Dear Fiends! We are the lucky ones to still be around for the 45th reunion of our Batch.
Time has literally flown. On 17th July 1978 when we entered the portals of CMC, the five and a half years for our course, seemed like infinity to me. A senior doctor saar of the ’73 batch put it in perspective, “Dei! When I joined in first year you were in 7th standard!”
Those who have read my blog, and for those who haven’t, on the perception of time.
I had postulated that perception of the length of time is inversely proportional to your age!
At 1 year a year represented your entire life, at 5 years it was 1/5th of your life. As you age that fraction shrinks as the denominator increases, now it’s 1/62 for most of us. Our perception of a year has proportionately shortened.
I have driven down to Bangalore from Calcutta with the King of Calcutta Bong Biswas and his beautiful wife Neena.
We broke journey in Horsley Hills trying to recreate the nostalgia of our class retreats.
The place is unrecognizable with tourist and trash but still retains some of the old world charm of a British hillstation.
We could not locate our retreat centre apparently it does not exist anymore. We searched for the iconic rocks on which most of our old pictures are taken but it was futile.
Bangalore also brings back nostalgic memories of 1976, when our family had driven down in our family Ambassador. That was my first trip south and exposure to the language and culture. Road trips then were a different story then. The cars were not air conditioned and there were limited amenities on the highway.
When we reached Bangalore we were surprised with the cool climate. There were no fans in the place where we stayed, it was considered too fancy!
We were quite amused that a ubiquitous road like Mahatma Gandhi road found in every town in India, was given a modern spin and called MG road! It removed the image of and a bent doddering old man with his cane and instead conjured an image of a modern happening place. Appropriate since MG road was the happening place in Bangalore.
At that time all along MG road there were posters advertising the latest hit Kannada movie, starring the superstar of Kannada movies, Dr. Raj Kumar. The story was based on Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’ and had an apt titled,
‘Bahadur Gandu’.
In Hindi, gandu would loosely translate to an asshole and bahadur means brave. It is logical that a man has to be brave and an Asshole to attempt to tame a shrew, invariably his wife.
While on the subject, I remember the old joke about how all the parts of the body fought for the position of the Boss. The brain the ears, eyes, mouth and nose staked their claim. The anal sphincter aka the asshole also threw his hat in the ring. The others laughed at the anal sphincter who sulked and refused to function. The brain became feverish, the ears began ringing, the eyes saw blurred and the mouth could not eat. They all appealed to the brain, “Let the asshole be the Boss!”.
And it came to pass that the asshole became the Boss.
All the parts of the body functioned perfectly and the asshole did nothing at all, except pass out a lot of shit. The moral of the story is “You don’t have to be a brain to be the Boss, being an asshole is sufficient”.
I recollect a quote by Dean Martin “At my age the biggest satisfaction is having a decent crap in the morning”.
I am sure many of us would concur.
In our vast country with various languages one word may be inoccous in one language maybe noxious in another. For example imagine my hard core Malayali mother in law’s indignation when she knock on a door and the occupants told her, “Kundi khole ke andar aa jao”.
After I completed my MS, I forayed into private practice by necessity. My mission hospital paid peanuts and I had a family to support.
Being a bottom feeder at that time, I was left with, what else? The bottom! All the anal fissures, haemorrhoids, fistulas and perianal abscesses not to forget the fecal impactions came to me. This region people higher up in food chain would not touch with a barge pole because they had the thyroids, abdomens, appendices, hernias, hydroceles and of course the breasts.
Like the motto of a gynaecologist is “Always at your cervix!” mine was “Always at your a____e”, you guessed it right.
I went about my job in earnest and became good at it, remembering the famous quote by Bailey and Love, “If you don’t put your finger in, you will put your foot in.” This must have been told to us ad nauseum during our MBBS.
There were anecdotal stories of the great Puli and his penchant for p.r.s.
A Princess from the Royal family of Nepal admitted in M ward with pyrexia of unknown origin. After taking an extensive history and doing a thorough examination, Puli did his famous p.r. and Eureka! He found a perianal abcess, which was the cause of the fever.
When we were in CMC I remember most of the patients with perianal problems were from across the border Andhra Pradesh. It was attributed to the fiery Andhra food.
In Nagpur we have our own very fiery ‘Saoji cusine’, which is supposed to beat Andhra cooking hands down in terms of conflagration. People have devised an informal grading system for the degree of heat.
Grade 1. Mouth on fire.
Grade 2. Stomach on fire.
Grade 3. Morning after rear end is on fire.
A young adventurous Vellaikara white man visited Nagpur and being either bahadur or foolhardy, he decided to experiment with Saoji cusine.
The moment he took a bite his face turned crimson and he opened his mouth and stuck his tongue out and fanned it with his hand. He gulped down at least a gallon of water and gripped his abdomen complaining of burning. Morning after when he sat on the water closet he passed few hard lumps followed by intense burning. By his description the pain was like passing out a barbed wire! He reached for the toilet paper to wipe himself but the rough paper behaved like an abrasive, making matters worse. He then spotted the hygienic shower and aimed it at the afflicted area. That was an epiphany moment, he realized why Indians wash it rather than wipe it!
He visited me the next day still complaining of a persistent burning. I asked him to strip and lie down in the left lateral position with his right leg flexed. First thing I noticed was a realistic lipstick mark tattooed on his right gluteal region, which seemed to imply either “kiss my ass!” or “my ass has already been kissed”.
On digital examination I felt button hole like abrasion in perianal region, diagnostic of a fissure in ano. He was send off with a prescription of smooth muscle dilators, laxatives and soothing sitz baths.
On the subject of wiping there is the story of a senior anaesthetist in CMC being reprimanded by a white theatre nurse for resting his backside against the shelf containing the autoclaved drums.
“Kindly remove your unsterile backside from my sterile equipment” was her reprimand.
The anaesthetist not short on wit retorted, “Sister we wash it and don’t wipe it”.
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