JaLaNe Days

JaLaNe Days takes us back to the medical colleges of the 1970s and 1980s - a world of stern yet fun-loving professors, traditional and didactic education, scarce resources, overcrowded wards, and seemingly endless exams. JaLaNe Days captures a generation coming of age in a very different India - when a cup of tea could last an evening, when people found joy in mundane things, and when the people you met in college could shape the rest of your life.

Medicine was only part of the education. Hostel life, ragging, friendships, rivalries, romance, language and caste divides, rigid gender boundaries, and the daily absurdities of student life shaped a generation of young people who were learning not only how to become doctors but also how to find their place in the world.

Told with warmth, nostalgia, and a generous dose of humor, JaLaNe Days is a journey through youth, friendship, and the path to becoming doctors. Drawing on the sights, sounds, friendships, and follies of those years, the author revisits a generation discovering medicine, love, independence, and adulthood in an India very different from today's.