THE SECOND YEAR:

"Fear leads to anger,

Anger to hatred,

Hatred to the DARK SIDE"

Remember Yoda? The deceptive appearing teacher of the Jedi (Star Wars)? First day at clinics-that was where we met him: we actually though he was a ward boy with a faded apron and a stetho slung over the left shoulder. Only a couple of years later, when he became of group teacher (in Surgery) did we realize the depth of his knowledge. Besides Surgery, he had a phenomenal knowledge of Microbiology and Pathology. In the OT, he was fast and clean and he spent most of his salary on the less financially fortunate of his patients. All these years he has been consistently the first doctor to arrive at the wards- walking all the way to reach at 8am!

Another filmi element: the shehar ki larki (literarily, "the City Girl")

Accent and English impeccable! When we first saw our American films, we all had a bit of problem with the accent. Imagine a 70+ sickly old gentleman from a village where the mobile is still a source of wonder (even though no network is available), being asked "Apunar ki Pro'm hoise?" (" watsya pro'm {problem} ?"). The look of wonder on his face that day, as if wondering what extra-terrestrial life could assume such humanoid form, would have won on Oscar. But it was (filmi) real life. And even if my female ward-mate had subtitles, I doubt our gentlemanly patient would have been able to read.

Another thing I forgot: the hero usually faints while about to dissect a dead body, right? Wrong (or I wasn't the right hero). The stench of rotting bodies in the dissection hall proved inferior to the boredom of standing in wards and listening to lectures. Prolonged standing at attention in the wards proved to be my downfall: the reason for my fall down!! I recovered after a drink from a not-so-pretty (ie not the filmi type) Sister. Since then, whenever in wards, my teachers always suspect I am a victim of St Vitus' dance (Official pompoverbous name is Sydenham's Chorea).

A Five-half year long Film

THE FIRST YEAR:

The beautiful teacher comes in, holds the hands of the hero, and teaches him some art, isn't it? Well, in my case, it was the art of cutting up someone's hand (dead guy of course) and the hero was the greatest one I could ever have: me!!! But mind you, the teacher was, oops is, (still) beautiful. It's a different thing her husband yelled at us the next day for cutting out all the tendons of the same (unfortunate) hand thinking them to be something else. The couple, my first group teachers, deserves a blog to themselves and please remind write on them later.

A great many of you have seen bones being cut with electric saws in gory films. But believe me, without electric saws, it's a very difficult job- took us almost a week to open up the skull and take out the brain. Gives you the creeps, right? Thinking of graves and grave-robbers? Then just imagine how we felt when we discovered that the brain we took out with so much effort was stolen by another group. *@#*@ ^%%$#&@*!!!!

The hero is always the volunteer, right? I was roll number 2, and roll number 1 being a girl, I was always the hero (read involuntary volunteer) in physiology- be it to donate 2mL blood (little less than the usual amount of blood donation) or be the subject whereon to exhibit jerks. You know the jerks jerk around a rubber hammer and hammer you to jerk the part of the body they hammer on. My "reflexes" were not involuntary as my volunteering but could be considered a defensive reflex against incessant hammering of my then-doctor-to-be-friends!

Of course, how can a film succeed without some sizzling chemistry? Naturally most of the sizzling came from the girls with hot test-tubes being washed under cold water. Often there would be a rush to get a sample of some urine before it ran out. Yup, some samples of urine had eggs mixed in them so that we could test them for proteins!

THE SECOND YEAR:

Coming up next…