92
you something that is not going to
be there in the books, I would make
an attempt to go. I am not saying
I would succeed, because once you
have a routine, a routine where you
play whole night and then go to
sleep and wake up late, if you say
tomorrow I am going to wake up at
8 am, it’s not going to happen. So,
unfortunately, because of the bad
routine which develops once you
don’t go regularly, It is hard to go
even for the ones that you want to.
And somehow luck would have it
that whenever I would go for a lec-
ture, the teacher wouldn’t show up!
And so what happened is after some
time, my future wife, my then-class-
mate, told me that basically, I am
an ill-luck charm for everybody,
that if I show up the class will not
happen, so I might as well not show
up! I took the advice quite literally.
I remember Dr. Panda used to be
there, who did research in hepatitis.
Non-A-Non-B is his work. A huge
amount. The thing that you do not
know as a medical student is that
which of your teachers is good. So
it becomes a circular argument.
You do not know enough to actu-
ally pick which ones are worth go-
ing to. So either you end up going
for almost all, or you end up going
for almost none. Those are real-
ly the two extremes. I am talking
about the 1990s. If you wanted to
find out who had done what, you
really couldn’t. It wasn’t easy. To-
day you can sit in your room, type
a few words on a computer and
you would know; which ones have
made primary contributions, which
ones haven’t. on people who do not want to be
there.” And the old AIIMS was like
this. My father taught at AIIMS for
a short while. That was the time of
people like Dr. Avtar Singh Pain-
tal, a very famous physiologist was
at AIIMS. So, he’d say if there is a
cricket match going on, go! Read in
your spare time. What’s the point
of being so selective if you do not
give flexibility! That’s my opinion.
So I think it should be left, in a
place like AIIMS, for students to
decide, to which lectures and to
whom do they want to go. And if
for instance, some professors find
that people are not coming to their
lectures, it really should be time for
introspection. So whenever I take
a lecture, informally and formally,
like in DU, a statistics course; my
general opening line is, “ Every-
body is marked present unless told
otherwise. But please don’t do one
thing, don’t apply for leave. Because
if I mark you present and you’re on
leave it is going to be a problem for
us. But those who want to sit can sit
and those who want to go can go.
I am happy on not having to focus SP: Semi-rigid.
So how is the attendance now?
AA: It seems the ones who want to
be awake can manage.
VP: Attendance is still formal-
ity sort of.
AA: It’s okay. Maybe MCI has
mandated it and maybe it was not
AIIMS who found that necessary.
In theory, AIIMS does not have to
follow MCI.
VP: But this is the supreme
court. All educational institu-
tions have to follow it.
AA: In which case, AIIMS is doing
the best it can. It has to comply by
what supreme court deems nec-
essary, but it is not enforcing, and
you people do as you wish to do.
On the clinical side, the things are
different. On the clinical side, I do
think that more attendance would
possibly make things better. When
it comes to suturing something, ei-
Intern’s party, at the famous Duke
farmhouse, with his then future wife,
Anjali.