Lights out

 

In this season of love many couples tend to go out for candle light dinners. But only few lucky people get to experience something called a Candlelight Lunch. But as a medico one gets to experience many strange things- be it watching dead people’s skulls being cracked open during autopsy or a candlelight lunch at the college canteen.

P.C- Shuvojyoti Rakshit

Nothing pisses you off more in the morning than when you just put all the spices in to cook your breakfast noodles and then you cannot turn on your electric kettle because of a sudden power cut. Initially you think it’s a mistake and power will come back soon. But 9 hours later you realized that it was a pretty long ‘soon’. If one is lucky enough then one gets a bed near the window in hostel. However not everyone is as blessed and for them a sudden power cut means immediate sunset and a pitch-dark night. So, one is left with no other option but to remember the traditional Indian Gurukuls and go and sit under a tree to read the never-ending syllabus. But unlike traditional Indian Gurukuls where you just had to listen to your Gurus, in modern medicine, practical examination means going through an outrageous number of long pdfs the day before. If you don’t have access to practical pdfs, you are a goner. Some sensible people put their phone on charge right when the charge goes down to fifty percent, but there are some other people who like to challenge their phones: “How long can you live without charge?” For such people power cuts bring a different challenge, that is, to make the best and the most judicious use of the 20 per cent charge on their phones. You need to answer phone calls, go through pdfs, go online and reply to texts throughout the day, all on 20 per cent charge. It is needless to say this it is impossible.

Hence one gets to have the wonderful experience of sitting at a General surgery ward where thankfully power supply is not cut off and charge her phone sitting on a random patient’s bed while being stared at by random PGTs and interns who intermittently come to investigate why on earth a strange girl is studying Community medicine sitting on a patient’s bed at a General Surgery ward on a Sunday afternoon. But desperate times call for desperate measures. And if you are foolish enough to put up a social media update about it you receive a string of “Get wells soon” texts from your friends who assume that you are in for an emergency appendicectomy or something. This is followed by frantic calls from your worried brother who ends up scolding you when he realizes that it was nothing but a prank on your part. Again, it is what it is.

However, the best part is to go to the washroom which seem right out of a horror movie alone, and suppressing the urge to sing “Mere dholna” to avoid scaring yourself and others!

If anyone is wondering what happened to the breakfast noodles, let me tell you that it remained soaked in spices and water all day long and at the end of the day when the cook discovered it, she was confused as to how the noodles got totally cooked even without fire. But the cook did not know that soaking up water and softening is not the same as getting cooked as far as noodles are concerned, so she had to throw away her beloved noodles because they turned out to be unpalatable.