India, Aug. 14 -- A packed room at the Bombay Bar Association (BBA)'s meeting called to protest against the Emergency, tales of renowned criminal lawyer Ram Jethmalani's 'ghoda-gaadi (horse carriage)' in pre-independence Karachi, carving out the state of Maharashtra from the larger Bombay state in 1960, and the spontaneous reaction of the judges of the Bombay high court who rose early from proceedings after receiving the news of Jayprakash Narayan's death in 1979 - senior advocate Nitin Thakker, 79, is the keeper of the storied history of one of the oldest high courts in the country and the events that shaped the young nation's "city of dreams".

An archetypal SoBo (South Bombay) boy, the two-time president of BBA, Thakker's first fee as ...