I didn’t plan on teaching.

I read law, and then read it again in London for my LL.M., and assumed I was headed somewhere with a firm in it, and a desk, and a great deal of paper. Teaching arrived sideways a few classes I agreed to take as a favour, a room that asked better questions than I was ready for, and the slow realisation that I had stopped noticing the time.

I’m careful about calling it a passion. Passion is a word people use about themselves, and it’s loud, and it dries out.

What I have is quieter and steadier, and it hasn’t run out: I simply find this interesting. A contract clause is interesting. An unclear provision is interesting. A student’s wrong answer is the most interesting thing in the room, because it’s the clearest map you will ever get of how a person is thinking. Interest gets renewed by the work itself.

That’s why it lasts.

There is no podium in my classroom, and that isn’t an accident.

A podium is a useful piece of furniture if what you want is to be a designation. Founder. Faculty. LL.M., London. It faces one direction, it fixes you in place, and it puts a wooden object between you and the people you are meant to be reaching. I have never been able to teach from behind one. The part of this job that matters happens in the open

close enough to catch the exact second a student stops following you, and to stop there rather than push on.

So that is the method, such as it is. Sit close. Watch carefully. Treat the wrong answer as information, not as failure.

Don’t move until the room has moved with you.What we teach at Bharat Law Institute is legal reasoning, logical reasoning, English, and the whole of what CLAT asks of you but underneath all of it we are teaching one thing, which is how to catch yourself thinking.

Where you rush. Which options you’re drawn to and why. What you assumed before you’d finished reading. Most students who arrive here believing they’re bad at reasoning are not bad at reasoning. They’ve simply never been shown that a passage can be taken apart, or that a wrong answer is usually a wrong question they asked themselves first. Once a student can see their own habit on the page, they start correcting it without me. That is where the growth actually happens, and it is the part I like most.

I built this institute so the teaching could stay close to the ground. No mystique, no theatre about cracking codes, no distance for its own sake. Clear thinking, taught by people who still find it worth thinking about.If you’re preparing come with your questions. I’d rather hear them out loud.

“There is no version of this where I do the hard part for you. There is only a version where you’re not alone in it. I don’t want students who agree with me quickly. Agreement is the cheapest thing a classroom produces.”

~Shweta