Reminiscing the Days of Tyranny

Its 6 in the evening...the day’s work is done....and all of a sudden an enormous sense of freedom and pleasant emptiness grips me....a sensation that was scarce known for the last 3 yrs....and indeed for the best part of the last 5 years (since the time I began studies for the PG entrance exams in any real earnest)..... a wonderful sensation of not having deadlines to meet...not having to look forward to a dreadful day at work (for which my preparation would as usual have been abysmal)...more importantly not having to go back and STUDY..... study for presentations , clinical meetings , and the chief tyrant of them all....VILE EXAMINATIONS.

....oh , How I have come to hate examinations..... more than 30 years of this mundane existence....and the only constant that I can remember , since as far back as I can trace memory are those of examinations..... be it in school , trying desperately to remember the number of pillars in the Meenakshi Temple.....or the terrible evening before the Math paper in Plus 2, quite literally mugging up the solved examples in OP Malhotra , in a desperate attempt to achieved that prized 40 %..... on then to the never ending tests and entrance exams.....the innumerable formulae which were so often memorized yet erased at the bat of an eyelid....projectile motion....gas laws....conversions in organic chemistry and so on.

But these were but the gentle outswingers with the new ball compared with the never-ending barrage of bouncers that awaited in Medical College...and add to it a new monster that reared its head and right upto the very latest days has more than once threatened to devour me....the evil Practical and Viva exam. Oh the painful memory of the night before the Anatomy prelim exams and the desperate attempt at a first ever reading of neuroanatomy.......and abandoning the effort at midnight totally flummoxed somewhere between the nuclei and the connections of the corpus stratum....the terror on the eve before the anat viva was something I thought would never be revisited ( how wrong I was).....the vain attempts at trying to make last moment revisions of the muscular attachments on the various bones would be littered my visions of Zag sharpening a particularly ugly looking battle-axe , his face perpetually etched with that unforgettable malicious smirk.
...what then o Kaisers of the miserable night before the forensic prelim....indeed , what pathetic creatures we were to have made a monster out of forensic medicine.....but let it just be mentioned that without a couple of bottles of rum and some ingenius diplomacy; the K2 batch might just have wrought some rather unpleasant history in the annals of AFMC.
Final MBMS brought its own share of terrors.... the night before the first university exam has always been one particularly heinous....never was it more so than before the dreaded medicine paper....I swear, sitting in the library as the last dregs of sunlight faded away to a darkness that drained all hope....there was not one person sitting in that AFMC library that did not wonder what they had been thinking the time they chose to enter this profession.
If medicine theory was the most mentally taxing, there was none more so than the night before the surgery theory paper I..... I remember vividly , no gap after Medicine paper II....and the syllabus , enormous.....sat through the whole evening and night with just 45 mins sleep (from 2-30 to 3-15) and yet a sizeable chunk of the syllabus couldn’t even be touched.
Medicine viva carried its own share of horrors.....it has perhaps till this day the exam I freaked out maximally over on the previous night (Anatomy notwithstanding). Those pages of Hutchison seemed greek and latin that final night and I was all geared up to repeat after six months.
Surprisingly , the levels to which confidence levels drooped prior to the exams , the same never affected me after finishing the paper....that fear was limited only for one exam , the final MBBS surgery practical exam....after quite haplessly messing up the long case and one short case , the dreaded red mark seemed a very real possibility....and the fears were not unjustified , as I escaped by the skin of my teeth with 51 marks on 100.....putting an end to the miseries of MBBS once and for all.
A bit of a breather after that...no threat of exams for a good three years till the monster of post graduation reared its head....the preparation for PG was perhaps the single most dedicated and intensive slog I’ve put in towards any exam in my life...add to it the growing hysteria of a perpetually deflated Puneet Saxena....but they were probably also one of the more memorable and enjoyable preparations....well all they served was to open the veritable gateway to hell.
PG was a black hole...sure , Pune was good....lot of good things happened , but the mental strain during the three years was at times just unbearable.... thesis , presentations , clinical meetings , calls , exams , bum jobs.... there was anger , mistrust , spite and a forever growing frustration at anything and everything that surrounded one. At times you’d lie on your pillow at night simply hoping not to wake up in the morning.
Quite befitting then that it should be crowned by the worst exam of my life and the ony other one where failure loomed as a realistic possibility....the viva was tortuous , ridiculous , senseless.....
Ah well....all is done and dusted. End to residency , exams and tyranny !!!
.... Indeed , now I know how Frodo felt....

“but if of ships I now should sing , what ship would come to me
What ship would ever bear me back across so wide a sea”