Just as we breathe a sigh of relief that our final theory exams are over, our hearts are thrown into palpitations with the onset of viva. Sound familiar? Let’s walk down that memory lane.
We skim through our dust gathered practical manuals and hastily completed records and try to cram all the principles, experiments, and case sheet pro formas into our uninterested brains. Let’s admit it – post exams, our mind is still on vacation and simply does not want to reach back in time for viva.
All year round, viva is considered “piccha lite,” but just an hour before you walk into those doors, we keep our ears wide open to pack all the little tidbits our friends tell us are ‘important.’ Lucky are those people who have studious friends who can summarize the entire textbook in just a few hours.
“What do you see under that microscope?” –it’s one of the most dreaded questions in practical exams. Honestly, it’s just pink and violet, but if we’re clever, we start a rant on all the finer details of the slide…like the eosinophilic cytoplasm, hyperchromatin, and the fibrous stroma, etc. For a second, we might even be proud of the spontaneous tale of explanation that we’re able to weave, until the examiner asks, “What is that cell at the 12 o’clock position on the slide?” You know what comes next.
We’ve heard our classmates chitchat nonstop, but viva is that moment where an epidemic of tongue tie breaks out. Stammering, mumbling, spluttering are just a few symptoms.
“Kya Poocha?”- And when our fellow classmate completes their viva and comes out, we all swarm them like bees and interrogate them on the questions they were asked. Forget being a doctor…Medicos interrogating their peers for viva questions can take up careers as agents of CIA, FBI, and RAW.
As soon as a question is asked, they pretend to think by frowning deeply and staring upwards at the “memospere” (the place in our heads where all memorized stuff goes when needed to recall). The memosphere is probably like a blackhole because it will suck in information but never come out at the time of viva.
We students love those examiners who like to finish the answers just after we initiate our response. Now all we need to do is nod our heads like we knew the answer all along, and that’s exactly the answer we would have given if the examiner had not, in fact, interrupted us.
‘Silence is golden’ and ‘A simple smile can dissolve any problem’ are two quotes that definitely expire at viva. Unfortunately.
Geethika Simma 