Saturday, February 3, 2007

Reminiscence 2

This is a continuation from my previous post.

On the D day, landed up in front of the imposing college building admission letter in hand, parents in tow. It was a proper zoo with people standing in a line moving from table to table, feeding the creatures assorted certificates and various fees. Behind certain tables sat dreadful creatures referred to as house surgeons who sized us up and made occasional circles around names in a copy of the admission list which they had somehow managed to acquire.

The admission formalities completed, the principal gave his 'you are the best of the best' speech, no doubt under the influence of watching too many American commando movies, followed by assignment of hostels. One guy was mistakenly assigned to a ladies hostel leading to queries of how one may accomplish that!
However the list was soon corrected much to our disappointment!

With our first night in the hostel we became acquainted with the hierarchy of medical student life

House surgeon/intern - can leap tall buildings in a single bound
Final year - can clear medium buildings with a running start and favorable winds
Third years - can scale a compound wall
Second year - can jump over puddles
First years - can crawl on fours

The first couple of days were rather hectic, with the seniors aka chettanmar conducting Interviews late in to the night, displaying extreme interest in our prior love life, our knowledge of swear words, porn, human anatomy, politics and so on. If our knowledge was found to be lacking in any sphere they were only too happy to augment it from there own extensive database. Needless to say, those early sessions were extremely informative and we soon got to refer to seniors with various colorful epithets among ourselves. The chettanmar however displayed their superior cunningness by getting a short fellow from amongst themselves to pretend to be a late admission and come to us. our conversation soon turned to ragging and the fellow asked in an oh-so-innocent voice "how are the seniors here?" one guy unable to curb his enthusiasm blurted out " they are all f***ing b*****ds!" the rest as they say, was history. I'll just add that the fellow was seen coming for dinner at the mess with his underwear on his head!

On the whole I'll add, to the credit of my seniors, they exercised restraint, there was almost no physical violence, or exposure to various drugs, the abuse of which we'd assumed would have been widespread on the campus. And it was a great way to get friendly with the chettans and broke the ice with our own batch mates!