The curious case of MEDICON- 2016

"If anything can go wrong, it will." ~ Murphy's law.

 It was recently, while I was skimming through the pages of my dusted Grays anatomy when I discovered a disturbing psychedelic piece of drawing sketched at the back pages . At first look, it seemed like a caveman’s first attempt at discovering art in stone age, or perhaps a modern bizarre art that’s  simply appreciated without involving much of your brain. It was a some sort of twisted sthescope that began from nucleotides and ended up in arteries, veins, and probably every other evolutionary body structure that has ever existed in homo sapiens till date. A warm gush of sodium ran through my membranes upon seeing that drawing. It was one among the hundreds of failed attempts at getting the perfect Medicon logo.

I was glad no one voted for it. The sketch belonged to the fall of 2015 when we all began discovering our inner hidden talents of sketching, designing, business, advertising and exploring perhaps every other field along with our hectic regular medicine studies, thanks to the medical conference that brought together 30 strangers and several volunteers to carry forward its legacy and etched experiences our neurons would cherish again n again. What started from a scratch, from an empty room in an obscure corner of the college building has now become a talk of the town with its banners n posters not only all over the sepia tinted streets of lucknow, but in every elite institution of the country which feeds the hunger for research and supports the cause of MEDICON. But this is not the story of those big banners designed by little fingers on a malfunctioning laptop, its not about the hundreds of hours of argument over the logo selection, its neither about molding all the things together in a sequential manner, piece by piece , sweat by sweat, to organize a flawless medical conference.

Like any other MEDICON in the past years, it involves drama, politics, romance, bad decisions and heated argumentary sessions that ensured we stuck together. It’s about the geek who went mad for a girl from overseas( while clearing her confusions regarding the conference on his cell phone), about the bald guy who could bargain an airplane in the price of a pizza, the pout faced delhite who came up with the best logo our minds could comprehend, the small misprints in big posters, about the Spartan who went broke ordering pizzas and coke for everyone, about the scooter carrying thousands of Medicon flexes that went missing in broad daylight, the coffee stained aprons, the meetings held after exhausting 8 hour ward duties, the lack of funds, newborn crushes, and most importantly about the legendary campus dog , who photo bombed our very first open air Medicon group photograph. yeah, that’s how unique our team was .

We were more like a suicide squad team, each with a unique skill, brought together for some greater good. A Spartan presiding over the meetings who spoke loud enough to wake up the cadavers, a pout faced girl blowing bubble gums every second, a cholesterol driven guy who couldn't fit in the small chair provided to us, and other strangers who were the same creepy as I.

The only person calm amidst the chaos was Dr House in his 10"*15" poster hung behind the meeting table, flaunting a brain in his hand, with his timeless quote beside it that said," USE IT! “It started out as a challenge, a challenge to divide the limited 24 hours, make the best out of our limited resources, handle the frustrations, face the gruesome rejections and keep going on with the ebb n flow of a regular medico schedule. And somewhere between picking up a pencil to design the first logo and watching the overwhelming response with a can of coke in our hands , we learnt more than we did in lecture halls. We grew up. Cell by cell. Slowly replicating in the silence of the night, until there was a big bang and everyone knew about it. The empty room bloomed with life way sooner than we had expected, an looked more of our hostel rooms. A couch, more 'Dr House' posters, Computers to manage the website, a board displaying all our posters and piles of them scattered all over for our daily use. The first step was designing a logo that would best suit the conference theme.

All we had was a pencil and all we did day and night was to think of the best creative way to represent Translational medicine in form of a logo. What followed were dustbins full of rejected ideas, all night long clashes in the whatsapp group, and search for a better and a better idea. There was blood spilled all over the white sheets, syringes and microscopes in place of letters and ECG waves coming out of paracetamol tablets which ultimately flattened n ended up in the trashcans. Our surreal drawings and the brimming over creativity would have put Salvador Dali to shame. 8 days, hundreds of designs and a hell lot of criticisms later, the bubblegum finally popped and the pout faced girl came up with the best possible arrangement of research, medicine and patient in a single logo. There were clashes but we finally settled with this one because this was exactly what we needed, no more, no less.

And that’s how the journey began...