When we passed out as Medical Doctors, acquiring the MBBS title and finished our one year internship, in the Department of Health in Ceylon, we were placed in the Preliminary grade. This was for two years. We had to sit and pass an oral test in Sinhalese for the Tamil officers and a Tamil test for the Sinhalese officers, to get into Grade 2 and confirming our appointment in the Health Department. Quite a few of the crowd made preparations for the exam and I will relate two of the comical interviews.
1. One of my friends who was posted as DMO Walasmulla in 1966, found no one to teach him conversational Tamil. One of his Tamil friends advised him to listen to the Radio Ceylon Tamil transmission, at least for 30 minutes every day. Came the day when he walked in for his Tamil oral test. He walked in and both the examiners greeted him saying “Vanakkam Aiyaa”.
He replied by saying “Vanakkam, ithu ilankai vanoliyin oli parappu thamil sevai’ which meant – “This is the Tamil transmission of Radio Ceylon”.
The flabbergasted examiners looked at each other and requested him to be seated and asked him where he learned his Tamil. He related what he was advised to do, as there were no Tamil speaking people at Walasmulla, where he was working.
The examiners sympathized with him and passed him telling him to learn Tamil at his own pace from a proper teacher.
2. Another friend of mine, lets name him as L.K, went to do the oral test and he found out that one of the examiners was a father, of one of his Tamil batch-mates. Once he was seated comfortably. He was asked in English what he was doing now. He replied in English “I am a house officer in Anesthesia”. He was requested to say it in Tamil, by his friend’s father. L.K. went ballistic and said “Look, I do not know the Sinhalese word for anesthesia. How do you expect me to know its Tamil equivalent”. A rather sedated conversation followed and he was given a pass mark. Looking back that was an easy question because the equivalent word in Tamil for your area of work was always a question asked at the orals.
Those were the fun times we had at the beginning of our careers in the medical profession.
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