Reading this post has thrown me into ultimate déjà vu…
I remember meeting Sir Aitzaz, an impecable man and my first and briefest mentor, at KFC in Islamabad when I was 8 years old. You see I had this incredible dream ever since I was 5 years old that I wanted to be a lawyer, that too very passionately. So standing in queue waiting to order my “chikky meal,” my father introduced me to Sir Aitzaz Ahsan who was told of my very precise future plan to become a lawyer. What followed was an amused laughter and an equally precise question directed towards chubby-8-year-old me “Young lady do you read books?” To which I nodded incredulously revealing the Enid Blyton book in my hands which had been clasped behind my bank, solemnly, so as to display my anxious attentiveness. Another amused laugh came from Sir Aitzaz, patting my head he said “Keep reading all the novels and interestingly fantasy-full books in the world and you will attain what it takes to be a litigant.” To this day I have not spent a day without reading my favourite fiction. Even after having worked 12+ hours a day reading laws, drafts, and the rest of the whole legal shebang, there is not one single night that I have gone to sleep without reading atleast a page of my current read. What have I acheived from this? My mind expands, when I am given legal propositions of any kind. My imagination runs “wild” in the most literal of senses. I create scenarios from every angle, address every issue in all possible contexts. Whether it be a legal opinion, a memo, a research paper, my arguments for court, book reading as leisure continues to give me the ability to imagine, write and grasp concepts more vigorously.
Senior Supreme Court Advocate Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan was asked by Umar Riaz in an interview that, what makes you stand different as Supreme Court Lawyer?
He said, "Do you see any law book in my library where we are sitting?"
Interviewer glanced around and he found not a single law book in shelf,
Aitzaz Ahsan then said, "I read only literature, fictional, history and poetry books when I sit in this library, I don't study laws here, and that's what making me different from other lawyers, I connect what I read from books in this library to my cases in which I appear and it makes my case presentation well"
Thank you so much for this post! We look forward to reading all entries! 🤞🌟