In 1987, for reasons I can no longer explain with a straight face, I decided to learn German. I had no plans to travel. No professional need. Perhaps I just wanted a small escape from the daily cycle of rounds, case sheets, and prescriptions. Or maybe I wanted to prove to myself that my brain could still do something new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Learning a foreign language in Wardha in those days was not exactly fashionable. We lived comfortably with Marathi and Hindi, and we managed our medical English as best as we could. Deutsch <\/em>felt as distant as snowfall. But Wardha has its own way of surprising you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mrs. Sunita Kawale, the wife of the District Collector, had moved to Wardha. She was a linguist, fluent in German, and she agreed to teach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A class of one sounded depressing, so I did what every enthusiastic beginner does\u2014I recruited others. Dr. Sudha Jain and Dr. Anjali Ingle from Anaesthesiology joined in. Monika Ahuja, an intern with a sharp mind, signed up too. So did Parthak Pradhan and Ganesh Srinivasan, two third-year students who were always ready for anything that wasn\u2019t PSM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n We committed ourselves to a six-month course. Three evenings a week\u2014Monday, Wednesday, Friday\u2014we gathered in the Medicine seminar room. Outside, Wardha baked. Inside, we tried to sound like people from Berlin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grammar was manageable. Pronunciation was the real enemy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The letter J<\/strong>, we discovered, behaved badly. In German it softened into a Y<\/strong>, which created an identity crisis for half our department. \u201cJajoo\u201d became \u201cYayoo.\u201d \u201cJain\u201d turned into \u201cYen.\u201d We said these names with great sincerity, and then collapsed laughing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then came the dreaded \u00fc<\/strong>. We sat pursing our lips like we were trying to whistle without knowing how. The sounds we produced were somewhere between a groan and a complaint. Mrs. Kawale stayed calm through it all. She corrected us gently, as if she had been trained for this in Germany too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n Despite the comedy, we took the classes seriously. In May 1987, I appeared for the examination conducted by Max Mueller Bhavan, the Indian arm of the Goethe Institute. I still remember the small thrill of seeing my score.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 84 out of 100.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That number made me greedy. I enrolled for the advanced course. This was no longer about memorising words. It was about speaking without panicking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An external examiner came for the final assessment by the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband (DVV)<\/em>. The oral exam was the hardest. I spoke in careful sentences, like a man walking on a freshly mopped floor. Somehow, it worked. I scored 64 out of 90 in theory and 22 out of 30 in the oral. In December 1987, I was officially declared passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n None of us went to Germany after that. We stayed exactly where we were\u2014firmly in central India, with our wards, our patients, and our familiar dust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, the effort wasn\u2019t wasted. Learning a new language opens a window in the mind. It freshens the air. It also gives you the quiet satisfaction of doing something difficult just because you wanted to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it gave me a small party trick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kasturba Hospital had a few senior nurses who had trained in Germany years earlier\u2014efficient, stern, and impossible to impress. Once in a while, I would walk up to the nursing station and drop a sentence in German.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe J-Y Problem<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
The Exam That Made It Real<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n
Germany Came to Sevagram<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n