The Final MBBS curriculum was a hydra-headed beast. Five major subjects, each demanding a different variety of stamina — Medicine with Paediatrics, Dermatology, and Psychiatry trailing in her royal wake; Surgery with Orthopaedics and ENT tucked under its wing; Obstetrics and Gynaecology; Ophthalmology; and the often-neglected stepchild of the whole enterprise, Preventive and Social Medicine, which we called PSM with the casual contempt that only the young and ignorant can manage.

But a medical college is not built on syllabi. It is built on teachers.

In the seventies, Government Medical College, Nagpur was not merely an institution. It was a galaxy of stars — men and women of formidable calibre, frighteningly disciplined, and completely devoted to the hospital in a way that people born into a later era of private clinics and consulting fees will find almost impossible to imagine. They did not treat teaching as a job. They treated it as a duty, and the distinction mattered more than any salary scale could reflect.

They were full-time. No professor rushed through a lecture because an afternoon appointment was waiting across town. Their world began at the college gate and ended in the wards. That single-mindedness gave them a moral authority that we did not question and could not have dismantled even if we had tried. We simply obeyed, learnt, and made every effort not to look foolish.

***

Bhande Plot: Our ‘Posting’ and Our Picnic

PSM arrived in final year, perhaps to remind us that India did not live only in wards and operation theatres. We were posted to the Urban Health Centre at Bhande Plot, Bapunagar — barely three kilometres from the college. Each student had to ‘adopt’ five families, monitor their health, understand their living conditions, and function as a kind of primary doctor who was in practice still several examinations away from the right to that title. Usually Dr. Khobragade accompanied us, translating the community into something our ward-trained eyes could understand.

The diseases of the seventies were different, too. Diabetes and hypertension had not yet become the daily background noise of Indian medicine. Instead, we encountered the older enemies — polio, tetanus, rabies, diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis, leprosy. Scabies was everywhere, persistent and unglamorous. Jaundice came and went like a seasonal visitor, unremarkable to the families it afflicted.

These visits should have made us humble. They should have taught us that the real India lived not in the teaching hospital’s gleaming corridors but in these lanes, in cramped rooms where five people shared a single charpoy and the water supply was a shared tap that ran for two hours a day.

But we were twenty.

For us, Bhande Plot was not a lesson in social medicine. It was a sanctioned escape from the suffocation of college — an excuse to walk in the open air, talking and laughing, with the sun on our faces and no senior registrar to impress. I confess I do not now remember the advice I gave those five families, or whether anything I said made a lasting difference to a single one of them. Public health felt slow and ordinary, while the wards felt urgent and heroic. We preferred heroic. We were twenty.

Only later, much later, did I understand that we had been walking through the very heart of Indian healthcare — and calling it a picnic.

***

The PSM Paper: An Ambush

Our Final MBBS examination opened with PSM, which we had prepared for with the casual confidence of soldiers expecting a small, manageable skirmish.

Then the question paper arrived.

The mood in the hall changed within minutes. The questions were obscure, oddly specific, and designed with what felt like a personal vendetta against anything we had actually studied. They came at angles we had not anticipated. They demanded precision about things we had treated as background reading — the kind of facts one files away under ‘probably not important.’ We wrote what we could, driven by panic and momentum, filling pages with confident-sounding sentences whose foundations were considerably less confident than their tone suggested.

We walked out stunned. Back at the hostel, the atmosphere was funereal. The usual post-examination chatter — the relief, the post-mortem, the cheerful argument about whether answer B or answer C was correct — had entirely vanished. From the girls’ hostel, we heard someone crying. Then more than one. The sound travelled across the campus in the still evening air and sat in our chests like something solid.

That evening, we gathered in the common room in what amounted to a council of war, dressed in pyjamas. We did not study. We consoled. We reassured one another. We made a pact, unspoken but understood: one bad paper cannot ruin five years. And without resorting to any lofty language, we discovered something that no curriculum had formally taught us — that the first duty of a doctor is to offer hope, even when he has none himself to spare.

The remaining papers passed in a blur of nervous energy, fractured sleep, and the peculiar discipline that comes from having no alternative to continuing. Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics. We wrote, revised, drank too much tea, slept in fragments, woke anxious at four in the morning, and wrote again. When the last bell rang and the last answer book was collected, relief arrived not as a thought but as a physical sensation — something in the muscles, something behind the eyes.

***

Two Practicals and a Small Miracle

Theory tests memory. Practicals test nerve — and the difference, when you are standing at a patient’s bedside with two senior examiners watching your hands, is not a small one.

Medicine was my sanctuary. I had loved its logic from the beginning — the detective work of it, the satisfaction when a constellation of signs resolves into a diagnosis that clicks into place like a key in a lock. My long case was Malabsorption Syndrome. My examiners were Dr. S.M. Patil and Dr. Mrs. Lata Patil, both strict, both fair, and both entirely capable of detecting uncertainty at twenty paces.

But at the bedside, something steadied inside me. The history flowed without hesitation. The signs made sense, each one pointing in the same direction. The differential diagnosis lined up in order. Even the viva questions, which can ambush you in unexpected directions, arrived gently that day. I walked out of the examination hall feeling lighter than I had felt in weeks, as though a physical weight had been lifted from somewhere behind my sternum.

I scored 141 out of 200 — a distinction-level score that would later, though I did not know it yet, open the door to my MD.

Obstetrics and Gynaecology was an entirely different story.

I had never been comfortable with the mechanics of labour. The instruments terrified me — the forceps with their confident curves, the entire choreography of a managed delivery that more experienced hands performed with such apparent ease. I still remembered, with a clarity that discomfort preserves better than pleasure, a labour room posting in which I had been asked to conduct a delivery. My hands shook so badly that the slippery newborn almost slid entirely out of my grasp. A nurse caught the baby with reflexes faster than my career had yet managed to develop.

I entered the Obstetrics and Gynaecology practical carrying all of that history, and considerably more dread than I was showing.

And then, as if the gods of examination halls had decided to be merciful for once, I received a case of Placenta Praevia — a textbook diagnosis, heavy on conceptual understanding and blessedly light on the kind of mechanical prowess that had always defeated me. No confusing rotations. No forceps. No instruments to fumble with under the quiet, watchful gaze of a superior.

I spoke with a confidence I did not entirely feel. I explained antepartum haemorrhage, I described the danger signs with appropriate gravity, and I set out clearly why Caesarean section would be the necessary management. The examiners — Dr. Mrs. Dubey and Dr. Sule — listened with the particular attentiveness of people who have heard every version of this explanation and are deciding whether this one is genuinely understood or merely memorised.

When the marks arrived, I looked at the number for rather longer than was strictly necessary.

141 out of 200. Again.

I still call it a miracle, plain and simple, and I see no reason to revise that assessment.

***

The Notice Board

Six weeks after the last paper, the results were pinned to the notice board. A crowd gathered the way crowds always gathered around that board — pushing, craning, some calling out numbers, somebody laughing too loudly, somebody else going very quiet in the particular way that means the news is not good.

I found my roll number.

1031 out of 1600. Sixty-four point four per cent.

In the era of inflated marks and carefully curated academic profiles, it may not look extraordinary. But in those rigorous halls of Government Medical College, Nagpur — where the examiners signed their names to your competence and meant it — it felt like a triumph. I had cleared Medicine theory with 59 and practicals with 62. My examiners — Dr. Mohgaonkar, Dr. Bharaswadkar, Dr. Doifode, Dr. Dekate, and the Patils — had looked at what I knew and decided it was sufficient. That decision, I understood even then, was not a formality.

I looked at the mark sheet for a long time. Not because I needed to read it again. But because I wanted to fix it, to be certain it was real and not some examination-season hallucination born of too little sleep and too much anxiety.

A deep, quiet peace settled somewhere in the chest.

I had done it.

I was no longer a student. I was Dr. S.P. Kalantri.

And in those simpler times — before the feverish race for postgraduate seats began before the finish line was even in sight, before every result became a stepping stone to the next competition rather than an achievement in its own right — we were content. We had climbed the mountain. We had not yet started looking for the next one.

The view, for a moment, was beautiful. And we were young enough to know it.