INTRODUCTION

When Raian Karanjawala made it on to the India Today magazine’s list of “50 most influential people” in 2004, the news came as a surprise to many.

Some even asked him (rather undiplomatically), how he managed to do it, as if he had a hand in the selection. Their curiosity, though, was not without reason. By earning a place on the magazine’s coveted annual roll of fame, Karanjawala had pulled off a coup over some of his more socially esteemed colleagues like Harish Salve, Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Fali Nariman.

The India Today honour described Karanjawala & Co—a law firm he started with his wife Manik in the early eighties, from a barsati (a one-room apartment on the terrace with a verandah outside) of his father-in-law’s house in Maharani Bagh, New Delhi, with two desks—as the “first port of call for several powerful people in legal trouble.”

Today, his firm is one of the largest in the country, with three offices in Delhi and over 150 employees on payroll, serving everyone from governments and companies in trouble to celebrities and street vendors in distress, earning him in the process, the nick name, “the big picture guy.”

Yet his spectacular achievements sit lightly on him, often dismissing it with disarming frankness and humility, telling people how he was just plain “lucky” or how it was his connections, which he cultivated during his college days—from Arun Jaitley, the late finance and defence minister to Mukul Rohatgi, the former attorney general—that actually enriched his life or even confessing that his wife is the “harder working of the two and the backbone of the firm.”

My attempt through this digital biography is to introduce the man himself, who has been a part of Delhi’s charmed circle for close to half a century, to the calm eye of the reader. In doing so, I hope, I will be able to illuminate the little examined aspects of his life and career, and that way tell a story.

Sangeeth Sebastian
Follow sangeeth @sangeethspeak

   Next: My friend Arun & College Days