Ravi Ramaswamy

Life is a journey, not a guided tour. I was privileged to be part of HPS band of brothers in my journey. I joined HPS in 5A as a day scholar. I met my first group of friends in 5A : Surendranath, Nitin and Anand. Then in 1969, my father who was in the Indian Air Force got transferred from Hyderabad. I left HPS only to return after a couple of months as a boarder. That’s when I met my second group of buddies: Pol, Handa, Narsim, Madhu, and some of our seniors from the 1970 batch. In 10th grade my dream of following in my father’s footsteps of joining the IAF as a pilot took a body blow as I started wearing glasses which would automatically disqualify me in the NDA as an Air Force cadet. So, my plan B was ‘B for biology’. I switched from Math to Biology. I was a semester late and still remember and am grateful to Narsim who transcribed in his own hand an entire semester worth of class notes for me!

I still remember the names of most of our teachers right from Mrs. Massey in 5A, Miss Suzanne Butler in 6A all the way to our teachers in the ISC classes who are the reason we are all where we are today. I know that Mr. Chandrasekhar helped me gain command of the English language that has saved me on more than one occasion where my English vocabulary made me appear smarter than I am! Pol and I had many adventures and misadventures together including our own ‘test taking techniques’! I remember Mr. Devadattam announcing at morning PT that ‘The Eagle has landed’-in reference to the moon landing.

After ISC exams I had the misfortune of leaving abruptly without even saying good bye’ to many. The 1971 Indo-Pak war had broken out and my father was sent to Hyderabad to deliver some top-secret material to SLAW (School of Land Air Warfare) located in Secunderabad. So, he decided to pick me up for a safe passage home since he was stationed in Allahabad, a strategic air base for the war. I did my medical school in Kakinada and my Internship at St. John Medical College in Bangalore. When I entered medical school, the first culture shock I had was the amount of ‘racism’ prevalent in India. I was considered ‘out of state’, the Kamma Reddys were against the non-Kamma Reddys, the inter-Andhra casteism, etc; I had never seen that in HPS. We did not even know or care where we were from or where our friends were from. We were just a band of brothers.

I remember in my final exam in medical school, I got a particularly puzzling case in my clinical exam, and I had no idea about the diagnosis. I had recently seen a re-release of Dev Anand’s ‘Tere Mere Sapne’ where during his exam he says ‘ I don’t know the diagnosis but I can discuss the various things it could be’. With nothing to lose, I repeated the dialogue expecting the axe to fall but the examiner was impressed saying that I was the only one that gave the right answer because the case was complicated. Whew! I’ve been a Dev Anand fan ever since!