GMC didn’t offer hostel accommodation to the first-year students because the number of boys outnumbered the hostel rooms. So, we were forced to form our self-help groups and rented rooms near the GMC campus till we took first MBBS examination. We moved into small flats and rooms in Raghuji Nagar, Reshimbag, Rambag Road, Ajni, Dhantoli and Hanuman Nagar. We desperately fought with homesickness, battled helplessly with the menace of ragging, tried our best to cope with the complexities of Anatomy and Physiology and started practicing spoken English. Most boys had come from small villages, had been educated in Marathi medium schools and could barely speak a single sentence in English. Gray’s anatomy terrorized them; Samson Wright and Harper tested their nerves. Soon, they found solace with Sahana and comfort with Chatterjee—books that our professors intensely hated.
Come the spring of 1975 and the boys found their way in the Boy’s hostels. The top 20 were offered the coveted single seated rooms in the wings; the remaining ones were happy to share a room with their classmate. We sold our tables, chairs, and mattresses that we had bought for our rented rooms and moved into the GMC hostel. Suddenly, we felt very relaxed and buyout. We were free to go around, and there are no curfew hours. Often, we took our cycles out at night sometimes to Panchsheel Square to eat and walked down to Saroj talkies to watch a 9 pm movie. The hostel wardens— often clinical registrars—had learned how to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to what we did on campus.
The 108 rooms in each hostel would home boys with varying backgrounds, personalities, and idiosyncrasies. Some were silent; some, cantankerous. Some studied hard, some equally hated textbooks. Some would squeeze every second to study, some would love squandering their time. Some were loners and taciturn; others were intensely vociferous. Some consciously displayed etiquettes and manners; others were equally crude and unpolished. Some were shy and self-effaced, some were bold and brash.
We began to play rubber ball cricket on the terrace of hostels. There were no mobile phones. No televisions. No internet. Addicted to cricket, boys would listen to cricket commentaries. Even die-hard atheists would collectively pray for Anshuman Gaekwad to survive an Andy Roberts brutal bouncer. We signed up, booked our slots and waited patiently for our turns at the table tennis room on the first floor of the hostels. Many took to cards. And some worked hard to obtain a specialization in reading the opponent’s minds—and their cards—in Teen Patti, a gambling card game that would often start post-dinner and continue till the wee hours of the morning.
We ate lunches and dinners in the hostel mess. The mess boys would serve us bland brinjal-aloo mix vegetables, dry and shriveled rotis, and watered-down daal. Week after week, the quality of food won’t change. We tried switching to another mess only to find that the mess managers uniformly maintained the quality of the food they produced and served. Come Sunday morning, and air of expectancy would be very palpable in the hostels. Boys looked eagerly forward to unlimited sweets that the Sunday lunch promised. Boys, showcasing their voracious appetite, would challenge each other, set up stiff targets and would stubbornly swallow as many as hundred Gulab jams in a single sitting without ejecting a burp.
We drank water from the wash basin taps, braving bouts of dysentery or diarrhea. We did our laundry on Sundays, waiting impatiently for our turns at the few bathrooms. The hostels were never silent: a medley of noises and strange voices would fill the hostel corridors, wings, lobbies and the dining areas.
Posters of favorite stars adored our rooms. Our rooms were as unkempt and as cluttered as any hostel room could be. Many rooms in each hostel were occupied by our seniors who were happy repeatedly failing in the examinations and used their hostel rooms to enjoy all good things in life.
Those three years (1975-78) in the hostels shaped our personality, enriched our friendships and generated a wonderful camaraderie among the boys.
