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”. With humble beginnings in Kalbadevi, once a hotspot for cloth trade and home to a large Gujarati community, Nitin Thakker is now a resident of the upscale Altamount Road. (Anshuman Poyrekar/HT Photo) An archetypal SoBo (South Bombay) boy, the two-time president of BBA, Thakker’s first fee as a young lawyer in 1969 was three gold mohurs or ₹45. Donning the black gown since 1968, Thakker has been both on the electric tram …