21 August 1989 reloaded

21 August 1989 reloaded

First time I heard of a place called ‘Chidambaram’ was from G Aravindan’s National award winning movie by the same name. In one scene the heroine, Sivagami ( Smitha patil) dictates her address as 15 Ammapet, Chidambaram . The storyline ends with the protagonist Bharat Gopi , a wanderer who in his travels while repenting for his sins accidently meets the heroine who is a shoe keeper at the Gopuram doors of the famous Nataraja temple at Chidambaram.

My destiny to reach this place was not for any solace, but for the tryst to learn dentistry at the largest residential university in Asia. Annamalai University started in 1929 and has about 50 departments and over 500 courses under the facultie
s of Arts, Science, Indian Languages, Fine Arts, Engineering and Technology, Education, Agriculture, Medicine and Dentistry .

August 21. 1989, the first day of our college. We were told to sit in the lecture hall for the Dean’s welcome address. With a lot of new faces around, I looked around and found a familiar face. It was my batch mate at the entrance coaching class at Chennai, Mohammed Rasool , who was a front bencher and was always asking doubts and answering in class sitting in the front row . My despair of not getting through entrance exams slowly faded on noting that the studious ones also didn’t get through in the entrance exam.

The Dean, Dr B Sreenivasan walked into the room and introduced himself. His one and a half hours talk was about the bright future of dentistry and about the life ahead in the University campus. He was so convincing that after his talk I thought Dentistry is the best profession and had made the right decision by joining for BDS course. Over the next few days I realized that he was the one man army in control all the students of Dental College. In today’s age, we would have called him a ‘fascist’ because of his austere disciplinary and authoritarian attitude. He taught us not only dentistry but a lot of other things through his actions and words. As a teacher and administrator today, I always think how our B S would have dealt with the situation before taking any important decision. Today as I look back, 10 years of life at Chidambaram for BDS, MDS and also as lecturer in the temple of knowledge has taught me important lessons and values, even though I had not appreciated it at that time.
In the hostel our beloved seniors gave us a rousing welcome and gave a list of " rules and regulations " to he followed thereafter . They also ordered us to shave off the sparse moustaches which most of us were nurturing for 1-2 years .

28 years have passed since that voyage to the destination from where my journey started, but the Annamalite in me stays vivid.