Spider Naevi

"Carl... you should decide now what you want to do... see im telling you to take medicine. It 'll be nice since we have only 2 doctors in the family... and it ll be a matter of pride when we see you as a big doctor some day...."

what you read just now is the deep yearning and constant nagging of every... well almost every .... Indian parent out there.... It’s crazy how each Indian parent would love their kids to grow up in a world of drugs, disease and black/grey/maroon/lavender/ you could pretty much add what color you feel like stethoscope around your neck... Mine is the same story as of a few others who have been resistant to their parents hypnotizing... and this is gonna be a long ranting :)

30,000 feet above the Arabian Sea... No... there isn’t any spy plane hovering over or a secret spy being dispatched for duty or a romantic... read as filthy rich... chartered plane flying over the sea so ones lover could have a glimpse of the full moon... which may appear hazy for some cos of the alcohol intake but whatever.... mine was a well... a journey of a spoilt kid into the world of Hippocrates...

Having joined the hostel which still happens to be where I am at was my first time out of my nest formed by Arabian delights of Abu Dhabi from where I had come from to an extremely hot and humid hot bed of.... well in case you didn’t know... Mangalore is known for its malaria :)

15th August... India's Independence Day... So as any shrewd caterer to the hostel means a day of serving unsuspecting newbie’s tasty tasty biriyani rice with fried kabab, raitha and chicken curry the sense of a... no not 5 star.... maybe 3 or 2 or 1 star hotel... the rating highly dependent on how fabulous your life was before you joined the hostel...

The meeting up of batch mates was uneventful. the waiting for your roommate to join... the who will my roommate be... the how early should I get up to use the toilet... the how can I change in front of my roommate... all these doubts came into my mind to be frank... which is does seem silly now but I was young and dumb... the gulf does that to people.. It feeds you and spoils you to the extent of floating in a black hole of no return....

Couldn’t sleep at all that day... don’t know whether it was of the oily food or the adrenaline going around doing its business of getting my hopes up for a new day of class to begin...

4am the alarm rang and yes I did get up... completed my chores and got down to getting ready for breakfast... the breakfast Q formation I feel is the best way for your seniors to get a low down of who's joined the hostel... fortunately I wasn’t caught... despite the weight I was... ahem 100 kilos... not proud of it... but that WAS how much I weighed BEFORE...

Cut scene to first day of class... if my memory serves me right the first class was anatomy... although extremely fascinating to the so called 'lay man' which by the way I find is kind of a derogatory term instituted by doctors who try to act superior to mankind and a frequently used word by the staff...

First year offers 3 subjects : Anatomy, Physiology n Biochemistry

Anatomy as everyone may or may not know is the study of the constituents of the body which can be widely appreciated by the innumerable dissection classes one has to attend in the afternoon after being fed improperly cooked fish curry and then led to a formalin drenched room... trust me the experience is not worth it... then there is the 640 muscles... their every origin, insertion, nerve supply and action and of course the applied anatomy...

I remember one particular dissection where after having completely ravaged the pancreas in search for a particular duct said he couldn’t find it... Oh ya I forgot another interesting note about formalin... this solvent invented to preserve human parts is most easily the most offending thing available to ones nose and skin alike... the days we all used to return to hostel and have dinner with our hands still smelling of formalin despite repeated washes thereby resulting in all of us having wrinkled hands...

The dissection hall we have is pretty big... which means tat sometimes some mischief is possible but only by those who dare cos the staff of anatomy are more to feared off rather than the fathers who run the place... we all used to sit at our designated tables according to our roll numbers and await for the gang to arrive... once they entered it was just like a scene from the movies preferably kaante where u have these big dudes who no one would dare mess with... and yes after they sat down the routine roll call... and then they used to begin...