able to move into my room at Harris Manchester College (HMC). HMC is a relatively small College at Oxford and in this sense rather unlike most other Colleges in the Oxbridge network. It features a small, but tightly knit community of very friendly peers, tutors and staff. On my first day at HMC, I had the opportunity to interact with most members of the College, and all of them made me feel very welcomed.

Rabindranath Tagore stands with Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Sir Maurice Gwyer, former Vice Chancellor of Delhi University, when Tagore was conferred an honorary degree from the University of Oxford.

I visited the beautiful College library (the Tate Library) as soon as I left my luggage in my room. I was pleasantly surprised to find beautiful photographs of India’s second President, Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and the great poet Rabindranath Tagore hanging prominently beside the library’s main floor. Dr Radhakrishnan, I was told, was formerly the Principal of HMC and Tagore had visited the College to deliver the Hibbert Lectures (now published as The Religion of Man).

Rabindranath Tagore delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. Here is a picture of the event in 1930, showing him walking to the Arlosh Hall (the College’s dining hall), accompanied by LP Jacks (the Principal… — Rabindranath Tagore delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. Here is a picture of the event in 1930, showing him walking to the Arlosh Hall (the College’s dining hall), accompanied by LP Jacks (the Principal of the College at the time).

The relatively small size of HMC did not mean that the facilities provided were in anyway inferior to other Colleges; I would actually suggest that they were, in many ways, much better. The food was always top class, the library was excellent, Formal Hall (traditional meals which we attended in formal academic dress) were beautifully conducted, and the lodgings were very comfortable (I was lucky to have been allotted a room in the newly built Maevadi Hall — easily among the best student accommodation sites at Oxford). An added benefit for me was that the College is located very close to the Faculty of Law and to the Oxford City Centre, giving me the chance to strike a good work-leisure balance (although, as I explain below, the BCL is a tough course, and this required me to focus much more on the ‘work’ aspect of my life that year).

The Academic Experience on the BCL

Prior to starting the BCL, each student was introduced to their academic advisor, a scholar in Oxford’s Faculty of Law who would mentor the student through their time on the course. In our first meeting, my advisor told me that the BCL year will likely be among the most rigorous and rewarding experiences of my academic life. Towards the end of Hilary Term, I was starting to understand what he meant.

The subjects I opted for were the following: (i) Advanced Property and Trusts, (ii) Commercial Remedies, (iii) Restitution of Unjust Enrichment, and (iv) Philosophical Foundations of the Common Law. Each of these had stellar reputations and were among the most popular private law courses on the BCL. Teaching for these subjects was to be divided into seminars and tutorials. Seminars are gatherings of the whole class in a subject in which students and professors would engage with themes from a pre-published reading list. Tutorials are more intimate gatherings – of about two to four students and a tutor, who is always an established scholar in their field. In a tutorial, a student submits an essay on a given topic and engages in a discussion with their tutor on it and receives the tutor’s academic feedback.

While I was clear about the subjects I wanted to study on the BCL, I faced a unique challenge as a law student from India. Equity and Trusts are an essential component of the undergraduate law syllabus in the United Kingdom, and these subjects are central to the private law framework (at least in most common law jurisdictions). Oddly, in India, equity and trusts are not taught on the law school syllabus. These subjects were therefore entirely alien to me – I hadn’t the slightest clue, for that matter, what ‘equity’ meant or what a ‘trust’ was. Prior to confirming my options, I was told that a background in equity and trusts is essential to at least three of the four options I had in mind. I was keen on studying these subjects and was determined to teach myself equity and trusts should it come to that (and it certainly did come to that).

The reading lists for BCL seminars were notoriously long and the reading material was dense. Almost all of one’s time in a day was spent in reading and learning (and this included weekends). In the Christmas and Easter breaks, most of my classmates took some time off from studies to relax. I, however, could not do this as I used this time self-learning themes in equity and trusts. The overall experience, no doubt, was challenging and frequently exhausting. But throughout one’s engagement with the course, there was so much to cherish and look forward to, and wearing-out was never an option — the frequent opportunities to unlearn and relearn, or to learn something entirely new, the rare flashes of insight, the presence of such great scholarship and generosity in one’s teachers, mentors, our books and the University environment, and, of course, the chance to learn amidst such driven, intelligent and good hearted peers. It certainly also helped to have acquired a wonderful circle of friends on the course. We learned from and supported each other, and many of them have now become some of my very best friends.

Memorable moments with friends from the BCL year at Oxford (2019-20)

In July this year, I passed the BCL examinations with a Distinction. I will now be continuing in Oxford as a doctoral student on the DPhil in Law programme. Interestingly, equity and trusts grew on me to such an extent that I now find myself pursuing doctoral research in this area! (Had I been told, one year ago, that this is where life would take me, I doubt anything would have struck me as more bizarre).

My year on the BCL left me not only as a better student of the law, but with somewhat greater empathy and awareness as an individual. I cannot, of course, express my gratitude for these enough, and, above all, to the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation for enabling what has been an experience of a lifetime.

Cover Image: Matriculation Day 2019, University of Oxford. Photographed beside the Radcliffe Camera.