MEMORIES from an old-timer @ CDC

Living thousands of kilometres away from home for the first time in your life is kind of funny yet scary if you think of it now. After years of being away from Ludhiana I had to brush away the cobwebs that had settled around my hippocampus...to chip away at the chicklet keys on my laptop while my dog Snoopy lies at my feet wondering what this human is upto at this hour of the night instead of going off to sleep.

Post 12th standard   ....After wading through multitudes of entrance exams those of us who were lucky enough to make it through the CMC entrance exam landed up at Ludhiana Railway station on a fine July morning.  Ludhiana railway station is not what one would call a world class station. As you step out of the air conditioned compartment of Shatabdi Train from New Delhi railway station one is greated by the horrible stench of urine from the tracks and the unknown language. Transpositioning ourselves from various parts of India to Ludhiana was indeed a culture shock to many. Ludhiana was a concrete jungle especially the Old Ludhiana where we spent years and years mastering the art of Dentistry (and love for some of us). We waded in through dirty puddles for our first day at college for admissions to be greeted by a bunch of seniors waiting eagerly to welcome us to the CDC fold (pun intended). In our days it was fondly called interaction. The boys had to get a special hair cut called the CMC cut which was nothing but a modified version of almost shaving your entire hair off leaving maybe 0.5 mm of hair standing. Even though it was painful to part with your hair and sparse facial hairs that sprouted around your upper lip suddenly one fine evening...but the wind which blew across tickled and massaged your hair so nicely after the hair cut that you forgot about your hair loss eventually. The CMC hair cut was compulsory for freshers of all the colleges...i.e. MBBS, BDS and the allied courses. One also had to do an almost 90 degree bow (CMC yoga style) in front of your seniors. Being so naive, one almost bowed in front of all the people who crossed in front of you, as you would not know who your senior was and who your teacher. The girls too were not spared. They had to wear a tricolour combination of duppata, salwar and kameez with their hair well oiled with coconut oil dripping down the hair. Parachute Oil Company must have made a killing during the admission season in CMC, Ludhiana.

Interaction nites had one or two staffs to oversee the event and to make sure that things never got out of hand and it never did. There was no North – South divide during interaction. The poor freshers either in groups or singly were made to enact or do something funny mostly. “Oye Mallu idar aa” was the most common phrase heard those nights, because 50 % of the admissions were from the land of coconuts.  Almost 99.9% of us took it in a positive sense and to tell you the truth we would have made some of our best friends with seniors who interacted with us the most. Some cried ,some laughed... but in the end we all came back to our rooms and laughed our asses off thinking about it. The final day of interaction was followed by a fresher’s nite which was then followed by ritual of initiation into the CDC family. The initiation ceremony was a night to remember. After being booed off stage by seniors despite having performed some nice item on stage, all the freshers had to assemble in the lawn and take an oath of servitude and allegiance to CDC. Before the oath ceremony was a La Tomatina style initiation ceremony where rotten eggs and tomatoes (!!!) were liberally smashed on the well oiled hairs of the CDC kudiyas and bald heads of the CDC  mundas. You literally smelled like an rotten egg farm run over by road roller that night and probably one had to dip oneself in a tub of formalin to get the smell of the eggs out. One wore the

worst clothes that day (Except the poor chaps who didn’t know about the ceremony after the fresher’s).But I guess the girls were luckier than us boys because they got a free hair conditioning done without having to go to the beauty salons.

First year was a fun filled year. Anatomy classes were a riot ...we BDS students had to occupy the back rows of the Anat Hall on the first floor of the Basic Sciences Block... We had our then HOD of Anat’s shrill voice shouting from the wells down somewhere in the front...”BEDEYES batche kuch padthe nahin“....which had us snickering at the back...because what did the femoral artery or the gluteas maximus have to do with a bunch of 40 budding dentists. The dark hours of anat lectures with the blinds drawn were spent copying practical notes of other classes...or sleeping off the tiredness of the previous nights galavanting.  D Hall is where we got to know that human anatomy was indeed perplexing and that Grays Anatomy is actually a book and not a series on Star World....because even after a year of rigorous anatomy classes some of us still identified the testicles as sub mandibular salivary glands and lungs were mistaken for liver. Some of us spent hours hunting for natural teeth in the Caddies as we were told by our seniors that we needed natural teeth for our Oral Anat classes. I remember an incident when my friend Dr X found a smiling Caddie with a set of smiling sparkles in his mouth. Dr X (now a renowned implantologist somewhere in the wilderness of America) managed to procure some instruments from somewhere and managed to extract a sparking set of DENTURES!!!! (which mind you...he cleaned nicely with a pair of brushes and was kept on display in his room throughout his days @CDC. Biochem under then HOD were taken seriously though...so I could not remember anything specifically except that we had a few cute post grad staffs whose classes we never missed. Physiology classes were spent sleeping again mostly except in the labs where you poked your friend to see if he actually had RBC’s and WBC’s in his blood. Hours and hours were spent in the Prosthetic Lab upstairs mixing POP to make blocks and models. Under the able guidance of Dr Kukrejas’ we managed to wade through Dental Materials.

Second year hours were spent over the lathes in Prosthetic lab grinding away at hundreds of teeth extracted from some poor soul’s mouth so that we could stick the cross sections in our books. I still remember the stench of burnt tooth which hung to our body for hours even after leaving the lab. Hundreds of finger tips lost their skin trying to get feather thin slices of tooth sections. Microbiology classes taught us that SDA was Sabouraud dextrose agar and not Sevenths Day Adventists and of course how can one forget the practical classes one spent searching through someones poop to see if they had helminthic ova in it. Pharmacology was so volatile like the gases they taught us used for General Anaesthesia. It was now the turn of the girls in the class to go googoogaga over Dr Sanjay Chand, a very talented Pharmac staff. Pathology classes were just like the Anat class. .hope you got the point.

With third year came medicine and surgery clinics. Surgery clinics were fun because that was where the maximum proxy attendance cards were signed by our gracious surgery PGs.  Camps by the Community Dentistry department was where we learnt the art of dentistry for the first time. Under the able guidance of our demos and interns we extracted the tooth of many a poor chap who thought that we were some Bada Doctor Sahab from Ludhiana, taking impressions of poor old uncles and aunties who turned up outside our faithful camp van. Oral Pathology practical  classes where in we were shown slides of some oral lesions and all that we could make out was that the gross picture when you looked at with your naked eye and seemed liked the map of Uganda was the slide for

squamous cell CA..while the one that looked like Italy was leukoplakia. ..etc. Sorry Dr GK ...I guess oral pathology slides are stilled studied that way.

Final year was indeed a mess. You had umpteen number of quotas to complete. Dentures to be delivered. Teeth to extract. Class 2 amalgam restorations to be done. Kids (not ours... mind you) to be managed in Pedo. Pan stained teeth to be made to look like an advert for Colgate. And the worst part was that you had to find your own patients for all this procedures. So the moment classes got over by 5 pm you could see white coated girls and guys going around the gullies of Ludhiana trying to convince some chap to turn up on the next day in college so that you can complete your quotas. Hunting for class 2 patients was a night mare especially for your exams. Out of the 30 odd patients who would agree to come only 10 would turn up at the college and the staff would sometimes outright reject all the 10 that you brought to college telling umpteen lies. I guess it is high time the system of evaluating a student on the last practical day should come to an end instead he or she should be evaluated on the work done through out the year.

After that came internship. The most awaited moment in the life of a dental student. Finally you are half a doc. Every one used to love going to Periodontics as interns because you were regaled with stories and food by our lovely HOD.  You were finally being treated like a doctor. The assistants laid out the instruments and then called you to do the ultrasonic scaling. You felt great when chunks of calculus and pan stains which refused come off with your scraping just popped out.  Finally you also get be part of the Oral Surgery on call team waking up in the middle of the night to run to the casuality (where finally the really doctors considered you as doctors ...but with great difficulty) and then go sit at the Gol Chakar with a hot steaming cup of coffee, tea or chocolate.  Finally we got to do RCT’s...assist in surgeries...do a few other stuff which you couldn’t do as students.

Boys didn’t have a hostel back then. And we ended up renting rooms out side the college. The lucky few managed to get into the paramedical hostel. Snow day was the day we managed to get into the girls hostel and ransack the place. For once the girls would have decked up their rooms to fool us boys into believing that they lived in style while we rotted outside.

We went home twice a year. One was for Christmas and one was after the Profs. Booking train tickets was a joint effort. Getting a list of names, concession forms and the money and then standing in the queues of the railway station in the peak summer heat or skull crunching cold. The days before the Christmas send ups were spent attending various carol services held in and around CMC. Train journeys of those days were quite memorable because we used to have our MBBS counterparts also travelling on the same day. Days and nights on the train were actually a nuisance to our fellow travellers because we would be spending hours and hours playing antaksharis aloud (sometimes at odd hours into the morning), cards and dumb charades....Boys and girls would clamour out at almost all major stations to buy either samosas or juices which would be shared with everyone. Return journeys had everyone sharing whatever their parents had packed to take back to Ludhiana.

Exam time saw every one feverishly visiting the medical library reading room and the chai shop opposite the library saw a peak increase in their sales with tea, samosas and pakodas being devoured at exponential rates. Boy’s feverisly Xeroxed notes from the girls (girls actually took pains to write down notes in the class rooms!!!). Hunger pangs in the nights were either settled at the Ross Hostel’s Mid Nite Mess or at Malik’s Dhaba near the railway station where umpteen aloo

parantas or all sorts of other parantas would be devoured by hungry packs of CDCites who would decend upon the eateries in hordes despite having an exam the very same morning. Exams results kept everyone awake in their homes and STD/ISD calls would be made to the office or friends in Ludhiana to check whether or not you had cleared.

Many of us who fell in love with CDC also fell in love with fellow CDCites and ended up marrying out sweet hearts and are living a happy married life in various parts of the world. Many who did not fall in love then also found their loves outside CDC after their courses and are also living a happy married life in various parts of the world. One thing that we have learned is that no matter how much we would have been angry or hated some persons because of some or the other actions, CDC has molded us into what we are today where ever we are. Many CDCites have scaled great heights and are today occupying various posts either in dentistry or related fields.

Much to write about but i guess the editor is going to chop off my memoire if I continue. Before I sign off i want to thank all my teachers for having been there during the molding phase of our lives. I want to thank Susan, Tina and Divya without whose help I would not have cleared my final prof. And above all i want to thank God the Almighty for showing me the person with whom i going to grow old with....my lovely wife ...Anju. As long as Mark Zuckerberg keeps FB free you can contact me on http://facebook.com/ginguanju