🥼👩‍🎓 🐓

 

My childhood dream was to become a doctor, donn a white coat and go about serving the sick, with a smile on my face ...it astounds me now, even to think about it because in general, I am not the smiling personality and the look on my face is quite stern unless I actualy smile or laugh. 

It could have started either after reading about Florence Nightingale in the school library or the sight of a tall smart lady with a white coat on her arm, daily in the bus, who got down at the Government Hospital bus stop - i still remember her face clearly.

I managed to get admission into the City Medical College on my own credit, and it was quite a thrill.

The course consisted of five and a half year of studies and one year of internship at the same local government hospital.

After completing my first year though, i was unable to concentrate on anything i read (even fiction) and I stopped attending college.

It upset my father very much, he consulted our family doctor and with his guidnace took me to a psychiatrist in another city, which was about 250 kms to the south of our place.

I had a series of consultations and some counseling sessions which taught me to focus my mind on whatever i read...

and somehow I managed to go back to my course the next year.

I had lost one year, but did not worry

about that and joined my junior batch in the college.

To consolidate this achievement my family decided to give two things

as a 'sacrifice' to our family deity in a temple about a hundred kilometres to the east of our place. One was a chicken and the second was a part of my long hair.

I still dont know the connection -  between the psychiatric consultant in a remote city, the faraway God,

and the  chicken from my Aunts farm ....can understand the hair though because it was a part of me, and I was a part of the whole thing. 

The whole process was enjoyable of course, with cousins coming along with us, bath in the river after the haircut ( about 7-8 inches ) and a delicious meal afterward in the temple premises, made with the sacrificed chicken.

During my earlier childhood, I had never hesitated - in fact used to run, to watch the chicken being killed and cut.

I wonder now if it was really me who did that.

In case I HAD voiced a dissent if I felt  any, in all probability it would have been crushed by elders who always said- 'No No, one has to kill to eat', and I would have agreed.... though a very small voice inside me had always wondered if it was fair on the chicken and if so how? 

Now of course I understand that it was NEVER fair on any chicken or sheep or whoever it was..it was only our selfish and unthinking human gene that said so.

And that it is this voice inside children which is systematically crushed by elderly human wisdom....and that in effect stops all original thought process, for most of us through life... unless the mind wakes up for a few at a later day.