Senior advocate and constitutional expert K K Venugopal was appointed the 15th attorney general of India on Friday. He will succeed Mukul Rohatgi, who after a three-year stint as the country's top law officer, wanted to return to private practice. Venugopal, who was an additional solicitor general in 1977, returns as a law officer after four decades. Venugopal is very different from most of his 12 predecessors as he is known to be a highly religious man. In the best of Hindu traditions, he donates large sums from his earnings for providing legal education and medical facilities to Kerala tribals and for other charitable purposes. Though he is one of the busiest senior lawyers in the SC, he utilizes vacations to indulge in his hobbies, including trying out new cuisines. "I have trekked to Mansarovar in Tibet and through the Silent Valley in Kerala. I had been to Pyongyang in North Korea. I have snorkeled in the Caribbean, in El Gouna on the Red Sea and in the Maldives. I loved traveling to exotic places like Antarctica, the Galapagos, Lhasa, and the Arctic Circle," he said in a media interview. He is a collector of antiquarian books and possesses a large personal library, including many books published in the 17th and 18th century. Venugopal, who started appearing in the SC in the early 1960s while being based in erstwhile Madras, was designated as a senior advocate by the SC in 1972. Five years later, he was invited by the Janata Party government led by Morarji Desai to become an additional solicitor general which warranted shifting from Madras to Delhi.