July-Aug 1997
For a fresh batch, the Jipmer academic session usually starts on the last Monday of July. I had joined on the 11th of August 4 years ago, which meant that I had missed 2 whole weeks of Anatomy, Physio and Biochem-at the time seemingly insurmountable gaps in knowledge, remedied eventually by hard core last minute cramming, helpful seniors and BD Chaurasia, that saviour of all Medical students in Anatomy. Over time, as one moves through the course and becomes more senior in the process, the terrors of getting ragged and reading that joining as a Baby Junior bring are replaced by the joys of doing the ragging, with reading now having being reduced to a necessary evil in the scheme of things. While it is not true that a medical student has to study ALL the time, it is probably true that they need to study more than anyone else, in more ways than anyone else and with more pressures and lesser rewards than anyone else.
The reading has become a part of life. The ragging and the anticipation of meeting fresh baby juniors, however, straight out of school and into the big bad world, is very real and comes around only once in a year.
August is the "Silly Season" here. It is the month before Spandan, the month of InterClass, Hostel Days and the month where, within the unwritten code of Jipmer ragging, the raggers can have a field day (or month). It is also the month where the Jipmer Students Association (JSA) screen the Jipmer Film Festival.
The Festival lasts for 3 days and consists of non stop movie screenings in Hunter or Bernard Theatre starting from about 5 PM till whenever the last movie finishes, sometimes by 3 AM. It's back to back, tickets are at 5 or 10 bucks, movies are projected onto a big screen and it's a time to catch up on lost movies and sometimes-hard-to-get juniors.
So we shall sit in AirConditioned comfort sans the accompanying booze and nicotine. The theatres are located on the Ground and first floors, at the end of a corridor which starts off at right angles from the Main Hospital entrance. The corridor leading straight on is the OG corridor on the ground floor and the Paeds/ENT/Ophthal corridor on the first floor, with a ward at the end reserved for Surgery.
The ground floor corridor of OG is a long one, starting near the Main entrance and ending at a T Junction with the Psych Ward on the Right and Private Rooms on the Left. However, it's actually more like a crossroads with the Hospital effectively ending here and the corridor, now continuing on, leading to the Hospital kitchen area, complete with the smells of freshly cooked Sambhar. There is a way to Aschoff House from the kitchen, although to get here, one has to leap across a wall and walk through some bushes and trees. Aschoff, of course, is where all the juniors now stay, safe from the terrors of meeting seniors in Lister and Osler, an exercise in isolation from which I was thankfully spared.
These days are small welcome breaks from all the academic tedium, especially for us Final Years, who do not benefit from the respite that Spandan confers to the campus. Everyone will be off except for us and we will have to go to Clinics from 9AM-1PM while the rest of the campus entertains and plays host to the 4000 odd Spandan delegates. This is actually fine and for 2 reasons:
1. Clinic attendance is vital to passing exams. One missed Clinic may mean a missed exam case.
2. The Final Years have organized Spandan etc the previous year.With that, their role in Spandan reaches a zenith and when it's over, they hand over the reigns to the next batch and move on.
The party is over, so to say.
I have seen some of the new juniors and there has been no real time to rag anyone. I have heard of a particularly cocky behaving guy called "Sastri" whom I haven't really met but has been pointed out to me from a distance. He walks with a slight swagger, and thinks he walks the walk and talks the talk. This kind of attitude is fairly common among uninitiated juniors and one of the aims of ragging is to get them back to Mother Earth.
It is therefore, inevitable that I say "Hey bugger" when I see Sastri in Hunter Theatre just before Batman and Robin is due to start.
He saunters up the step to me and says "Yeah, what".
I should have caught him by the collar, dragged him down the stairs and into Lister House, tortured him all night and dumped him back in Aschoff. But I am beyond all this, too tired, too senior and too bored. Sastri, from what I hear, is already a marked man and I suppose the rest of the lions will feed on him at some point.
The movie starts. It's one of the worst I have ever seen. Sheer stupid torture. It's dark but I can make out Sastri sitting on the front benches with some other babies. I'm getting the impression that the movie, horrendous as it is, is just an excuse for people to get closer together in the dark. In any case, around 3 AM, with the movie drawing to a close, I see Sastri suddenly leave, quietly and quickly.
This can mean only one thing. Our man has decided to cut and run, bypassing the hordes of frustrated and bored seniors in the theatre who will undoubtedly make him their entertainment for the rest of the night.
I am bored too. And I know exactly where he's going. I rush out into the corridor and see Sastri walking fast and turning into the OG corridor. This means that he will take the short cut to get to his room in Aschoff, again not risking getting caught by anyone. I won't be able to catch him, what with me being fatter, older and with less able lungs but I have a bike. I jog to my bike, gun it and get to Aschoff House. 5 minutes later, Sastri emerges from the trees in front of Aschoff and stands in shock. His escape to freedom has just been short-circuited.
"Hi bugger, where do you think you're going"
...Silence
Hoping to run away and go to sleep, Sastri is instead met by me, a Final Year student fed up with books, vivas, classes, attendance issues and longing for some entertainment. Sastri and I, however, end up just chatting. He is a bit in awe of how I saw him escape and cut him short and how his jaw dropped when he saw me, standing between him and sleep. It turns out that he's from Bangalore and interested in Neuroscience He wants to do Neurosurgery apparently, preferably in NIMHANS. (My eyes roll here. This guy is about a week old in MBBS). He seems smart which may not be the wisest thing to be in ragging season and I tell him so. Talk veers around to books and he tells me he reads a book called "Stryer" for Biochemistry.
I know this is rubbish since Stryer is unreadable, massive and not even recommended. Maybe he hasn't discovered this yet.
He has made the fatal mistake of expressing an interest in basketball and will be recruited for the team. His classmate, Muneer, has also done the same. Both will spend the first year running laps around the field, doing German drills on the court, fetching water for the big boys and despite being treated like dust, will develop an attitude and swagger that everyone on this team manages to do.
It's now 430 AM. Sastri and I go out for tea in the shacks. I think he's a bit relieved that nothing more came out of his aborted attempt to escape. I feel good too-in Jipmer lingo, a typically "jobless" thing to do. Chasing juniors at 4 in the morning.
The joys of College, Final Year or not.
For a fresh batch, the Jipmer academic session usually starts on the last Monday of July. I had joined on the 11th of August 4 years ago, which meant that I had missed 2 whole weeks of Anatomy, Physio and Biochem-at the time seemingly insurmountable gaps in knowledge, remedied eventually by hard core last minute cramming, helpful seniors and BD Chaurasia, that saviour of all Medical students in Anatomy. Over time, as one moves through the course and becomes more senior in the process, the terrors of getting ragged and reading that joining as a Baby Junior bring are replaced by the joys of doing the ragging, with reading now having being reduced to a necessary evil in the scheme of things. While it is not true that a medical student has to study ALL the time, it is probably true that they need to study more than anyone else, in more ways than anyone else and with more pressures and lesser rewards than anyone else.
The reading has become a part of life. The ragging and the anticipation of meeting fresh baby juniors, however, straight out of school and into the big bad world, is very real and comes around only once in a year.
August is the "Silly Season" here. It is the month before Spandan, the month of InterClass, Hostel Days and the month where, within the unwritten code of Jipmer ragging, the raggers can have a field day (or month). It is also the month where the Jipmer Students Association (JSA) screen the Jipmer Film Festival.
The Festival lasts for 3 days and consists of non stop movie screenings in Hunter or Bernard Theatre starting from about 5 PM till whenever the last movie finishes, sometimes by 3 AM. It's back to back, tickets are at 5 or 10 bucks, movies are projected onto a big screen and it's a time to catch up on lost movies and sometimes-hard-to-get juniors.
So we shall sit in AirConditioned comfort sans the accompanying booze and nicotine. The theatres are located on the Ground and first floors, at the end of a corridor which starts off at right angles from the Main Hospital entrance. The corridor leading straight on is the OG corridor on the ground floor and the Paeds/ENT/Ophthal corridor on the first floor, with a ward at the end reserved for Surgery.
The ground floor corridor of OG is a long one, starting near the Main entrance and ending at a T Junction with the Psych Ward on the Right and Private Rooms on the Left. However, it's actually more like a crossroads with the Hospital effectively ending here and the corridor, now continuing on, leading to the Hospital kitchen area, complete with the smells of freshly cooked Sambhar. There is a way to Aschoff House from the kitchen, although to get here, one has to leap across a wall and walk through some bushes and trees. Aschoff, of course, is where all the juniors now stay, safe from the terrors of meeting seniors in Lister and Osler, an exercise in isolation from which I was thankfully spared.
These days are small welcome breaks from all the academic tedium, especially for us Final Years, who do not benefit from the respite that Spandan confers to the campus. Everyone will be off except for us and we will have to go to Clinics from 9AM-1PM while the rest of the campus entertains and plays host to the 4000 odd Spandan delegates. This is actually fine and for 2 reasons:
1. Clinic attendance is vital to passing exams. One missed Clinic may mean a missed exam case.
2. The Final Years have organized Spandan etc the previous year.With that, their role in Spandan reaches a zenith and when it's over, they hand over the reigns to the next batch and move on.
The party is over, so to say.
I have seen some of the new juniors and there has been no real time to rag anyone. I have heard of a particularly cocky behaving guy called "Sastri" whom I haven't really met but has been pointed out to me from a distance. He walks with a slight swagger, and thinks he walks the walk and talks the talk. This kind of attitude is fairly common among uninitiated juniors and one of the aims of ragging is to get them back to Mother Earth.
It is therefore, inevitable that I say "Hey bugger" when I see Sastri in Hunter Theatre just before Batman and Robin is due to start.
He saunters up the step to me and says "Yeah, what".
I should have caught him by the collar, dragged him down the stairs and into Lister House, tortured him all night and dumped him back in Aschoff. But I am beyond all this, too tired, too senior and too bored. Sastri, from what I hear, is already a marked man and I suppose the rest of the lions will feed on him at some point.
The movie starts. It's one of the worst I have ever seen. Sheer stupid torture. It's dark but I can make out Sastri sitting on the front benches with some other babies. I'm getting the impression that the movie, horrendous as it is, is just an excuse for people to get closer together in the dark. In any case, around 3 AM, with the movie drawing to a close, I see Sastri suddenly leave, quietly and quickly.
This can mean only one thing. Our man has decided to cut and run, bypassing the hordes of frustrated and bored seniors in the theatre who will undoubtedly make him their entertainment for the rest of the night.
I am bored too. And I know exactly where he's going. I rush out into the corridor and see Sastri walking fast and turning into the OG corridor. This means that he will take the short cut to get to his room in Aschoff, again not risking getting caught by anyone. I won't be able to catch him, what with me being fatter, older and with less able lungs but I have a bike. I jog to my bike, gun it and get to Aschoff House. 5 minutes later, Sastri emerges from the trees in front of Aschoff and stands in shock. His escape to freedom has just been short-circuited.
"Hi bugger, where do you think you're going"
...Silence
Hoping to run away and go to sleep, Sastri is instead met by me, a Final Year student fed up with books, vivas, classes, attendance issues and longing for some entertainment. Sastri and I, however, end up just chatting. He is a bit in awe of how I saw him escape and cut him short and how his jaw dropped when he saw me, standing between him and sleep. It turns out that he's from Bangalore and interested in Neuroscience He wants to do Neurosurgery apparently, preferably in NIMHANS. (My eyes roll here. This guy is about a week old in MBBS). He seems smart which may not be the wisest thing to be in ragging season and I tell him so. Talk veers around to books and he tells me he reads a book called "Stryer" for Biochemistry.
I know this is rubbish since Stryer is unreadable, massive and not even recommended. Maybe he hasn't discovered this yet.
He has made the fatal mistake of expressing an interest in basketball and will be recruited for the team. His classmate, Muneer, has also done the same. Both will spend the first year running laps around the field, doing German drills on the court, fetching water for the big boys and despite being treated like dust, will develop an attitude and swagger that everyone on this team manages to do.
It's now 430 AM. Sastri and I go out for tea in the shacks. I think he's a bit relieved that nothing more came out of his aborted attempt to escape. I feel good too-in Jipmer lingo, a typically "jobless" thing to do. Chasing juniors at 4 in the morning.
The joys of College, Final Year or not.
'Sastri' IS a neurosurgeon now. And he did go through NIMHANS.
ReplyDeleteI know. We are in regular touch. He visited melaka also
ReplyDeleteI have been reading all this stuff..only one question..how do u remember so much.so detailed
ReplyDeleteWho this 'n'? And I don't remember the "yeah what"... but it's been good fun since then...
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBlood boils on seeing such juniors and now that INTERACTION is not allowed wit juniors, there are so many such people in the campus. .
ReplyDelete