Dedicating the award to the memory of the late V.R. Krishna Iyer, who was one of his formative influences when he began his career as a young lawyer, Mr. Subramanium, former Solicitor General of India, said that there were few like Iyer, whose personality, moral conscience, selflessness, and compassion for the poor was enough to elevate the conscience and stature of courts. Mr. Subramanium was speaking at a function organised by the Kerala Lawyers’ Club on December 7, 2014 to confer the second Pirappancode Sreedharan Nair award on him as a “lawyer of eminence with social commitment”.

In the passing away of this great humanist, the greatest loss is for truth which most people are afraid to touch even with a barbed wire.  “Society is guilty if anyone suffers unjustly”, Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer once told an interviewer. We were fortunate to have Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer around us this far. Personally,  I was fortunate to be in his vicinity and experienc his great warmheartedness by himself writing the FORWARD to my second book LIFE ON MELTDOWN and a review to my first book STORY OF MAN LAYMAN in 1990. He wrote in the FORWARD: 

“It is a fundamental principle of most moral theories that all human beings have a right to life. The right to be born, the right to have one’s life maintained, the right not to be killed, the right to have one’s life saved are all fundamental rights of every human being. Here no one has the right to destroy the living environment. Here we happen to occupy parts of this lively and wholesome environment only quite temporarily — as a borrower.

Our future generations—our children, grandchildren and great… grandchildren included—are just as much members of human family as ourselves but have no voice to speak for themselves. We take advantage of this and are damaging them irrecoverably by our breach of trust of this environment of which we are only custodians and not owners. Every single citizen is a trustee of Earth. All the more, governments trustees (leaders) bear a special responsibility in this regard”.

“Today we are in default of our duties if we continue our present destructive modern lifestyles and create more, despite our knowledge of their dreadful consequences. Our generation and particularly those who are specially entrusted with the care of environment will have to answer before the court of history for our default and abuse of trust. Indeed we are committing the gravest possible crime against future generations—and, as is visible, even against ourselves — and are doing so with a full consciousness of the effects of our actions. It is indeed quite unsettling to believe that we have become the most destructive generation in all of human history, regardless of the fact that we are destroying the undoubted birthright of billions of human beings for whom we hold Mother Earth on trust.

“In this regard, I have great pleasure to introduce a new book, Life on Meltdown by M. J. John, who has taken up this critical case/question before the present world. Here John undertakes a highly revealing study and has effectively tried to answer the crucial question: how has mankind, in our modern civilization, suddenly lost its potential quality for survival?“

 ( The full parts of the ‘FORWARD’ may be read at: http://www.humanfirst.in/…/oforeword-by-honorable-justice-…/)