Ind Govt's Lunacy Act,click here if it applies 2 u. Review on ______

(Hmm.. thanks for clicking on the link....i knew it would be applicable to a lot of MSians like me)

I was studying law the other day and was going through the Indian Contract Act 1872. The Contract Act for all you people who are not familiar with it, is the governing body in India for all trade, business, purchase, sales, auctions……….you name it and its included. Anyways…..i was just browsing through a particular section which I cant recall at the moment, I think it was Section 2 (a)(3), anyways, that section dealt with identifying parties which are competent to Contract. (A party in legal parlance is a person, AOP, BOI, Company………In short its anything but a well…..party. No booze, no shlooze, no girls parading about in bikinis, no exotic dancers…..nothing…..zilch….its the most boring Party ever…..heh heh….).

Anyhow….the 3 basic conditions which a party must fulfill to be competent to contract are:

1- He must be above the age of majority

2- He must be of sound mind

3- He must not default when subjected to any law for the purpose of determining his competency to contract.

(I can just see the thought forming into the minds of the feminist MSians……but yeah…..blame the Act ladies, they included the SHE in the HE)

The second point above grabbed my attention…..i.e He must be of Sound Mind. What exactly is ‘sound mind’. Referring to some other sections which I am not naming for the simple reason that I don’t remember the section numbers (See….i’m honest too…..i’m not tryin to impress the members of the fairer sex here by quoting false section numbers….), I was pleasantly surprised to know that, according to the provisions of the Lunacy Act, A person who is a lunatic may also be held as competent to contract subject to certain conditions………..

The Lunacy Act says that, any person who is a certified lunatic (which would be my 4th grade computer teacher) may enter into a contract, but the contract will be legal and enforceable if the lunatic had entered into a contract during any period of time where he may be sane momentarily before again going over the edge. So if a crazy guy enters into a contract with you to sell his car during a span of time where he’s sane, and you agree to his proposal, you’ll have to buy his car and cant avoid the contract on the ground that he’s a lunatic and you didn’t know it. (you’re probably thinking…..so whats the problem huh…..i’m buying his car…..Why should I care whether he’s looney or not……..read on….and you’ll see the “craziness” of the situation)

Now…..this according to me is a little bit of a…..well…..nutty law. How exactly do you determine that when the person entered into a contract with you, what his mental state was. Or in other words, was he crazy or sane at the time of his entering into the contract with you.

Lets take an example…. A certified lunatic offers to sell you his brand new Porsche Carrerra 3.6 GTO (don’t ask me how he got one…….) for say 1000 bucks…..and you accept the offer and take possession of the car. Now when he has a moment of sanity, he remembers he sold you that car for just a 1000 bucks. So in the court of law…..the contract will be treated to be void…as it had been entered into when either or both of the parties weren’t of sound mind…...and so you’ll have to return the car to the lunatic.

Now suppose again, that this certified lunatic offers to sell you the same car for a 1000000 bucks during a moment of sanity. You buy the car……and a couple of days later the lunatic gets an offer of 2000000 bucks for the same car from another person. At this point of time, he can take you to court and say, that he entered into the contract of sale at a time when he was crazy and so you’ll have to hand the car back in this case too. Even though he was of perfectly sound mind when he entered into the contract. .

My point….its virtually impossible to go back into time and determine whether a person was sane or crazy at the time of entering into a contract. Here what this Act does is that…..it benefits lunatics who may have entered into a contract in times of sanity to take recourse and avoid the contract, if they later on get much better terms than the one’s you offered…...

So I guess….in this case….the lunatic is obviously placed at a much better position than the normal sane people, and so right now at this point the Lunacy Act needs to have some changes incorporated into it, or you can be sure more and more people will be going crazy everyday. One thing struck me as a bit odd though……not impossible…..but a little well…..odd…..I cant fathom a lunatic having such a moment of sanity that he can actually remember what he did when he was looney and also understand that what he did was void legally and he can go to court and claim it back subject to the provisions of the Lunacy Act…….But then I guess, it takes a lunatic to fully understand the provisions of the Lunacy Act…..and I’m pretty close to comprehending all those provisions thoroughly, so no surprises as to what that makes me….

Anyways……..if any of you sane guys do get the time, do think about drafting a new Lunacy Act…….and remember never ever to enter into a contract with anybody whom you think is a lunatic. Coz you can be sure, the Lunacy Act as well as the jury in the court is going to favour the crazy guy……..so either you comply with restoring the benefit you derived from the contract, or agree to the non-performance of the contract as it is has now been subsequently declared void. Either way……it’s gonna be a big surprise if you dont go crazy yourself on hearing the verdict.

Yawn…......allright…..i’m done here……me’s off to bed……..will be back with some more looney reviews….and some more subjective analysis on Indian Governments Laws and Acts which concern me…….