3
Arrival in Sevagram
Where medicine became my way of life
Arrival, 1982
I arrived in Sevagram in the summer of 1982 with an MD from Government Medical College, Nagpur, a fresh degree, and the kind of confidence young doctors carry before life begins to correct them. On paper, I was trained. In my head, I was ready. In reality, I was still a Wardha boy trying hard to look like a physician.
Sevagram was barely a few kilometres from home, yet it felt like another country. Nagpur had taught me medicine in lecture halls, wards, and exam rooms. Sevagram taught it in corridors, in silences, and in the way people behaved when nobody was watching. It was not just a campus. It was an atmosphere—part institution, part village, part ashram, part battlefield.
MGIMS and Kasturba Hospital had their own rhythm. Work began early, moved fast, and rarely paused to accommodate excuses. The department expected discipline, punctuality, and clinical seriousness. There were no speeches about “values.” Values were assumed. You showed up. You examined patients properly. You wrote notes that made sense. You read. You stayed back. You learned. If you didn’t, you didn’t last.
In those first months, I felt grateful and slightly intimidated. I was entering a department where giants still walked the corridors—Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. A.P. Jain, and Ulhas Jajoo. Their names carried weight. Their clinical judgement was sharp. Their standards were not designed to protect your self-esteem. They did not teach with slides or slogans. They taught by asking the one question you could not answer, and then waiting—calmly, patiently—until you realised how much you did not know.
The residents were a world of their own. They lived on adrenaline, tea from Babulal, dosa from Madras Hotel, milk from Goras Bhandar, and the stubborn belief that sleep was optional. They worked with the intensity of people who had no choice. Their hands moved quickly, their minds even faster. They could diagnose, improvise, and endure in ways that I admired from a safe distance. They also had their own language—half clinical, half comic, entirely practical. In that rough humour, I began to see how young doctors protect themselves from the daily weight of illness.
I, too, began to work harder than I ever had. I read more. I listened more. I spoke less. I learned to keep my ego folded neatly in my pocket, like a handkerchief—useful when needed, but best not displayed. Barely a week after I joined, Dr. O.P. Gupta asked me to present a journal club. The dust had not even settled under my feet. I was still trying to find the ward, the files, and my own voice. Sevagram had a way of beginning the lesson before you had even opened the notebook.
Outside the wards, the campus carried echoes of another legacy. Vinoba Bhave lived in Pavnar, barely six kilometres away. Here, his name was not just remembered; it was spoken with reverence. I was privileged to care for him in the last fortnight of his life, and to witness something rare in medicine—a dignified death, unhurried, almost instructive in its calm.
Sevagram also offered its own side-stories—odd, charming, and completely unplanned. German classes in a rural medical campus. Conversations that began beside a patient’s bed and ended in the library. Encounters that made no sense at the time, but returned years later with meaning.
Meanwhile, my personal life was also changing shape. In February 1984, I married Bhavana. Soon, my days were no longer only about proving myself in the department. They were also about learning how to build a life around the unpredictable hours of medicine. Wardha remained home in the old sense—family, familiarity, the comfort of known streets. Sevagram was becoming home in a new sense—work, purpose, belonging.
And the world outside refused to stay outside. In 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated, Bhavana and I were in Chennai, attending a conference on respiratory medicine. The news arrived like a blow. The country held its breath. Fear travelled faster than facts. Even far from Delhi, you could feel something shift—on railway platforms, in hotel lobbies, in the cautious way people spoke.
For a few years, I lived between Wardha and Sevagram, commuting not just through roads but through identities. In Wardha, I was the son, the brother, the man who still belonged to the old house. In Sevagram, I was the young faculty member expected to perform, improve, and endure. It took time to stop feeling like a visitor.
By 1988, the decision was made. My father had passed away in December 1986, and two years later I moved to Sevagram for good. There was no announcement, no dramatic turning point. It happened the way most real changes happen—quietly, after enough days have passed to make the old arrangement feel inefficient and the new one inevitable.
Looking back, those early Sevagram years were not glamorous. They were formative. They taught me habits that later began to feel like personality: punctuality, persistence, clinical seriousness, and the ability to keep going without applause. They also gave me something rarer—the sense that medicine, practised honestly in a small place, can become not just a profession but a way of life.
The pages that follow are a record of that apprenticeship: my entry into the department, the men who shaped its culture, the residents who taught me by example, and the small events—some serious, some almost comic—that quietly built the Sevagram I would spend the next four decades calling my own.