by Bharat Chugh

I have been thinking, lately, about luck. Someone defined it as the specific point where preparation meets opportunity. I have been thinking of opportunities.

The opportunities I’ve been handed by this lottery called Life. And I’ve been thinking about my luck.  

Not the abstract kind. The specific kind. The kind with names.

The teacher who saw something before there was much to see. A father that prized reading above all else and brought a second-hand computer when there were so many other demands on his limited money. A library that let me stick around whole afternoons in its stacks, return books late – without late fee. The juniors who chose to build something with me when they could have gone elsewhere. The clients who walked in carrying the worst moments of their lives and trusted my young and inexperienced shoulders with them. 

And the early clients. The ones who came when there was no office, no juniors, no infrastructure of any kind. Who trusted a young 21 year lawyer who would do everything himself. Right from buying the court fee stamp, file the papers, clear the objections, argue the matter, pay the process fee, follow up on the summons.

Clerk, driver, junior, assistant, advocate – all rolled into one, held in one piece  by stubbornness and a certain type of hunger.

Those clients did not have to trust me. They did anyway.

I have not forgotten that. And, I never will.

And my mother. Who lived with me in a matchbox of a janta flat (along with father and sister) and would go outside to request the vegetable vendor — quietly— not to call out his wares too loudly, because her son was studying inside and his shouts would reach. Who made adrak chai at three in the morning, without complaint, without even being asked, because I had decided that night was when I would work.

Who created, in a small flat with thin walls, the conditions for a life of reading and trying to understand.  

Pull one thread of this tapestry of luck and almost the entire fabric of my little life unravels.

I have been lucky. Plainly, repeatedly, specifically lucky.

At 23, I ranked 1st in the Delhi Judicial Service Examination and became a Judge. I presided over courtrooms where litigants stood, where witnesses sweated, where the machinery of justice – slow, creaking and imperfect – turned every single day producing justice and – sometimes – a little injustice too, I suspect. 

In short, I saw what law could do to a person, and what it could do for one. 

And, I saw – sometimes a little too vividly – the sheer distance between those two things. 

Later, for the sheer love of the practice of law, I left. A government job with a title and a certain kind of security — and I walked away from it, back to the Bar, with no particularly impressive connections, no law firm pedigree, no safety net beyond the belief that this was the right thing to do. It was, by most measures, an unreasonable decision. 

And then a certain brilliant law firm managing partner — a man who had every reason to look past me and didn’t — offered me a Counsel position and then, upset the apple cart by offering me partnership, all in my 7th year of legal practice.

I had not earned it on paper. My resume did not demand it. He extended it anyway, on something closer to affection, faith and hope than real calculation.

I think about that often. What it means when someone bets on you before the evidence of your life is fully recorded and the jury is still out.

Then came the years of building something of my own. And somewhere in that long middle, the cases, the courtrooms, the arguments made and lost, the clients I could help and the ones I couldn’t – I kept returning to the central reason I chose this in the first place.

Not the briefs. Not the reputation. Not riches. 

The ability to use law as a tool to leave things slightly better than how I found them. Even marginally or slightly.

Nature is not fair. It never promised to be.

Some are born into homes with money and connections and the quiet confidence that comes from never having to wonder whether there is enough and the confidence of doors-opening wherever one goes.

Others arrive into life in circumstances that would exhaust most people even before the real work of living begins. Poverty. Privilege. Not having a chance. Having a real shot at life. It is all simply where the dice landed.

And for most of human history, where the dice landed was where you stayed.

And this is where Law comes in. 

Law, at its best (which, unfortunately, is not often now), refuses to accept that. It steps-in where nature shrugs with indifference. It says that regardless of what you were born into, there are rights that belong to you, wrongs that can be named, and a forum where your voice — however small — must be heard.

Where the David is the equal of Goliath.

It is indeed cumbersome, slow, and sometimes maddening and chaotic. But it is also one of the few instruments human civilisation has fashioned that can, in the right hands, can make the ground a little more level and equal for everyone to walk on. 

That is what drew me to it. That is what keeps me here. On most days at least. 

But access to that instrument is not evenly distributed. It requires money, time, patience & connections. Most people who need it most have the least of all these four. And a right that you cannot access is, in practice, not a right worthy of its name at all.

I must confess, I have not always done enough about that. All these years were about having a place to stand-on and arranging a lever. I have a legal practice, a team of about 15 people, offices in Delhi and Gurugram, obligations that are real and immediate. The demands of a professional life are pressing, and I will not pretend otherwise.

But luck, when you have had as much of it as I have, eventually asks something in return. And justly so.

This is time. 

So we are formalising at The Chambers, a more systematic and structured commitment to pro bono work that has always lived informally in our intentions.

If you need legal assistance and cannot access it — or if you know someone who does — write to us at contact@bharatchugh.in with ‘PROBONO’ in the subject line. Our team will read every email. We will vet the matters carefully.

The filter will not be how well-known a case is. It will not be how intellectually interesting the legal question. It will be simpler: can we make a real difference here? Can we help justice reach someone it would otherwise bypass? Is this something that we have the competency and skill for? 

These are the only questions worth asking.

I make no promises.

We cannot take every matter.

Probably, we cannot even respond to every mail. But we can take some. And for some people, some is the difference between everything and nothing.

I have been enormously lucky. The right teachers appeared. The library was there. The juniors showed up. A managing partner extended a hand when he had no particular reason to. The clients trusted — the early ones most of all, when there was the least reason to.

And a mother, in a small flat, kept the world quiet and the chai warm so her son could reach for something larger than what surrounded him – in his immediate neighbourhood.

The least I can do is show up for someone else.

Write to us. We are listening.

Warmly,

Bharat Chugh