It was learning a new language.

There were about fifty students in the first year batch of MBBS at Andhra Medical College With me. Almost all of them were from Andhra region, representing both urban and rural areas. The difference in their backgrounds was very explicit in their daily lifestyles and mannerisms. While students from urban areas would take the formal wear of socks and boots to as far as the bathrooms and use English even in their most intimate conversations, students from rural background would carry contemptuous aggression for their urban colleagues and miss no opportunity to let them down. There was a strong underlying divide between the two groups which would manifest at any given opportunity of power play as trivial as election of the mess secretary or selection of the volleyball team. I could not identify myself With any of them and thus won the acceptance of both or perhaps was considered to be of no consequence. Five students were admitted in the quota created for refugees from Western Punjab. Many of my flagellant colleagues discovered some repelling body odour in them. I found none and became in fact quite friendly later With S.S. Bhalla, one among them. During the familiarization Phase, Dr. Shepherd interviewed me. A British, Dr. Shepherd always had his personal secretary when he talked to natives to fill any possible gap that might arise between the ideas expressed in his Oxford-accented English and the mumbling of novices in their Telugu-tainted version of his great language. During my interview, the personal secretary, almost tanned in the reflected glory of his boss,  whispered into my ears, 'Wish him". I said, "I don't fish", mistaking his advice for wishing  Dr. Shepherd to a query about fishing. I always wondered as a child about the relevance of priests during prayers. My confusion became further compounded. I had interest in Mathematics and considered Biology as an unavoidable burden. In the first class of Biology, I was asked to lift an earthworm. I looked around for a fork, inviting laughter from my colleagues and a frown from my teacher. "How will you handle a dead body if the touch of an earthworm is frightening to you?" somebody said. More as a challenge than for the logic of the contemptuous comment, I lifted the earthworm and kept it on my palm. At night I kept feeling the creature's movement in my palm.  even after washing my hands a dozen times. Slowly, I started enjoying observing different forms of living creatures. Within Six months, I extended my Circle of acquaintances from earthworms to rats, frogs and rabbits. While going for our lecture classes we passed through a corridor that housed the Museum of Anatomy. A part of the museum was used to perform autopsy. My curiosity used to lead me to the museum where I would observe corpses in silence. The cold and stillness of death would fill me With a strange kind of realism. The clever manipulations, pretensions, Plots, pride, prejudices, greed, so familiar and almost omnipresent, would appear so strange and remote in the presence of the human corpse. Most of our teachers in the Medical College were Tamil doctors. I developed instant fondness for my anatomy professor Dr. Krishna Rao. He was very tall, Six feet four inches, and lanky. He would utter the fairly long and tongue-twisting medical terms describing human anatomy, mainly adopted into English from Greek and Latin, With such ease and fluency that students used to Circle around him. Barring a turban, I used to see Sarvepally Radhakrishnan in him Unfortunately, he Ieft the college after about three months of my joining. My tryst With medical English, however, continued. The features of human body visible to the naked eye make morphological anatomy, the hidden ones that need a microscope involve histology. The basic framework of the body is provided morphological anatomy, the hidden ones that need a microscope involve histology. The basic framework of the body is provided by a large number of bones that collectively form the skeleton. A Doctor's Story of Life and Death The flexible tissue around them is cartilage. Two bones are united together by fibrous bands called ligaments. The flesh is muscles. On getting an electrical signal from brain they contract and thus provide power for movements. Running through the intervals between muscles are blood vessels, lymphatic vessels and nerves. Blood vessels are tubes through which blood circulates. The vessels that carry blood from the heart that keeps pumping it to maintain circulation, to various tissues are arteries, and the ones that return this blood to the heart are veins. Tissues, arteries and veins are connected by a fine network of microscopic vessels called capillaries. Lymphatic vessels are delicate, thin walled tubes, difficult to see. They run alongside veins and have bean-shaped nodes in between called lymph nodes. Running along With them are solid chord-like nerves that carry electric impulses from and are solid chord-like nerves that carry electric impulses from and to the brain. In addition, there are specialized organs called viscera. Some of the viscera are solid like liver and kidney, some are tubular like intestines or sac like stomach. The viscera are grouped together in accordance With the function to form various organ systems. So, respiratory system provides body With oxygen, alimentary or digestive system absorbs food, urinary system removes waste and genital system contains organs concerned With reproduction. A major problem in describing anatomical relationships is that they keep changing With movement. When a patient is standing, his head is his uppermost part and feet the Lowermost. But when he is Lying down, both head and feet are at the same level. So, we were taught to presume that patient is standing upright, looking directly forwards, arms held by the Side of the body and palms facing forwards With thumbs Lying outwards. Now, anything that is nearer to the front of the body is anterior, and anything behind it is posterior. Anything closer to the head is superior to anything below which is, thus, inferior. The vertical plane that divides body into right and left is median. Anything nearer to it is medial and away is lateral. So each eye is anterior to the corresponding ear and is also medial to it. A doctor would, therefore, say that the eye is anteromedial to the ear and that nose is inferomedial to the eye. It was learning a new language.