What is a mentor?
This is from an invited post I wrote on the Facebook group 'Learning General Surgery'. During my residency at Maulana Azad Medical College, I was initially assigned to the unit of the head of the department, Dr TK Malik. The less said about that part of my residency, the better. However, I did have good second and third year residents from whom I learnt how to look after patients. Halfway through my second year, Dr Malik retired and a new unit was created with two Consultants, Dr Vinod Malik and Dr Ram Kaza . Being the most junior unit at the time, they had the Saturday emergency and were always short of staff. For a considerable period of time, there were no third year PGs, no first year PGs and no regular Senior Residents. There were, however, two second year PGs, Brundaban Nahak and me. Dr Vinod Malik and Dr Ram Kaza were gentle bosses, allowing us to figure out how to keep the day to day running of the unit going, putting up...