Dr. S. Ramaswamy.

Soon after receiving a letter informing me of my admission to Stanley Medical College, my brother, who had been admitted to Government Veterinary College, Madras, and I prepared to leave Salem for Madras. But on the day of departure Madras was rocked by a bombshell. A telegram informed me that my admission to Stanley had been cancelled. Shocked and upset, we nevertheless decided to go to Madras, my elder brother to join Veterinary College while I, though the last date for admission to the B.Sc. Chemistry course in Loyola College was just past, would try to get into the College.

On arriving in Madras, I met a friend who told me that a reconsideration of the case of those whose seats had been cancelled had taken place and that I should go to Stanley Medical College to check the information. To my surprise I found my name on the restored list, which also informed me that my admission had been transferred to Madras Medical College. There, I had to go through the formality of a short interview with the Principal, Dr. A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar, by way of introduction. The dress regulation was very strict (coat/jacket, trousers and tie) or “Full Indian Dress, closed coat”. When I asked the Stanley Principal an audacious question, “What is full Indian dress”, and wondered if “Pajama and Jibba was permitted,” he had a hearty laugh and asked, “Young man, don’t you know pajama means nightwear?”

The course began with six months of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (Zoology and Botany). For a maths student like me, the biology part (of B.Sc. level) was tough going.

Dr. John Sunder Rao was the Professor of Biology. He was very lenient as an internal examiner. A friend of mine, who had the mounting of an earthworm ovary under the microscope as his practical examination question, struggled to do it. John Sunder Rao came to him and repeatedly asked him “Have you mounted the ovary”, once, twice and thrice, each time raising the volume of his voice. My friend could not get the hint that all that the Professor expected of him was to just place some part of the earthworm under the microscope and show it to him. Each time my friend only blurted out ‘no’. Thoroughly disgusted, the Professor left the place. My own practical exercise was the demonstration of the trigeminal nerve and its branches in the frog. What marks we got was not known, but with no individual minima for the theory and the practical, I got through Biology.

Our Physics professor was C. Viraraghava Iyer, a tall, pleasant person with a red namam on his forehead. He was known for his punctuality. You could set your watch following his punctuality. Both for organic and inorganic chemistry we had a venerable-looking, elderly professor who used to dictate notes, almost a repetition of the same notes – year after year – so that even the jokes could be anticipated and the laughter used to precede the joke! After the ‘snakes’ practical class, some of my male classmates used to smuggle out one or two of the snakes from the lab and frighten the women students seated in the front rows by throwing them at the girls, who would jump up and shout “Sir, snakes!”. The women students never felt hurt by this innocuous fun at their expense. In fact, among them were graduates, one of them being T.C. Vimala, an M.Sc. in Botany.

As for ragging, I was late in joining by a few days due to influenza fever and so I escaped, but I saw a few Anglo-Indian students dressed in khaki, belonging to the Indian Medical Department (IMD) group, with half-shaven heads or with hair cut here and there on their heads. Ragging practice at the time did not include day scholars, unlike what started a few years later. But the ‘victims’ were never subjected to violence or humiliation.

I used to be nicknamed ‘vakil’. I had only two coats, one of which was black and which I used alternately with the other of a different colour. Of my two trousers (pants, as they were wrongly called), one was white and the other greyish.

Even while in the six-month pre-registration course (where Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Biology were taken), I was invited by the college cricket captain to join the team, even in while I was attending a lecture! I also had a short stint with the Minerva Cricket Club, captained by A.F.W. Dixon. But my cricket experience then stopped with my being a perpetual twelfth man.

(To be continued)