Sirens and Lights

Unless you are a connoisseur of military architecture, or have succumbed to a tropical disease, you’re unlikely to find much inspiration in VELLORE, 150km west of Chennai.

-The Rough Guide, South India

Ah, my new home ;). Apparently, they failed to realize how much inspiration a foreign soon-to-be medical student researching systems of EM might garner from being in Vellore!

In all seriousness, Vellore is a relatively small city by India standards, located between Chennai and Bangalore in the state of Tamil Nadu. It’s really a startling place in that the center of a city is this busy, crowded, traffic congested area, all located around the rather pretty Christian Medical College campus, which includes housing, canteen, all of the hospital and college administration, as well as the hospital itself. Walking around the campus, you can always hear the traffic coming from the surrounding area, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that it’s all there until you catch a glimpse of the big, colorful signs and blur of yellow and black autorickshaws beyond the campus gates. The campus itself is always flooded with people ranging from medical students and faculty to the throngs of relatives of patients waiting underneath the trees and along the pathways. Despite being crowded, though, it’s quite a contrast from the dusty streets surrounding it…there are beautiful little gardens and plants, and if you walk along one part of the campus and look up, you’ll see a small green and brown mountain pictorequely standing against the sky. The other surprising thing is how much calmer the areas a bit distanced from the college are. I’m currently staying at Bagayam, a hospital housing complex located 8km from the medical center…you’d think you were in an entirely different place. It’s green, with lots of trees and vividly colored flowers amongst which are set several large bungalows that house faculty, students and CMC guests. The only noises I normally hear are of birds and bugs, the whirring fans and the dogs and monkeys that roam around the campus. When it rains (which it often does, as it is monsoon season in the South right now), I can actually smell the rain, instead of the usual cloud of exhaust fumes/cows from the city center! It’s kind of nice being able to experience two contrasting environments so close to one another. And, as one of the physicians in the Casualty Department said to me yesterday, the fantastic part of being at CMC in this department is that I really am seeing a microcosm of the town/region itself because people from all over come here when they need treatment. As most of these people are rural people, I’ve gotten to see quite a range of cases that I’d never see in the U.S., as well as some serious road traffic accidents (those are still Indian-style, like someone getting hit while jumping off of a moving train…not an all-together uncommon phenomenon on the overly crowded trains). The Casualty Department here really is quite busy…yesterday alone, there was a woman who 9 months pregnant that got hit by a van, another serious RTA, 2 serious heart attack patients, a little boy with TB, a guy who was getting transported to CMC for a liver transplant, a man having an acute psychosis episode, a woman who was run over by a bus, a man who was bitten by a viper….among a slew of other less dramatic cases. Like I said, quite a range….

Ok, back to exploring the city. There’s apparently a great restaurant near the hospital that I’m supposed to check out for some good South Indian food….oddly enough, it’s called Chinatown. :-P.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2003 at 4:15 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.