ORDER :

This judgment needs to be prefaced with what more than a century ago, a great Judge of US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in TOWNE vs. EISNER, 245 U.S. 418 (1918) had observed :

“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used..”.

The difficulty which the petitioner is put to arose because of BDA’s employment of a wrong English word namely, ‘donation’ in a lease transaction and the same having been literally construed by the statutory auditing party, the concession given to the lessee was sought to be revoked.

2. The Petitioner, a private Trust registered under the provisions of Indian Trusts Act, 1882 is grieving before the Writ Court against the BDA’s Letter dated 19.11.2014 (Annexure-M) whereby it is asked to pay back a sum of Rs.50 Lakh on the ground that such a ‘donation’ could not have been made by the BDA -an authority constituted under the Bangalore Development Authority Act, 1976 whilst renewing lease of the sites in question.

3. The impugned letter reads as under:

4. Learned counsel for the Petitioner vehemently argues