 When you go out into the big bad world, you will find people who will not even give you the time of day leaving on a shoulder to pry on. However, in spite of all odds, you will get a chance to do good in life. Grab it. The other day I came across a Fox News item. I put a young doctor in Sinai Grace Hospital in Detroit. He happened to be in the scene of an accident on his way to work. He rescued the people from the crash. He gave them first aid until the ambulance arrived 40 minutes later. When I saw this interview at Fox News, I recognized him. He was in my first batch of students in MUA in med 3 when I joined in 2009. So what is the carry home message from this? Try to do at least one good thing whenever possible, without any expectations whatsoever. If you get recognition, fine. If not, you are still richer in spirit. One day, during my second post graduation, I was walking along a small street in London. And I was not even sure where I was. Suddenly I saw a small block on a small building. It was so stunning that I immediately took out my cheap analog camera, because I did not have any iPhone 5s in those days, and snapped this picture. In 1929, Alexander Fleming, a meteorologist, had gone only leaving his laboratory in charge of his assistant. When he came back, he noticed that his assistant had not taken proper care of the petri dishes. They were all contaminated with fungal cultures. In disgust, he was about to throw it out of the window, when he suddenly did a double peek. He noticed that there were clear zones around the cultures where the fungus boats had germinated. He thought these fungus must be generating something, and yes, he was right. This was penicillin, which was generating penicillin and killing the cultures. This was the window from which he was about to throw away his specimen, and this was the building which housed the lab of Alexander Fleming. Alexander Fleming gave us penicillin, gave us antibiotics, and a small piece of medical history was created, and that is why I snapped this picture with my cheap analog camera on Pride Street, London. I won't be able to find it again. So what is the carry-home message from this? Learn from the past. But keep an open mind for the future. Who knows? As Dr. Samir said, you may be the next Fleming, and the next Nobel Prize winner. That is pre-med, but we still will agree. What does the king get to this story? Medicine gave us the magic bullet. It saved numerous lives during the Second World War. It ushered in that divided era, but it also gave us blood resistance. It gave us anapalexis. And I have had the misfortune of seeing a patient die in front of me from anaphylactic reaction to penicillin testos. Leave it on the full dose. So we found a never-ending vicious cycle of more powerful antibiotics and more powerful drug resistance, and we have not been able to come out of this vicious cycle even today. So that is the whole problem with modern medical knowledge. You can create a magic bullet, but you never know when it can boomerang on you. Just like a magic. And open up a proverbial can of worms. You see, the story never really ends in medicine. While I was in the same job on the same day in London with the same cheap analog camera, I snapped this picture. It is a statue of Sherlock Holmes. For those of you who do not know about him, he is a fictitious detective character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Now this Holmes, he was a formidable detective. He could solve seemingly impossible cases with his phenomenal powers of deductive reasoning. He could observe things where others had missed. What many people do not know, his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a fully qualified medical doctor himself. Doyle was impressed by his own chief physician who could make phenomenal diagnosis using his formidable powers of observation and deduction. And Doyle endured all these powers into his character, Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes series of books remain in the best of the list for many, many years. Just as a sideline, in one book, Doyle got Sherlock Holmes killed. The public got so furious, they besieged his house, they threw rotten eggs at his house, and they demanded that you bring Sherlock Holmes back to life. And he was forced to bring Sherlock Holmes back to life in his next book, and he was knighted. That's why he's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is my role model, and I still try to follow Holmes' reasoning techniques in all my clinical reasoning whenever and wherever possible. So what is the carry-home message for us here? Always have a role model to follow, and work at perfecting what you do best. Observe. Don't just see. Listen. Don't just hear. Understand. Don't just read and memorize. That is what Sherlock Holmes is to do. That's what I believe in. During your career, you may get a chance to work in diverse, exotic, outlandish, or even unpleasant places. I know of some of my ex-students who have been to many places. So let's see what we can learn from some of these exotic places in the world that I have experienced. This is a map of an island which nobody will be able to pronounce. It's called Kurugufushi. It's on the Indian Ocean. You won't find it. It's so small. It's smaller than Davis, and it's a population of just 7,000 people. I was fortunate enough to be a consultant surgeon in this hospital, Kurugufushi Regional Hospital. One day, the pediatrician referred one child, two-year-old child to be. I diagnosed necrotizing colitis. The child was in a bad shape. He was just one-and-a-half feet away from his grave, BP 40 millimeters systolic. I told the father, without surgery, he is going to die. With surgery, there is only a 10% chance that he may live. The father gave consent. When I opened up, I found that gangrenous, total collect. The whole gang, Kurugufushi gangrenous, so I had to do an emergency total collect to me. And I performed it in 13 minutes because I had no choice. When I finished the surgery, I had added 10 years to my life. I had lost whatever little hair I had on my head. I had lost a lot of hair. The stress was so much. It was so much stress. Miraculously, the child survived. His number was not up yet. So what is the kind of message for us? Life is not always going to be a bed of roses. At times, you will have to be gentle as a flower. At other times, you may need to be ruthlessly bowled, like a scaffold of a surgeon. Make your decision wisely. Leave the risk to almighty. This is a picture of Tugruk. It's on the Mediterranean coast. You can see the Mediterranean sea here. This peaceful picture realize the fact that this was a zone of one of the most ferocious battles in the Second World War. First the Italians took it, then the British took it, then the Germans took it, then the British took it again. So it had been seeing war on and off continuously. And some of the most remnants of the war are still there in this island. And these are the pictures which have taken the same analog camera. Now, I was working in a hospital. Interestingly, this hospital had a very unique name. It is called 28 March Hospital. Because 28 March happens to be a very significant day in the history of Second World War. I don't know what exactly it was, though. Now, this tape Tugruk is bounded by the Sahara Desert on one side and the Mediterranean Sea on the other side. And it is just 150 kilometers from the Egypt border. And the entire desert zone is still dotted with thousands of landmines from the Second World War era. And you have guessed it. Smugglers, they try to cross the border illegally and almost invariably, they used to step on the landmines. And we used to get cases at the rate of one or two per, sometimes three per week, with the lake completely blown off from Second World War mines 70 years ago. They're still there. Well, I've not put any pictures of landmine lake blown off because all of you were right away from here. Furthermore, the same Tugruk, because it was bordering the Sahara Desert, we used to get these terrible desert storms, which were called Ghibli. Sometimes it used to go on for the worst one, went on for 72 hours. It used to completely blow up the sun and make it into day to night. And these are the times we used to get the number of cases that we used to see to rise exponentially, all sorts of cases, including psychiatric cases. Many of you would have seen the movie, Hotel Rwanda. Well, actually, it's not Hotel Rwanda. Rwanda is the name of the country. The name of the hotel is, hotel, they may call it, meaning land of thousand hills. Now, this Rwanda is an extremely beautiful country. But what many people may not know, that it was the scene of mankind's second worst ethnic genocide after Hitler. Two million people were massacred in the next month. I was a lecturer in surgery in this University of Putare, National University of Rwanda in Putare, and I was working in this hospital, central hospital of Chigali, during the rebuilding process after the Civil War. And even when I was there, you can see these evidences of bullet holes. This happened to be the house of my hospital administrator. Now, interestingly, in Chigali, Rwanda is a francophone country. So most of the people there speak French. They do not understand English. Whenever I have to give a lecture in English, there's this Belgian doctor who was bilingual who could speak English and French. He used to translate all my English into French. Hence, to simultaneously tell the audience what I was telling. So that was just an interesting side-light. So what is the carry-on message from all these stories? Do not hesitate to go out of your comfort zones. Do not hesitate to get diverse experience. The more varied the experience, the richer will be your knowledge and the richer will be your quality of life. You don't want premature cortical dementia, do you? Is that you? That's why I took this diverse experience. Some of you are going to be posted in Jackson Park Hospital in Chicago, JPH. So let me tell you two short, interesting stories, not from my side, but actual stories in Chicago, and we'll talk. In the 1920s, there was this notorious gangster called Al Capone, who had a lawyer whose name was Ezi Adi. Ezi Adi was so smart that he had kept Al Capone out of jail. One day Al Capone decided, as Ezi Adi decided that he wants to turn state evidences, he knew the price would be very heavy. And in spite of that, he did inform everything to the 30s. Al Capone was arrested, and Ezi Adi met his death at the hands of the mob. This happened in the 1920s and 30s. Let's fast forward to the 1942 Pacific Front, the Second World War. During this time, the war was going very badly for America. America was getting defeated in all fronts. This is a picture of USS Lexington aircraft carrier. Eight Japanese bombers were on the point of bombing this when Lieutenant Commander Bujko here took off. And using his small fighter plane, he knocked out five bombers in less than four minutes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave him the Medal of Honor and he was made the first ace of the Second World War. He died one year later, again in another dogfight, and then Chicago honored him. And the International Airport in Chicago is called O'Hare International Airport, named after Lieutenant Commander Bujko O'Hare. And you will see this memorial of Bujko O'Hare in the airport. So what is the carry-home message from all these two stories of Chicago? Valor, honor, integrity, courage, but also something deeper. Aim for excellence rather than success. Success will follow automatically. And always be ready to go the extra mile. To conclude, you're all joining a special profession. You are in the survival business, but remember, you're also in the mortality business. Your successes will be restricted by the limits of your knowledge and capability, by the inevitability of suffering and death. You have to learn to help people make the most of what is known and cope with what is not known. This will take science. It will also take art. It will take innovation. It will take ambition. It will take humility. But the most fascinating thing is that you will get to do it all. Like in that Fables Beatles song, Hotel California, you can always check out, but you can never really leave. Don't let you win it to the present, because that is a barrier to thinking about the future. And after you have saved your world, your society, your family, your friends, do not forget to spare a minute for yourselves. The story is not over anymore.