The Maze

For those who feel that the Law is ever an Ass (with due apologies to that noble of beasts), here is a surprise: unlike an Ass, the Law is able to realise its own asinine nature (asininity sounds so incorrect that I hesistate to use it, lest it expose my lack of grammar).
Most Indians who have had occassion to be associated with the law have dreaded its might, not for its awful majesty but for something equally, if not more,awful; its awful rapacity. More distressing is its secular nature, it being eqaully rapacious of Time and Money which, in the modern world, are one and the same.
For Indians who have never been involved in the vast machinery of the legal system, the greatest punishment that could conceivably be inflicted is not the actual loss (of freedom or resources) but the process of the infliction (or benediction).

Like Gabbar Singh of Sholay fame, who boasts that Mother's utilise fear of him to put children to sleep, the legal system can lay claim to deterrence of crime. Nothing deters crime more effectively than the fact that one is likely to be caught in the tentacles of the law, irrespective of the fact that anticipated punishment can take so long to be delivered as to be almost labelled inter-generational.

In fact, given the proverbial long arm of the law, the framers of our legal system must be complemented on their vision and foresight, foreseeing that prevention of crime is better than detection, and further that a non-transparent, arbitrary set of rules, one that allows the norm to be determined by any exception that an inventive judge is able to dredge up from a hoary past of equally inventive judges, is the best deterrent, devised the current punishment that is our legal system.

Of course, if is quite unfair to lay the blame at the doors of the framers of the the legal system, if it is only the "small flies" that accept an invitation, by the spider, in the form of the lawyer, into the parlour that is the legal system, to forfeit all.
Thus, all who complain that the law does not provide any tangible solutions to our problems must be reminded of the divine purpose of the Law, as provided in the unparalleled aphorims of Bierce; a victorious litigant, questioning his lawyer as to the lack of any tangible benefits from the victory, is reminded by the lawyer that "he-the litigant- appears not to know the purpose of litigation" .

In this ideal world of judicial perfection, I wonder what certain learned judges alluded to when they compared the current legal proceedings to a "chakavyooha" (a complicated maze) with the litigant being in the position of an Abhimanyu ?
http://deccanherald.com/deccanherald/apr282006/state198172006427.asp