JUSTIN YEO
Senior Editor (SLR)

Two metres was the closest I came. Two metres away sat he, brows furrowed in thought, mental faculties analysing every word of the Attorney-General’s Singapore Law Review lecture on criminal sentencing. When the time came, he rose without pause, accepting Attorney-General Woon’s invitation for questions from the floor. “Here’s the tough one”, the Attorney-General enthused, to the amusement of many but to the astonishment of none. For everybody knew who he was: the man who was, and is, the face of criminal law in Singapore; the man who has defended the most heinous offenders with neither fear nor favour; the man who did the best he could – Mr. Subhas Anandan.

Beyond media coverage, however, many – myself included – know little of the man. But when an autographed copy of Mr. Anandan’s autobiography The Best I Could came into my hands in the form of a Christmas gift, the two-metre gap slowly dissolved. The pages told a personal story, the aggression of Singapore’s battle-scarred criminal law stalwart melting away into an earnest reminiscing of the past. Ranging from Primary School memoirs and Secondary School defiance, to an unbelievable behind-the-bars experience, and to proud ownership of a brand-new Mercedes Benz, Mr. Anandan’s account was more gripping than many works of fiction. When he finally got down to writing on the law, his accessible and stimulating style made for pleasurable reading for both layman and lawyer alike. Readers are exposed to the human-dimension of the characters featured in widely-publicised cases, while law students, in particular, are presented with nuggets of legal-eagle experience: they watch, enthralled, as the people in their case books come to life.

In authoring this book, Mr. Anandan may not have been doing what he was best at, viz., legal practice. Notwithstanding, his first-handed, no-holds-barred account topped the non-fiction charts at leading bookstores in December 2008, bringing Singapore’s criminal law into limelight – an unprecedented authorial effort by a man, doing the best he could.