India, June 1 -- By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD

The weekend that has just gone by, was a very nostalgic and emotional trip back in time for me, because it marked the passing of a full fifty years of the moment I joined medical college, to embark on my ten-year-long journey to becoming a doctor, with post-graduate qualifications.

It was on a Monday morning, on the 18th of August, in the year 1975 that my sixty-six classmates and I, clad in our smart, new white coats, attended our very first class at the M.R. Medical College, Gulbarga. And, it was to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this momentous event of our lives, that all my classmates decided to meet at Lonavala, near Pune, the location we had chosen for it.

The first time we had ...