Learning the Language

August 1993

While the terms and the language of Anatomy are flying way over my head, I start to pick up an entirely different language altogether-The Language of Jipmer.
Soon, I know that I am a bastard, a bugger and an asshole.
This is not personal, I quickly realize, as it dawns on me that everyone in Jipmer is a combination of these three things at all times. The language, or lingo that I hear all the time are as follows:


A) Where the people are from:
1) Tambis-From Tamil Nadu
2) Gults-From Andhra.
3) Kanjis-From Kerala

4) Bongs-From Bengal. (All Bengalis are Bongs but only 2 people are actually called "Bong", both senior. Out of the 2, the Junior Bong is the one whom I met on the first night)

5) Bihari-Self Explanatory. I am a Bihari too, having being born in Patna, but I have been told that I don't speak like one. This is supposed to be some sort of compliment.

The above terms are never used in a derogatory sense. This is just where the people are from.

B) Special Terms

1) EP- is usually reserved for guys who take classes and give all the marks to the girls and ask all the questions in class to only the boys, who usually know nothing. It stands for "Enlarged Prostate" though I'm unable to see a connection. Bad marks in exams are always because they were marked by an EP. 

2) Bastard-Anyone at all. Casual greeting. Day Scholars are also called Bastards because they usually escape ragging and get great marks in the first few tests. 

3) Asshole-As Above.

Points 2 and 3 above are are also used to refer to people who actually do a lot of studying and get good marks. 

4) Baby Juniors-The new batch , which is us. 

5) Macha or Machi- Another casual greeting, usually between friends.  

6) Bugger-

Used usually as a greeting...."Hey Bugger, come here you Bastard", or "Hey Bugger, why the fu** did you puke all over my bed last night?" and such variations, which is all I hear all day and all night. 

Bugger can be a noun but also a verb or less commonly, an adjective, as in " I got buggered today man". "Bugger" is therefore a very important word useful in any situation.
Juniors get buggered by seniors, seniors get buggered by anything one gets buggered by, bathroom doors are buggered if they don't shut properly, food (or grub, in lingo terms) in the mess is always buggered. One can get buggered at any time, in class, in the wards, in campus, outside campus but usually by someone senior to you.
I almost feel that "Bugger" defines Jipmer Lingo. 

7) "Screwed my happiness" -A more descriptive alternative to "buggery".
8) Grub-Means the food served in the mess. "Bugger, had grub"? etc. Food elsewhere, as in the restaurants and joints in town is not grub.
9) Mugging and Reading-Very commonly used, and ragging is often cut short because a senior has to read or mug. When exams are not that close (about one week or more away), one "reads". Get a bit closer and it becomes "mugging". People who mug and read with no exams in sight are either irrelevant or simply "bastards" or "assholes".  When the exam is the next morning and one hasn't done too much about it, one "mugs one's ba**s off".
10) Night Out-A usual state of affairs where the entire syllabus needs to be covered in one long marathon session all night. The session is usually punctuated by trips to the "shacks".
11) Psyched out-Usually reserved for high stress situations in or just before exams. Usually when one hasn't read or mugged enough. It does not mean "excited"-quite the opposite.
12) Shitting bricks-Similar to "psyched out". Therefore, one mugs (or not), gets psyched out and then shits bricks, mostly after a night out.
13) Cockroach: A sputtering, crowded, cramped 3 wheel contraption capable of holding as many people as can safely hang on. Moves at 5 km per hour and takes people from campus to town.

A sample conversation, an example of many that I've heard so far might therefore go like this: 

A has just arrived back in the hostel after an Anatomy test disaster (which is a universal phenomenon). A meets B, a senior, or a classmate who bunked the test.

A: Hey bastard

B: Oye Asshole ( or anything other similar word). Passed or failed?

A: I got screwed man. Total buggery.  

B: Who came for your viva? 

A: So and So

B: Him? He's an EP of the highest order. 

 Silence for a few minutes while both of us get some water from the cooler.

B: Chal, lets go booze. 

A: Ok, where. 

About half an hour deciding on the "where", A and B disappear and life is normal again.

C) Hostels:

1) Lister and Osler House-Boy's hostels. The 2 hostels face each other across the Inter-Hostel Road.
2) Curie House-Girl's Hostel, located opposite Lister House. Occupants of Lister and Osler are often found here, waiting for their counterparts.
3) Aschoff House-Another hostel located next to a road called "Lover's Lane". Interns live here and I'm too scared to visit.
4) Harvey House-The PostGrad Hostel. The residents here are apparently too senior to bother us but who wants to find out.  I am told that the mess fridge officially keeps beers. This place is a no-go for Baby Juniors unless one is a masochist.

D) Hostel Parts:

1) Floor-There are 4 floors in Lister and Osler. Ground to Top. Each is a long corridor with a staircase running up near either end. 5 double rooms are on either end and in the middle are 13 single rooms. The hostel rooms start from "7" and go upto "31" numbered 107 or 331 etc.
2) Annexe-Each hostel has a smaller similar building perpendicular to the main hostel. The rooms here are all double, numbered from 1 to 6, as in 101 or 406 etc.
3)Wing-Each collection of rooms,double or single, is a wing. Parties are either floor parties or wing parties or just random parties, usually in rooms or the rooftops.

4) Top-Top floor of any hostel. As in "Lister Top" etc. It's never 3rd floor, ever.

5) Common, as in "Lister Common etc". Movies are screened here every weekend. The Common Room has chairs and a TV set. The movies are followed by a "Space Thriller" or a "Gorimedu Sinusitis". These movies are the climax of the evening. The volume is turned down a bit for these.

E) Places in and around the campus

1) Shacks-A collection of small shops selling snacks and drinks (no alcohol) 24 hours. There are a few of these located right outside the campus across the road from the main gate. They are frequented by patients and Jipmerites. Buses to Chennai or elsewhere often pick up passengers by the roadside here. 

Shacks consist of a shop selling vadas and the like, a medicine shop, 2 "Casinos"  and another one which makes great coffee.

I get the feeling that Jipmer would lose its character without these shacks. They provide tea, coffee, food and a place to sit and chat and waste time, ALL the time. They almost never shut down. They are ideal places to rag, get ragged, recuperate after work, get ready for work, or waste time in between work. 

2) STD Booths-There are 2 STD booths from where one can call home. They are called "Raj" and "Grace", named after their owners presumably. There are huge queues here on occassion and timing is everything. This should not be confused with places where one might get an actual STD. Those exist too, apparently.

3) Town-The city, starting about 2 km down the road and marked by a junction or for Jipmerites, the "Muruga crossing". Town is for escaping from mess grub, a movie or anything else. For baby juniors like myself, trips to town are not possible in the first few days.
4) Lover's Lane-A stretch of road with no lights, good for lovers or for spotting them behind bushes from behind different bushes.
5) Stadium-A huge field with no grass next to Lister House. It's covered by the red clay that is all over Pondy. Sports events in Spandan will be held here. 

F) Students and Associations:

1) Baby Juniors-As above.

2) FSA-Foreign Students Association...We have students from Maldives,Malaysia etc. 

3) HSA-Himalaya Students Association, which includes students from the North East.

4) JSA-Jipmer Students Associaltion. This is the body that organizes Spandan, InterClass etc and is basically the whipping post for everyone. It consists solely of students from the batch 3 years in (Vikrant's batch). It consists of a President, a Speaker (who often takes his job too literally) and Secretaries of various Committees. Shom is the Speaker of the current JSA.

I have had the pleasure of attending one such JSA meeting where there was much shouting, much debating and for me, a complete torture because I had to be there as a Baby Junior and I had no clue or interest in what was going on. And I was getting ragged at the same time. Shom, as the Speaker, was doing plenty of speaking.

A Special mention on On the Use of Tones in Lingo:

Reading the above, one might think that all we ever say is "Bastard",  "Asshole" and "Bugger". This is not entirely true. While some normal words have their place in conversation, the TONE with which one says words like "Bastard" carries a lot of importance and varies according to context.

The word "Bastard" for example, can be used in various ways.
1) Flat tone-No inflection.
You walk across to someone and just say "Hi Bastard". Nothing is happening so it's just a normal greeting.
2) Rising tone-(BaasTurrrd, with the Turrd part ending on a higher note than the Baas part).
This is sometimes used when one sees classmates after vacations or when someone unexpectedly passes an exam.
"Hey BaasTurrd, I passed/failed it!! Yippeeee"...etc
3) Falling tone-(BaasTd, the T and d are very closely spoken, with no emphasis).
Serious situations, eg, booze has run out and it's 1 AM. "Hey BaasTd, the booze is over man". Or when it's discovered that a particularly nasty examiner is coming for University Exams. So with a resigned face, " Hey BaasTd, B is coming and we're all going to get screwed.
4) Falling and Rising- (BaasTurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd). The tone is lowest at the "S" in Baas. Denotes that someone has buggered somebody else and the latter has found out.
At this point, the 1 point agenda of the latter was to "Screw the Happiness" of the former.
Common situations include (but arenot limited to):
  -Eating other people's food
  -Losing notes or Lab Records
  -Losing someone's bike keys
  -Losing your own bike or room keys
  -Finishing someone's last cigarrete without permission. This, I gather is a CARDINAL sin.

Ragging, therefore has an enormously useful purpose. Apart from getting to know the seniors, I am now slowly talking in Lingo. Slowly, but surely, I am becoming a true blue Jipmerite.