You did what?

Life at the bottom of the food chain is no fun. The antelopes know it,and so do interns. You might not get eaten,but as an apprentice,probationer,or just as a fuchcha on the job you can be sure to have your sense of self wounded and your ego torn asunder. After the glories of being boss in school and college,the work world quickly shows you that you are quite simply8230;nothing. Interns in prestigious international organisations often spend their mornings photocopying and making coffee. Duties of style interns in glossy magazines resemble those of a well-trained Labrador. They spend hours fetching,arranging and returning. Their other duties include masking and un-masking shoes,which involves sticking paper to the shoes soles so that the soles dont get dirtied during a photoshoot. And then removing the paper,before returning them to boutiques afterwards. Chefs spend weeks cutting 30 kilos of onions before they are allowed anywhere near the cooking range. But someone has got to do this work,and interns are the obvious choice. Much of this labour is performed free and only at the cost of the interns self-image.

Siddharth Menon decided to be a doctor in class six in order to save lives. But as an apprentice at a leading government hospital in Delhi,he quickly realised that his heroics would be of a baser nature. He describes the early morning digital faecal impaction removal for distressed old men before breakfast. The old man would be made to lie on his side,while Menon,wearing a yellow glove,with lubricant applied on the forefinger,had to manually break up the impaction,careful not to increase the patients discomfort. The old man would then be given

an enema and Menon would be

given breakfast.

Medical interns have numerous stories of fainting in operation theatres,and being yelled at for collapsing on the sterilised equipment.

V Mohan recalls his first day as an intern,10 years ago: I was posted in an ICU. The senior doctor called me and asked me to continue CPR Cardiopulmonary resuscitation on a patient. One by one,the senior doctors left the ICU. I continued the CPR for a while and asked the nurse to get a torch and examined the patients eyes they were dilated. I frantically reached out for the senior doctor and told him this. He looked at me and casually said,The patient had already passed away. I wanted to see how youd handle the situation.

Internships are the rightful passage between child and adult. They push you to the corner and force you to grow a thick skin,as Samuel Verghese of the Indian Administrative Service found out.

Most people associate the IAS with powerful babus living in plush houses in inaccessible colonies,but the beginnings are far more modest. Verghese recalls his days as Sub-divisional Magistrate in Kashmir of the Seventies. The winters were heartless,and staying options limited. On tours in in Karnah closer to Muzaffarabad than to district headquarters in Kashmir and in Kishtwar 200 kms from Jammu,famous for saffron and sapphires,Verghese found more than hed bargained for. He says,There were no dak bungalows in the remoter areas of Kishtwar,and while on tour we had to bed down in peoples houses,often sharing accommodation with cattle,goats,and other domestic animals,who,according to standard practice were stabled in the ground floor. He didnt mind the animals as much as he minded the fleas. He would spend his nights listening to animals chew and stomp and snore,trying to ignore the fleabites,which left him sore and itchy. On return from tours which would often last weeks,it was only after a brutal scrub in boiling water that he would enter his house. The clothes of the SDM had to be boiled before they were taken in.

But animal stories are aplenty in the capital as well,as Mansi Sharma discovered,while working for a television channel. Like most journalists,she joined the profession believing that her stories would make a difference,but early in her career,she once found herself shadowing a monkey catcher for a day and a half. When the police commissioners 12-year-old daschund,Toto,went missing,she found herself scouring the city for visuals of a lost dog. How do you show a missing dog? she asks,before bursting into a laugh,You have to have pictures for a TV story,and we had none. Sharma then told her cameraperson to shoot the pamphlet for the missing dog,while she got people to stare at it intently. She then proceeded to a dog shelter,surrounded herself with many mutts,wondered aloud whether poor Toto was among them,and signed off,hoping that Toto would have its day.

Captain Ashok Dewan remembers his delusions as a young naval cadet. A cadet passing out after three years at the hallowed Naval Academy feels he is at the height of responsibility,in impeccable starched uniform,with always-gleaming shoes, but little does he know what is in store for him. Captain MV Prabhakar goes on to describe his training aboard the INS Krishna when he and 26 young men were cadets from the 34th NDA course in 1968. On the very first day,a complete head-shave quickly established them as the lowest form of marine life,even lower than planktons and barnacles, just as the CDO Cadet Divisional Officer,had promised them.

Prabhakar adds,Six months on board a warship,as a cadet,is probably the toughest training one can undergo in life. Those six months are spent in learning all aspects of the navy starting at the lowest rung of the naval ladder. Besides learning cooking,guard and sentry duties,cleaning,sweeping,they also learned how to stitch and repair clothes. No wonder we make such wonderful husbands, he says with a laugh.

As the ship sailed from Mumbai to Mombasa Kenya,the Indian Ocean pounded the ship,and nausea pitched the cadets. The rolling sea broke the crockery and they soon found themselves eating out of lampshades. The training also required the use of small arms and weapons. Prabhakar once had to throw a hand grenade over the ships side. Unfortunately,it fell very close to the ship,upsetting the CDO. Later,I had to run around the ships upper deck with two hand grenades with pins removed,and my heart in my mouth, he says.

Looking back at those experiences of over 40 years,Dewan and Prabhakar agree that the hardships brought them together for life. Those six months gave us stuff that memories are made up of stuff you can relate to your grandkids as they sit on your lap, says Prabhakar,grandfather of four.

Koel Sethi too has ample stories to share from her days as a trainee for an English feature film shot in Delhi. When I started work on a feature film,I thought I was about to do something exciting,creative,and perhaps even slightly glamorous. My first day at work was spent sitting in a corner trying to read a script. As time went by,I was upgraded to carrying the directors handbag,familiarising myself with the cooks of her house,and patting the dogs. Closer to when the shoot was about to begin,I thought that that would be my moment,I would finally get to see a shoot,except,I was babysitting the actresss child,who could mostly speak Italian and count in English. On set,she found herself looking after the child stars,whose mothers would call her frequently to ask what milk she was using for the kids hot chocolate. Whenever the children would be required for a shot,a sock would go missing,milk would spill on a dress,or the child would simply not like the colour of her sandals. The only time of rest during the month-long shoot was when I had to get a root canal done on my way to pick up the child from school. I actually used to look forward to the anaesthesia and the reclining chair, says Sethi,with a grin. And,oh yes, she adds,We also had to boil some tea on set in the middle of the night to dye the lead actresss costume.

But its this menial work that makes adults of children. Its work that keeps the millions of cogs oiled and the machinery running. As Sethi says,I did learn that in a film,no work is menial. If the food is not ready on time,then the crew gets late; if the set is not ready,then the lighting cant be done,and until that is done,the director cant call action! I still value that learning experience tremendously.

As for me,I learnt that advertising was not for me. n

Some names have been changed to protect identities