Friends, I have become quite irregular in posting my stuff, though I read yours and enjoy it too.... Here's a leaf out of my life's book, a rare silver lining that stands out among the otherwise dull and dreary residency period... As we say,  andhon mein kana raja! (A one eyed person is a king among totally blind people!) 

During residency we had to stay in the hostel. The routine was really monotonous, to say the least. The same old dingy, smelly, gloomy, oppressive wards; the same old doomed, sick patients and the same old appendices and hernias and gall bladders and piles... If that was not enough, then there were gargoyles in human shapes as nurses and worse still, female doctors! Gawd, give us a break, we used to pray! And this is not to mention the saddistic senior consultants whose prime source of entertainment seemed to be sc--wing our happiness by humiliating us in front of the patients, nurses and just everybody else, at the  drop of a hat. Well, a lot was at stake and somehow we used to endure the ordeal. So how did we survive?

One of the activities that brought the occasional chuckle on our otherwise drawn and hagard faces was fiddling around with the public telephone instrument that stood prominently in the lobby of our hostel. We used to survey the crowd (read female doctors) gathered around the cement concrete benches across the main entrance. Then the least gargoylish of them would be picked as that day's lucky recipient of our attention. The next step would be dialling up the hospital number and ask for the hostel lobby extension which was just across the public phone, barely five metres away! The attendent would be instructed to get that 'lucky' person on the line. Then we would pull that person's leg as long as we could hold back our collective guffaws! Most of the times we never got caught. Sometimes someone would sing and then there would be a confrontation with the opposite number or a giggle or a chuckle if the person had an ounce of SOH.

Getting caught was not so much of a risk as the stuff dished out through Mr Bell's ingenious invention would be quite harmless and lewd remarks were strictly a no-no.

The price we had to pay for those pranks was a hefty 50 paise which we readily sacrificed!

We had to pay 50 paise for every call that we made thru the main exchange of the hospital other than those made for hospital work. The bill used to hurt us dearly as it was deducted at the month end from the measly sum that was euphemistically called our stipend. ( For the first year it was Rs 900/-, for the second it was Rs 1100/-, and the third it was Es 1300/-! It got almost doubled by the time we left the institute!) What used to hurt us more was the fact that our opposite numbers from the government medical college were allowed unlimited local calls through the hospital board. And so we decided to revolt against this disparity. We made repeated presentations to the faculty dean but it was of no avail. So there was a hidden rebellion fomenting within us.

What to do? How to get even? The authorities were sort of untouchable. With the stakes being as high as they were, no one really dared to bell the cat. We resident doctors were indeed (actually times have changed significantly since those days... And with it the attitude of the younger lot of trainee doctors too, but that issue can be addressed in another post.) a gutless lot... Any revolt was harshly dealt with by the powers that be. The leaders were threatened with dire consequences such as repeated failures at the degree exams and even suspension. Antagonising the dean openly, therefore, was not a viable option: none of us dared to court disaster! We had to show our anger in an innovative way.

The answer came to us in the most unexpected way: the public telephone booth! The phone instrument installed by the telephone company was our new play thing! As luck would have it, there was a very narrow slit like gap on one of the sides of the instrument. It admitted a thin strip of x-ray film about 4 cm wide and 6 inches long. We started fiddling around with instrument using the x-ray film. Actually someone must have known that it was possible to activate the instrument this way: certainly it was not an original idea. The result was that we ( my prankster friend and yours truly) got the nack of using the strip instead of the requisite coin to make a phone call. The news spread around like wild fire and soon we used to get summoned by friends who wanted to make calls. Interestingly enough, there were just a couple of others who could use the x-ray film effectively! After a few months the telephone authorities got a rude shock: the meter was moving as fast as ever but the coins had disappeared from their coffer! They started investigating and found out the inevitable! So they changed the instrument and everything was alright for a while! Coins again started appearing and the powers that be sat pretty for a while with a wide smirk pasted across their smug faces. But now we had tasted the blood! After a few weeks' lucid interval, our devilish mind started to look for a way to defeat them and sure enough we somehow created a razor thin gap in the new instrument too! Again we started getting references whenever a needy doctor wanted to make a call! Again the coins disappeared from the box and again the authorities changed the instrument, now a new design which was temperproof! The powers that be had a wider smile on their smug faces! But alas, their bliss was destined to be short lived! As luck would have it the new phone had a lock which was having a combination identical to that of my friend's motorbike lock! We just had to put his motorbike key into the key hole, and just a flick of the wrist and hey presto, the front panel would swing open and all the mechanism was there for us to fiddle around! No need to put a coin again. Open the instrument, press a certain lever and talk as much as you like! 'Life-time out going free' was the slogan those days. So again the authorities started acting feverishly and changed the instrument! And no, this instrument was having a different lock, unresponsive to our friend's bike key! But again, there was a twist in the tale that nobody had expected! These phones have two locks. One is where the front panel hides the mechanism but there is another lock that keeps the coins secure. Only the telephone company personnel can have the access to the coin bowl. And fate had one more ace hidden up her sleeve: My friend's bike key could open the lock to the coin bowl. Could anyone believe it! The fourth instrument too couldn't hold up to our collective ambush strategies! Now we did need a coin, albeit temporarily! We dropped the coin the regular way, chatted, and then would open the coin box and retrieve it and walk away with an even wider grin!

Finally the telephone company had to remove the instrument altogether and the drama ended there, but not before the dean came visiting our hostel and gave an admonishing speech to the collected resident doctors expressing his doubts as to what type of unscrupulous doctors his institute was churning out! We too were there in the crowd that had gathered around our dean and you can safely bet that ours were the straightest faces of the lot!