In the English of South Asia a hostel is where students live. Elsewhere in the English-speaking world the word usually means a cheap lodging for travellers, a place of bunk beds and strangers, and an Indian graduate who uses it abroad soon learns to add an explanation. The two senses are less far apart than they sound. Both describe people sleeping among others who are not their family, in a building that is not their home, on terms set by someone else.
The word’s history makes the point more sharply. Hostel came into English from Old French, which took it from the Late Latin hospitale, a guest-house, from hospes, the word for both host and guest. It is a doublet of hotel and of hospital: three words from one Latin source, each specialising in a different kind of stranger who needs a bed. A medical student who lives in a hostel and trains in a hospital is therefore sheltered by two institutions with the same name, one for the young who are learning and one for the sick who are being looked after, and in the course of his training he passes, many times a day, from one hospitale to the other.
The word nearly died. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it fell out of ordinary use from the late seventeenth century until 1808, when Walter Scott revived it in Marmion, with a scene of tired men lying around a fire, “Deep slumbering on the hostel floor.” But an older English sense survives in a description of England printed in Holinshed’s Chronicles in the sixteenth century, which explains that “There are also in Oxford certeine hostels or hals, which may rightwell be called by the names of colleges, if it were not that there is more libertie in them, than is to be seen in the other.” From the beginning, then, the hostel was the residence with more liberty than the college. Generations of students who have lived in one would recognise the description.
This essay reconstructs no particular hostel, room, roommate or year. It is about an institution that Indian medical education has long relied on, and that its graduates describe, looking back, with a fondness worth examining. Late nights, examinations, food and friendships all belong in an account of hostel life, and all of them appear here; but the question underneath them is a harder one. The hostel advertises independence. What does that independence actually rest on? And what does affectionate memory leave out when it tells the story of the years spent there?
A Nook Obscure #
The finest account in English of a student arriving in a residential college is the third book of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, “Residence at Cambridge.” Wordsworth entered St John’s College in October 1787, and the poem he later wrote about it begins with the coach rolling across a wide plain under clouds, the first sight of King’s College Chapel, and a young man getting down at the Hoop Inn with his spirits high and his thoughts full of hope. He describes himself with a clear eye: “Migration strange for a stripling of the hills, / A northern villager.” At once, as if a fairy had waved a wand, he is rich in money, dressed in silk hose, his hair powdered like frosted trees, going from tutor to tailor about his own affairs. The first pleasure of the residential student is the pleasure of being, for the first time, a man of business.
Then comes the room.
The Evangelist St. John my patron was: Three Gothic courts are his, and in the first Was my abiding-place, a nook obscure; Right underneath, the College kitchens made A humming sound, less tuneable than bees, But hardly less industrious; with shrill notes Of sharp command and scolding intermixed.
From the same room, he tells us, he could hear Trinity’s clock, which never let a quarter slip by unproclaimed, and from his pillow, by moonlight, he could see into the antechapel of Trinity, where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
Those last lines are among the most quoted in the poem, and they are usually quoted for Newton. Read in place, they describe an arrangement of floors. Above, a young man lies in bed contemplating the image of the solitary mind, the scholar alone with his thought. Below, people are working: cooking for the college, giving orders and receiving them, being scolded. Wordsworth hears them as a sound, compares them to bees, and credits their industry. He does not give them faces. The solitary mind on its pillow is lying, quite literally, on top of the kitchen.
William Knight, Wordsworth’s Victorian editor, added a footnote that completes the picture with an irony nobody planned. Wordsworth’s rooms, Knight reports, were above the college kitchens, exactly as the poem says; and they had recently been removed “in connection with sundry improvements in the college kitchen.” The kitchen, in the end, absorbed the poet’s room.
That is the hostel in miniature. Its residents experience it as liberty: their own key, their own hours, no parent at the door. The liberty is real. It is also built on a floor of other people’s work, and the building knows this even when the residents forget it. Wordsworth’s honesty lies in recording the noise; the hum of the kitchen is in the poem. His limitation lies in hearing only noise. Most accounts of student residence, in English or in Punjabi, are less honest than his and share the same limitation.
Wordsworth adds one more thing that belongs in any account of a student far from home. In the midst of the novelty he confesses to “some fears / About my future worldly maintenance,” and to “a strangeness in the mind, / A feeling that I was not for that hour, / Nor for that place.” A hostel’s first lesson is often this strangeness. Students arrive in a city college from villages and small towns, from other states, from families that have never sent anyone so far, and the independence they have been promised arrives at the same moment as the discovery that nobody here knows them.
The Geometry of a Corridor #
In the late 1940s the social psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back studied friendship among the married students living in Westgate and Westgate West, housing built for returning servicemen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Residents had been assigned to apartments more or less at random, which made the housing an accidental experiment. The finding, published in 1950 as Social Pressures in Informal Groups, is one of the most cited in social psychology. Friendships followed the architecture. People became friends with their nearest neighbours far more often than with residents a few doors further along; and what mattered was not only physical distance but what the researchers called functional distance, the routes people actually walked. Residents of apartments at the foot of a staircase, or near the mailboxes, were befriended by people upstairs who passed their doors every day.
A hostel is a machine for producing functional distance. Its corridors, stairs, bathrooms, water coolers and mess doors decide who passes whom, how often, and at what hours. The student in the room beside the stairwell knows half the floor by the end of the first month; the student at the end of a dead-end corridor may know three people. None of this is chosen, and much of what is later remembered as the warmth of hostel life was laid down by an architect who never thought about it.
The same geometry that produces friendship produces friction. Living among others turns private preferences into collective negotiations. Light is the clearest example. In a shared room one person’s lamp at two in the morning is another person’s insomnia, and every pair of roommates arrives, explicitly or by attrition, at a treaty about when the light goes out. Noise is negotiated the same way: music, visitors, the late return, the early alarm. Storage is negotiated: whose books go where, whose trunk is under which bed, what may be borrowed without asking. These treaties are rarely written down, and they are often unequal, favouring the louder, the older or the more stubborn. But they are a genuine education in the thing a hostel teaches better than any lecture, which is that one’s own habits have consequences for people one did not choose.
Examinations alter the treaties. In the weeks before professional examinations a corridor that was loud becomes quiet, rooms stay lit all night, and the ordinary claims of sleep and company give way to the shared emergency. The hostel at such times is unusual among human dwellings: everyone in it is afraid of the same thing on the same date. That shared fear produces some of the kindness students remember, the lent notes, the explanation at midnight, the tea brought to a neighbour’s door. It also produces strain, because the student who needs silence and the student who studies aloud are now negotiating under pressure. The late nights the hostel is famous for are partly a story of collective effort and partly a story of people keeping one another awake.
Mess #
Hostel food has its own literature in India, almost entirely a literature of complaint. The dal is thin, the rotis are cold, the vegetable is a mystery, the same dish returns on the same day each week. The genre is old and good-humoured, and it hides a more interesting subject, which is what it means for a young person to be fed, for years, by an institution.
The word for the place where this happens is itself worth a moment. In Indian hostels, as in the armed forces from which the usage descends, one eats in the mess. The word has two roots that have run together. One comes from Old French mes, a portion of food or a course served at table, from the Late Latin missum, something put or sent, from mittere, to place, as on a table. The other comes from Old English mēse, a table, from the Latin mensa. A mess is what is put on the table and the table it is put on; a messmate is someone who eats from the same table. The everyday English sense of a mess, a confused jumble, appears to have grown from the image of mixed food. Hostel students in India have long enjoyed the double meaning without needing the etymology.
In many Indian hostels the mess is run, in part, by the students themselves: an elected committee, a secretary for the month, accounts kept and disputed, a contract with a cook or a contractor, a daily argument about quantity and price. This arrangement is a small school of civic life, and it teaches some uncomfortable lessons. The students who complain loudest are not always the ones who will take a turn at the accounts. A rise in the mess bill that one student absorbs without noticing is a hardship for another. And the menu is a perpetual compromise among people who grew up eating differently, by region, by religion, by whether meat was cooked at home, so that every meal is a small treaty among households that are not present.
Home intrudes into this arrangement in tins and parcels. Students in north India returning to college after a holiday have long carried a tin of pinnīāṅ, the dense sweets of roasted flour, ghee and sugar that Punjabi families pack for anyone going away, or a jar of pickle, or something cooked by a particular hand. The tin is opened in company, and it is usually shared, because a hostel’s etiquette makes hoarding difficult. In its way it is a message from one kind of feeding to another: food prepared by someone who knows you, eaten among people who do not yet.
Punjabi village life had a name for a different arrangement. The ਸਾਂਝਾ ਚੁੱਲ੍ਹਾ, sānjhā chullhā, the shared hearth, was a communal oven, often a tandoor, where the women of a lane brought their dough in the evening and baked together. It is remembered fondly, and another essay here has already asked whose labour the fondness forgets. But it differs from a mess in one way that matters. At a shared hearth the labour is visible. Everyone knows whose hands are at the oven. The mess of an institution separates eating from cooking so thoroughly that a student may spend five years eating food made by people whose names he never learns.
There is a reason a medical student, in particular, might attend to this. Hospitals also feed people who are away from home. A patient in a ward eats what the institution provides, at the hour it chooses, in portions it decides, and complains about it in the same good-humoured or bitter terms that students use. A doctor who has been fed by an institution for years has, at least, the chance to understand from the inside what a hospital tray means to the person in the bed: that food from strangers, however adequate, is a reminder of being away from those who would have cooked it differently.
Hands That Do Not Appear in the Memoir #
Every hostel that students remember was kept running by people who are almost never in the memory. Someone swept the corridors and cleaned the bathrooms. Someone washed the clothes, often a dhobī who collected bundles and returned them pressed, keeping account of every shirt in a system of marks the owners could not read. Someone cooked, and someone washed the pots. Someone guarded the gate at night, opened it for the late returner and was blamed when he was caught. Someone repaired the fans, carried the water, mended the wiring, chased the rats. A warden, often a teacher with other duties, stood between the students and the administration and was resented by both.
Memoir has a habit, in every language, of treating this labour as scenery. The hostel story is told as a story of friends and freedom, and the people whose work made the freedom possible appear, if at all, as comic figures or as part of the furniture. Wordsworth’s bees are the gentlest version of this. A harsher version is simply silence.
In India the silence has a particular shape, because the dirtiest of this work has long followed caste. Cleaning, sweeping and the handling of waste were assigned for centuries to particular communities considered untouchable, and the assignment long outlived the laws against untouchability; Parliament’s Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, passed in 2013, is evidence of how long the worst of it persisted. Wherever that history still shaped who cleaned, a student’s freedom in a hostel rested on the labour of people whom the society around him had placed beneath him, and an education given in the name of equal dignity could teach him, without a word, not to see them. I cannot say what any particular hostel was like, and I will not invent its staff. The structure was general enough that any honest account of student residence in India has to acknowledge it.
The habit of not seeing travels. A hospital, too, runs on people whom its hierarchy renders invisible: the ward attendants who lift and turn patients, the cleaners who make a room fit for the next admission, the porters, the laundry, the kitchen. In Indian government service these are the lowest grade of employee, and in hospitals everywhere they are the staff patients see most and doctors notice least. A medical student who has learned to step around a man mopping a hostel corridor without registering his face will step around him again on the ward. The reverse is also possible. A student who learns the name of the man who washes his clothes, asks after his family, pays him on time and treats his work as work has practised, years before it is needed, a form of attention a ward requires.
Recognition does not repair a structure, and I do not want to suggest that knowing a sweeper’s name makes his wage fair. But it is the beginning of seeing what the hostel’s liberty costs, and who pays for it.
Seniors #
The other people who shaped hostel life were older students, and here nostalgia has the most to answer for.
Residential schools and colleges in the English tradition built hierarchy into their living arrangements. In Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), set at Rugby, younger boys serve older ones under the system of fagging, and the novel’s most notorious scene is a punishment administered by a bully. Tom refuses to sell his ticket in a sweepstake to the older boy Flashman, and Flashman and his companions decide to “roast” him: they hold him before the hall fire until he faints. Hughes notes how the group forms. “One or two boys hesitate, but the rest join in.” Afterwards, two or three of the boys who helped come to Tom, beg his pardon, and thank him “for not telling anything.”
Those two sentences describe the mechanism of hazing everywhere. The cruelty is done by a few and permitted by many who hesitate and then join, and it survives because its victims are honoured for silence. The English word that Indian colleges adopted for the practice, ragging, comes from the slang of British schools and universities, where to rag someone meant to tease or torment him, and the practice came with the word. In Indian hostels it became an initiation: a period at the start of the first year in which seniors could demand performances, deference and obedience from freshers, defended as a way of breaking the ice and building the bonds of a college.
The history of that initiation in India is partly a history of deaths. In 1996 a first-year medical student at Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu was killed by a senior, and in 1997 Tamil Nadu became the first state to pass a law against ragging. In May 2001 the Supreme Court of India, hearing a public-interest petition brought by the Vishwa Jagriti Mission, issued guidelines against the practice. In 2006 the Court directed the central government to form a committee, chaired by the former director of the Central Bureau of Investigation R. K. Raghavan, to recommend measures. In March 2009 Aman Kachroo, a first-year medical student in Himachal Pradesh, died after being ragged by seniors, and that year the University Grants Commission issued regulations on curbing ragging and a national anti-ragging helpline began work. The definition now used nationally describes ragging as any act of physical or mental abuse, including bullying and exclusion, directed at a student on grounds that include colour, caste, regional origin, linguistic identity, place of residence and economic background. Reported complaints have continued since, and medical colleges have remained prominent among the institutions named.
The defence of ragging is better answered on its own terms than with a list of tragedies. It runs like this. Initiation is ancient and nearly universal. A shared ordeal binds a cohort; juniors who have been through it together become close, and their relationship with the seniors who tested them often turns into the patronage and mentorship on which a medical career depends. Social psychology even appears to support it. In a famous experiment published in 1959, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills found that students who had undergone a severe and embarrassing initiation to join a discussion group afterwards rated the group, which was deliberately dull, more favourably than those who had undergone a mild initiation or none. Ordeal, on this evidence, produces loyalty.
The experiment is right, and that is precisely the trouble. Aronson and Mills explained their finding through cognitive dissonance: people who have suffered to gain something persuade themselves that it was worth the suffering. Applied to ragging, the finding explains why so many former freshers defend what was done to them, and why so many go on to do it to the next year. The loyalty is real; it is purchased by a distortion of judgment, and it reproduces itself. As for the bonds between juniors, the remedy shows that they need no ordeal. Students who share rooms, examinations, a mess and a timetable for five years have every condition for closeness that ragging claims to supply. And the mentorship of seniors, which is genuinely valuable, flourishes better where the first thing a junior learns about a senior is that he can be asked a question safely. What ragging teaches medical students in particular is a lesson they should never learn: that power over a frightened person is an entitlement of rank, and that the frightened person’s silence is a virtue.
A Door That Does Not Lock #
Communal living is a long exercise in managing privacy without walls. A shared room is a place where letters are read within sight of someone else, where telephone calls from home are taken in a corridor, where illness, grief, homesickness and prayer happen in front of a person one did not choose. Bodies share bathrooms. Moods are audible. The doors may lock, but the life behind them is overheard.
What students learn under these conditions is less privacy than its etiquette. They learn not to read what is left on a desk, not to repeat what was heard through a wall, to look away when someone is crying, to leave a room for a few minutes when a roommate needs it, to pray or not pray without comment on how the other does. The etiquette is imperfect and unevenly practised, and its failures are the stuff of hostel cruelty: the letter read aloud, the illness mocked, the secret circulated. But at its best it is a sophisticated social skill, the art of being present at another person’s private moment without exploiting it.
That art is, almost exactly, what a hospital ward demands of a doctor. A ward is also a room of strangers who did not choose one another, separated by a curtain where there is one and by nothing where there is not, in which the most private things a person ever says are said within earshot of others. The doctor at the bedside is present at moments that ought to be private, and must behave as though they were. A student who has lived in close quarters has rehearsed, without knowing it, the discretion this requires. A student who learned in a hostel that other people’s privacy is entertainment has rehearsed the opposite.
I want to be careful not to make this sound like a hidden curriculum of virtue. Many people learn discretion without living in a hostel, and many hostel residents never learn it. The claim is narrower: communal living presents the problem of other people’s privacy every day, at close range, to people who will later hold a great deal of it, and how they solve the problem at twenty is not irrelevant to how they will solve it at forty.
A Hospital in Myself #
The most private thing in any hostel is illness, and a medical students’ hostel has a peculiar relationship to it, because its residents spend their evenings reading about diseases.
Jerome K. Jerome described the consequence in 1889, in the opening chapter of Three Men in a Boat, though his narrator is no medical student. He goes to the British Museum to look up the treatment for a touch of hay fever, idly turns the pages, and discovers, before he is halfway down the list of premonitory symptoms of some devastating scourge, that he has it. He goes on alphabetically. He has typhoid fever, St Vitus’s dance, ague, cholera with severe complications, and diphtheria apparently from birth; the only malady he can conclude he has not got is housemaid’s knee, and he feels rather slighted by the omission. Then he reflects on what an acquisition he would be to a medical class. Students would not need to walk the hospitals if they had him. “I was a hospital in myself.”
Medical educators gave the joke a name, medical students’ disease, and studied it seriously from the 1960s onward. The most useful study I know is a modest one. In 2001 Rona Moss-Morris and Keith Petrie compared 92 first-year and 85 third-year medical students at the University of Auckland with 82 law students. Both groups of medical students were more likely than the law students to report thinking they might have an illness they were studying. The first-year students were also more distressed by such thoughts, and had more hypochondriacal concerns, than either the law students or the third-years. Yet the medical students had not visited doctors more often. The authors concluded that the phenomenon is better understood as a normal effect of learning about disease, a change in how one perceives one’s own sensations, than as hypochondria; that students might be told about it on arrival to reduce the distress; and that it could serve as a personal example in teaching how patients make sense of their symptoms.
A hostel full of medical students is an incubator for this normal effect. A whole corridor reads the same chapter in the same week. A cough heard through a wall in the week of the respiratory lectures is a different cough from the one heard a month before. Pulses are counted, lymph nodes searched for, tongues inspected in the mirror. Much of it is comedy, and students know it; the jokes about whose turn it is to have the disease of the week are a way of managing a real, if passing, fear. But the corridor also becomes something else, an informal clinic without a qualified doctor in it. Students take one another’s blood pressure, listen to one another’s chests, offer diagnoses with the authority of last week’s lecture, and pass medicines from room to room. This is where many medical students first practise medicine on another person, and they practise it on friends, unsupervised, with the confidence of the half-taught.
Two risks follow, and they point in opposite directions. The first is overreaction: the student who frightens himself or his neighbour with a diagnosis read rather than found, and treats it. The second, more dangerous, is underreaction: the student who is genuinely ill and keeps it private, treats himself from the shelf of a neighbour, and tells no one qualified, because admitting illness feels like a failure of the competence he is being trained to display, and because his friends, who are students like him, assure him it is nothing. Doctors are known for self-treating and for coming late to their own care; it is reasonable to suspect that the habit begins in rooms like these, where a medical identity is formed before medical judgment, and where the nearest consultant is the student next door.
There is a gift hidden in medical students’ disease, and the Auckland authors saw it. A student who has lain awake convinced that the lump under his jaw is what the textbook says it might be knows, from the inside, the night a patient spends after reading about a symptom. Patients now read about their symptoms in greater quantity and with less guidance than any medical student, and the fear they bring to the clinic is the fear Jerome turned into comedy. A doctor who was once, as a student, a hospital in himself for a week has the beginning of the patience that fear requires.
Equal Rooms, Unequal Lives #
Hostel rooms are usually identical, and the sameness can disguise how unequal the lives inside them are. Two students with the same bed, the same desk and the same mess bill may differ in almost everything that money and background decide: one goes home every weekend and one cannot afford to; one has a steady allowance and one waits anxiously for the next transfer from home; one arrived fluent in the English of the lecture hall and one is translating, silently, from Punjabi or Hindi; one has clothes for every occasion and one has two shirts that he washes in rotation. Wordsworth’s “fears / About my future worldly maintenance” were not his alone.
The hostel can soften these differences or sharpen them. A common table, a common timetable and a common set of rules do level a good deal, and many students from poorer homes have found in a hostel a degree of equality that the world outside did not offer them. But the same closeness that levels also exposes. Differences that might stay invisible to classmates who go home each evening are on display in a shared room: what is in the trunk, what is eaten from it, who pays for the round of tea, who is never at the cinema. The definition of ragging now in force, with its list of grounds that includes economic background and place of residence, reads in part like a map of what close quarters make visible.
Nothing in this calls for particular stories, and I will tell none. It calls only for an honest refusal of the comfortable claim that everyone in a hostel lived the same life because they lived in the same building.
What Communal Life Leaves #
Graduates of hostels often say that it made them tough, or resilient, or ready for anything. Some of them are right. The claim deserves more suspicion than it usually receives, though, because it is told by the people for whom the experience worked. Those whom hostel life wore down, through loneliness, bullying, poverty or illness, are less often the ones telling the story at a reunion, and some of them left medicine altogether. Resilience attributed to an institution is often survivorship described from the inside.
What communal life can leave, at its best, is something less heroic and more useful: the knowledge that independence is a social arrangement. A student who lives in a hostel has his own key and his own hours, and he also depends, every day, on the habits of his neighbours, the tolerance of his roommate, the labour of people who cook, clean and guard, the rules of a warden and the restraint of seniors. Liberty, in the hostel, is lent. It is lent by people whose work and patience make it possible, and it can be withdrawn by people who abuse it. The sixteenth-century description of Oxford was right that hostels had more liberty than colleges. It did not say whose liberty it was, or who maintained it.
The hostel and the hospital are cousins in more than etymology. Both shelter strangers who did not choose one another. Both depend on labour the residents barely see. Both require of their occupants a daily tolerance of other people’s bodies, noises, habits and griefs. And both are places through which people pass on their way to somewhere else, leaving their names on doors that will soon carry other names. A doctor who has understood what made a student’s freedom possible is better placed to understand what a hospital asks of its patients, and of the people who keep it running. Hostel years, whatever else they are, are years of being sheltered by a hospitale. The return on that shelter is to remember, in the other one, who is doing the sheltering.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. Public biography relied on: MBBS at Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Amritsar, 1997–2002; Punjabi as first language. The etymology of hostel (Old French, Late Latin hospitale, hospes; doublet of hotel and hospital), its disuse from the late seventeenth century until Scott’s revival in Marmion (1808) as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary, the Marmion line “Deep slumbering on the hostel floor,” the obsolete sense of an Oxford or Cambridge hall with the quotation from Holinshed’s Chronicles, and the South Asian sense of a student residence: Wiktionary, “hostel.” The two roots of mess (Old French mes, Late Latin missum from mittere; Old English mēse from Latin mensa): Wiktionary, “mess.” William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 text), Book III, “Residence at Cambridge,” and William Knight’s footnote on the rooms above the kitchens and their later removal, quoted from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 3, ed. Knight (Project Gutenberg eBook 12383); Wordsworth’s entry to St John’s in October 1787 is from the same footnote. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), quoted from Project Gutenberg eBook 1480: fagging, the roasting by Flashman, “One or two boys hesitate, but the rest join in,” and the boys thanking Tom “for not telling anything.” Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back, Social Pressures in Informal Groups (Harper, 1950); the Westgate and Westgate West findings on physical and functional distance: standard reference knowledge. Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, “The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59 (1959): 177–181; the design, result and dissonance explanation: standard reference knowledge. The history of anti-ragging measures in India (Tamil Nadu’s law of 1997, the Supreme Court judgment of May 2001 on the Vishwa Jagriti Mission petition, the 2006 direction that produced the Raghavan Committee, the 2009 University Grants Commission regulations after Aman Kachroo’s death, the national helpline from June 2009, the current national definition including exclusion and economic background, and medical colleges’ prominence in recent complaint figures): Wikipedia, “Ragging,” section on India, and the sources it cites. The 1996 killing of a first-year medical student at Annamalai University, Kachroo’s place of study in Himachal Pradesh, and the British school and university slang sense of rag: standard reference knowledge. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889), chapter 1, quoted from Project Gutenberg eBook 308 (the British Museum reading, housemaid’s knee, “I was a hospital in myself”). Rona Moss-Morris and Keith Petrie, “Redefining medical students’ disease to reduce morbidity,” Medical Education 2001;35(8):724–728 (PubMed abstract, PMID 11489098): 92 first-year and 85 third-year medical students and 82 law students at the University of Auckland; findings and conclusions as stated. Earlier studies of the phenomenon: R. C. Hunter, J. G. Lohrenz and A. E. Schwartzman, “Nosophobia and hypochondriasis in medical students,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 1964;139:147–152 (PubMed record, PMID 14206454), and S. M. Woods, J. Natterson and J. Silverman, “Medical students’ disease: hypochondriasis in medical education,” Journal of Medical Education 1966;41:785–790 (PubMed record, PMID 4380602). Physicians’ tendency to self-treat and delay their own care: standard reference knowledge, stated as general. The abolition of untouchability by Article 17 of the Constitution of India (1950), the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, and the historical assignment of sanitation work by caste: standard reference knowledge. Pinnī, the ਸਾਂਝਾ ਚੁੱਲ੍ਹਾ, the dhobī, student-run hostel messes and the Indian-English sense of mess: standard reference knowledge of Punjabi and Indian usage, stated as general. Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. The public biography does not say where the author lived as a student, and the essay asserts nothing about it. No hostel, room, roommate, meal, member of staff, senior or incident from the author’s years is described or implied; all descriptions of hostel life are general, and the only scenes are from Wordsworth, Hughes and Scott, identified as such. The essay contains no hypothetical scene. Nothing is asserted about accommodation, rules or staff at any particular institution.
Analysis and forecast. The reading of Wordsworth’s floors, the treatment of hostel and hospital as institutional cousins, the argument against ragging and its reading of Aronson and Mills, the remarks on privacy as rehearsal for the ward, and the suspicion of resilience narratives are the author’s interpretation and ethical preference. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.