“Move fast. Don’t waste your time. I already know the background of your institute,” Mr. M. Venkaiah Naidu, the Vice-President, seemed to be impetuously impatient and in a haste, as I was about to make my PowerPoint presentation.
Mr. Naidu had come to Sevagram this Sunday to inaugurate the operating theatre of our hospital. My task was to tell him the history and the heritage of MGIMS, describe our strong community orientation and show him the path that we had travelled so far to serve our patients. Well, I was not supposed to—and would never have done—deliver a corporate hospital PRO presentation. I wanted to weave a five-decade-long story that started in 1969.
Probing eyes and piercing voice. The Vice-President wore the look of a headmaster coming down hard on his pupil and telling him precisely what he wanted from him. He wanted me to tell him how we navigated the MGIMS boat through the Scylla of industrialization of the medical profession and the Charybdis of crass commercialization.
Forty years back, such an admonition would have left me breaking into a cold sweat. I would have been a bundle of nerves—with tongue vibrating tremulously, heart leaping into the throat and lips quivering, nervously.
Not this time. I made a quick calculation. Mr. Naidu wanted me to shorten my presentation without ruining it. I had prepared for a 50-over match but the Vice-President had used the Duckworth-Lewis method to reset the target: just seven minutes to run through my slides.
My original PowerPoint was packed with 30 slides. Half of them carried no words—only a picture—and the rest had a single word in the middle of the slide—no sentence. I didn’t have trouble pacing the presentation because each picture in the PPP—as the cliché goes— was worth 1000 words. As I went past the thirtieth slide, I glanced at my wristwatch through the corner of my eyes — seven minutes from start to finish! I heaved a sigh of relief that although I had upped the pace, I didn’t run through my slides.
I had to run physically, though. The Vice President was to inaugurate the OT as soon as I was done and I had to reach the inauguration spot ahead of him. I needed to catch my breath and tell him the number of patients we wheel into the OT, the villages they come from, the kinds of surgeries we do and super specialties that we had recently added. I made my way to the front of the crowd— a chaotic cavalcade of cameramen, television crew, and petulant politicians—and reached the OT passage that housed the inauguration plaque. Mr. Naidu unveiled the plaque, asked me if we have an on-campus faculty or an imported one from Nagpur and whether we were prescribing the generic drugs. He said some good words about the hospital and briskly walked back to get into the auditorium where he was to confer International Gandhi award for Leprosy to two doctor-researchers.
When I started my presentation, I thought that I would have to run a gauntlet. Fortunately, my luck didn’t run out; instead, I had a good run on a Sunday morning.
