Retired, not expired: At age 71, veteran court interpreter graduated with diploma in legal studies
Published on
27 Jul 2024
Published by
The Straits Times
SINGAPORE – On Nov 4, 2023, Mr Nadarajoo Sivanandan put on a spiffy white shirt and red tie to dine out with a former colleague and good friend.
“Dress up,” she instructed, when she offered to buy him and his wife, stay-at-home mother Teresa Lauzar, 75, a good meal. The friend declined to be named.
The veteran court interpreter, who turns 76 in September, wondered where they were going that warranted formal clothing.
When he stepped into the grand ballroom of The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore that morning and saw staff members from Kaplan Higher Education Academy, he finally caught on. His friend and the diploma graduation team were surprising him with the graduation ceremony he never had in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mr Sivanandan completed his diploma in legal studies in August 2019 at age 71, making him Kaplan’s oldest diploma graduate to date.
“I felt very elated,” says the grandfather of four, who was captured in a local Tamil television news clip dabbing his eyes, overcome with emotion. Fellow graduates, many a third his age, clamoured for wefies with him.
With his sonorous voice and clear diction, it may seem as if Mr Sivanandan was born to be an interpreter, but he fell into it by chance at age 19 after his A levels.
He had wanted to become a lawyer, but when he came across job pamphlets by the Public Service Commission in 1967, he applied and was chosen to join the Subordinate Courts as a student interpreter.
He spent the next 43 years at the High Court and Subordinate Courts as a Tamil interpreter, a job he grew to love. He officially retired in 2010, but his bosses extended his service in the state courts until March 2019 when he was 71, because his children, now in their 40s, asked him to slow down.
Mr Sivanandan credits his late father for seeding the love of Tamil language and culture in him as a boy. He took Malay as his second language, as his primary school lacked a Tamil mother tongue teacher. However, his father would teach him the language every day after he returned from work as a clerical staffer in the telecommunications industry.
Despite scoring well in Malay, he decided to take Tamil as his second language in secondary school and later became involved with the Singapore Tamil Youths’ Club for more than three decades promoting Tamil language and culture.
Between his job, cultural advocacy work and raising a family, he says: “I really never found time for myself, which I very much regret later in life.”
In 2018, his good friend suggested that he pursue his dream of studying law, and helped him research which school to pick. She offered to enrol in the course with him, which started in December that year, so he would not be alone.
He admits that he thought a diploma course would be easier than doing a degree, but it turned out to be “eight months of torture” going back into a classroom environment, he recalls.
In addition to attending classes up to five times a week from 6.30 to 10.30pm, he overcame his fear of technology and learnt to use a computer for his course work. Before his course, he quips, he last used a Brother typewriter many years ago.
“My computer knowledge was very little and when I had to type 2,000 words for my essays, I needed God by me,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t think I’ve studied that hard ever in my life.”
Mr Sivanandan says his classmates, many of them in their early 20s, saw that he was struggling and “they motivated me” by sharing study materials. He, in turn, became a valuable source of real-world law to them when he shared his vast experience in the courts.
His wife was a pillar of emotional support at home, gently asking if he needed anything while he worked into the wee hours.
Studies aside, Mr Sivanandan has taken to writing books in recent years, with three titles under his belt.
Beyond A Reasonable Doubt: Giving Voice To The Accused, published by Marshall Cavendish Editions in 2019, chronicles his career highlights as one of the longest-serving interpreters in Singapore’s judiciary and gives an insider’s perspective on how difficult the work can be.
He wrote it after a senior judge suggested that he share his unique perspective and experience.
He also wrote a Tamil book, loosely translated as My Thoughts, a series of essays on social issues such as giving up seats to seniors in public transport, as well as his memoirs in English. Both were published in India in 2019.
He is also one of eight translators and interpreters from different government departments behind an English-Tamil glossary, the first of its kind here, which was launched in 2018. It is available online at tamil.org.sg
Mr Sivanandan now busies himself with part-time translation work for a law enforcement agency and ad-hoc translation for law firms. He also volunteers at a Hindu temple.
“If my health permits, I would like to continue to work for at least another five years,” he says. “I want to contribute. The nation has treated me well. I must give back to the country, the little that I can do.”
Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Reproduced with permission.
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