LIVE YOUR DREAMS

The ‘D’ October in Muzaffarpur was like a disease in approbation that made u dream of being under one of Alice in Wonderland skies and stuffed your nose with aroma of fresh air with a tinge of jasmine, but today it clogged his lungs and made him shudder from every nerve and sweat from every pore of his body. It was midnight and the fragrance outside didn’t seem to relieve him of the heat or humiliation within. Tonight desperation added a new element to his restless discontent. It rode his nerves like a hissing snake looking for somewhere to sink its fangs into. ‘Tapp’ fell another sweat drop on the glass of his specs. Hurriedly he took off the specs from over his big worried nose and gave another mighty push on the chest piece of the stethoscope placed on 12 year old Armaan’s chest. Shook his head in cringe. Another push… ‘Huh!!’...a sigh in guilt and he returned to his chair next to mine. Dr. R. Prasad or RP as we used to call him, from the Dept. of Emergency Medicine, was a man o

Of late, medical profession has become near-synonymous to ‘strikes’, be it doctors at peripheral hospitals or resident doctors at government hospitals. While the former strike for higher wages and better medical equipments, the latter do so, sometimes for or against imposing the benefit of reservation, sometimes against procrastination of promotions, and now-a-days purely against the government rule to impose compulsory rural postings on every course that the doctors undertook. The rule said 1 year after MBBS, 2 years after post graduation and 3 years after a super specialization. So a doctor who started his studies at 19-20 would complete his super specialization and postings at the end of 17 years i.e. by the time he would be in his late thirties. While thinking of all this, on my way back to college, after hearty Diwali celebrations at home, I went through the same gamut of sentiments. How insensitive can doctors get? After all they earn so much. How greedy of them to refuse rural