Palkhivala asked me, "When are you joining the profession?"

Senior advocate Harish Salve said that forests were a way of life when he was growing up in Nagpur. Speaking to Rainmaker about his childhood and the early years in the profession, he said that Nagpur was a good small town when he grew up. "Things were very different in a small town. We used to walk to school - a nice, missionary school. Completely different set of values."

He said that there were some advantages of growing up in a small town which you didn't have in a big town. "The holidays we had, for example. I remember when we passed college for example. Three of us friends got into a car and went driving into the forests of that area - to the Western Ghats. Even on weekends, our idea of partying was getting into a jeep and driving off into a remote place. Of course, you would sneak your bottles of beer or rum along, but it brought you very close to the environment."

Reflecting on his passion for forests, he said that an interesting thing was that his father was a shikari. One of his friends and clients, a former Minister, Sri Vidyacharan Shukla, used to run a shikar company.

"In fact there is a photograph of me as a young boy on the bonnet of a jeep next to the carcass of a tiger that these people had shot. But for some reason, by the time we were fifteen or sixteen, we had turned conservationist."

"My father was a chartered accountant but we come from a family of lawyers. The father of one of my closest friends was also a lawyer who went on to become the Advocate General of Bombay."

Speaking about his earliest experiences in profession, he said, "I wanted to be an engineer, but that idea soon fell off when I started reading the Perry Mason novels."

By the time Harish Salve grew up, he was pretty keen on chartered accountancy. "My father, even before he joined politics, had given up any accounting work, and used to exclusively do tax, which brought us very close to Mr. Palkhivala, who was like a mentor even for him. I remember meeting Mr. Palkhivala for the first time when I was ten years old. He came to our house in Nagpur. Surrounded by all this, I sort of drifted into taxation - then I realized, if I had to do taxation, might as well do it as a lawyer."

"The turning point came in 1975. I had just passed B. Com, and I had already finished two years of training as an article when one of my father's clients had a problem relating to an issue of interpretation of the new set of provisions relating to the Settlement Commission. I used to work at that time under my father's partner in Nagpur, and he asked me to prepare a note on the issue. I prepared a note. When my father came from Delhi, his partner took the note that was meant for his eyes, and showed it to my father. I was petrified, I used to be very scared of my father, and I thought I would be humiliated in front of everyone.

"He growled "Who drafted this note?", and my father's partner pointed at me. My father said, "Very interesting!" He said that he was in the committee which framed this law but that they never looked at it that way.

"It concerned the definition of "case", and my father said "what you are saying sounds plausible", but since the stakes were too high, we decided to take Mr. Palkhivala's opinion on the matter. As a reward for having prepared the note, I got an air ticket to go to Bombay and a hotel room to stay. That was my first professional visit off my own steam. We went to have a meeting with Mr. Palkhivala, and my father said with great pride that I had written the note. When he read that note, he looked at me and said, "When are you joining the profession?" And that was that."

Salve did law from Nagpur and in 1978, moved to Delhi, working full time with Dadachandji & Co., with whom he used to intern while in college, in Delhi and Nagpur. In 1980, he formally qualified as a lawyer. Nani Palkhivala then advised him to join Soli Sorabjee.

Meanwhile, he also had assisted Palkhivala while he argued Minerva Mills. "What an opportunity that was!"

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Harish Salve
• Palkhivala
• Minerva Mills
• Soli Sorabjee
• Dadachandji & Co.
• Nagpur
• tax
• accountancy
• Settlement Commission