The common misconception that medicos are glued to their books and are always stuck in hospitals looking after patients was thrown to the wind, when scores of young wannabe doctors surged into the Jâ��Kâ��Grounds to witness ‘Abhivyakth- 2011’, a state-level cultural festival organised recently by Mysore Medical College and Research Institute (MMC and RI).

Doctors from Belgaum Institute of Medical Sciences, JSS�Medical College, SS�Institute of Medical Sciences and Research gave tough competition to art students from the University School of Design during the three-day cultural fest held in the third week of September.

The event turned out to be a huge success as scores of youngsters participated in various competitions.

However, efforts to make the festival a huge success rested on the shoulders of MMC�and RI�students, who pulled it off with ease.

Speaking to City Herald, the cultural secretary of MMC and RI, Sagar G said the main inspiration and support was given by the director and dean Dr Geetha Avadhani, principal Dr P�S�Kaladagi, students welfare officer Dr C�Rajan and cultural chairman Dr K�R�Dakshayini.

Sagar mentioned that seniors including Vinod Rathod, Shivashankar S�Patil and general secretary Preetham Philip Tauro played a key role in helping the young batch to carry out the event.

However, the journey to make the event wasn’t all too easy, says Sagar. “With less than one month to go for the fest, we hadn’t even identified one sponsor. We didn’t have one rupee in our hand. Since we had a few holidays in the first week of September, the internals got extended and everybody were preparing for the internals,” he recalls.

It was then that a few of the students including Mahendranath S�P, Pavan, Bharath, Madhusudhan, Srinivas and Nishant started to meet the sponsors along with general secretary Preetham. As soon as the internals were over the whole batch of 2008 came forward and started helping with the events.

Mentioning that the list would never end if he had to tell all the names of the students, who helped him, Sagar said it would have been impossible to conduct the event without the help of the whole batch.

“ We never imagined that we would get such a huge response for Abhivyakth. We went to nearly 60-70 people for getting sponsors and succeeded in organising the event within our financial limits,” he adds.

Srinivas R, who was in-charge of arranging accommodation for the students from other cities, said that he made new friends by helping out in the event. “We arranged rooms in our hostel and also in youth hostel.

They all went to Mysore palace and KRS during their visit here and were very happy,” he adds.

Co-ordinator Mahendranath said even though in the beginning we were a little worried, we decided to put our whole-hearted effort. “Once we started there was no stopping us,” he says.

“Another important factor, which worked in our favour, was that it didn’t rain during the cultural festival,” he adds gleefully.