1994 was a year of seismic shifts for India, but for us at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (MGIMS), it was simply the year the money ran out.
I was a Reader in Medicine then, managing a ward that never slept and a bank account that was dangerously quiet. I had a lively group of residents, but two stood out: Dr. Prabhat Goel and Dr. Ravi Sautha, both from the Class of 1983. They were a study in contrasts. Prabhat, a Medicine resident, was the cerebral type—the kind who absorbed textbooks by osmosis and could quote Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine as if it were poetry. Ravi, an Orthopedics resident, was the pragmatist—hands-on, energetic, and possessed of a sharp, street-smart clinical eye.
Their enthusiasm was abundant. Their money, like most of ours that year, was nonexistent.
It was a strange, anxious summer. The Institute had fallen foul of Mr. B. Shankaranand, the then Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare. In a move designed to teach the management a lesson, he pulled the purse strings tight. The central government withheld our grant. For two months, salaries simply did not arrive.
In a metro city, you have credit cards or anonymity. In Sevagram, you have neither. There were no overdraft facilities to cushion the fall. We lived on borrowed time, patience, and the immense goodwill of the local kirana shopkeepers who quietly noted our debts in their greasy ledgers without asking questions.
***
It was in the middle of this fiscal drought that my phone rang. It was Dr. Sudhir Bhave from Nagpur.
Sudhir was a kindred spirit—an alumnus of GMC Nagpur (Class of 1976), a psychiatrist with a sharp academic streak, and a man who had music in his blood. He was a storyteller and a singer, the kind of person who could make a mundane event feel like a festival. He was organizing the annual medical quiz for the Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS), Nagpur.
“We want a team from MGIMS,” he said, his voice crackling over the landline. “One teacher and two residents. Will you lead it?”
I looked at Prabhat and Ravi. They were drowning in discharge summaries. I was buried under a pile of lecture notes. We were tired, we were broke, and our minds were occupied with the very real problem of how to pay for next week’s groceries. “We can’t,” I started to say. “There is a trophy,” Sudhir added. “And lunch is on us.”
I paused. A free lunch. A day away from the oppressive heat of the wards. I looked at the boys. They nodded. So, we said yes.
***
Third Class, First Spirits
We travelled the way unpaid doctors travel.
There was no question of hiring a taxi. That was a luxury for consultants with private practices. We pooled whatever crumpled notes and coins we had in our pockets, squeezed our frames into a shared auto-rickshaw to Wardha station, and bought tickets for the unreserved compartment—what we unashamedly called “Third Class.”
The train was a sensory assault. It was packed with the humanity of rural India—farmers with sacks of grain, women with crying babies, students playing cards, and the pervasive smell of sweat, hair oil, and steel. We didn’t find seats. We stood near the door, clinging to the grimy steel rod, swaying with the rhythm of the tracks.
But the mood was electric. Perhaps it was the escape from the hospital, or perhaps it was the absurdity of our situation. We stood there, sweating in our synthetic shirts, grilling each other like schoolboys. “What’s the triad in Felty’s syndrome?” Prabhat shouted over the roar of the wheels. “Rheumatoid arthritis, splenomegaly, neutropenia,” Ravi shot back, dodging an elbow from a fellow passenger. “Don’t ask me triads. Ask me something we actually see!” “Okay, X-ray findings in scurvy?” “White line of Fraenkel!”
We laughed, throwing answers like paper balls, oblivious to the stares of the other passengers who surely wondered why these three men were shouting about spleens and vitamins.
***
The Long Walk on North Ambazari Road
We deboarded at Ajni station. It was a strategic decision—partly to save time, and partly because we didn’t want to look like lost villagers navigating the chaos of the main Nagpur station. From Ajni, we walked. The venue was the IMA Hall on North Ambazari Road. It was a mile and a half away. Under the merciless Vidarbha sun, that mile felt like a marathon. We walked briskly, clutching our small bags, watching the heat rise in waves off the asphalt. By the time we reached the gates of the IMA Hall, our shirts were clinging to our backs like damp towels. Our shoes were coated in grey dust. We looked less like a team of intellectuals and more like three refugees who had just crossed a border.
We had come with no preparation, no books, and absolutely no expectations. It is, I discovered that day, a very light way to travel.
***
The Dark Room and the Slide Projector
Inside the hall, the atmosphere changed instantly. The air-conditioning hit us like a blessing. But the social temperature was different. Teams from the Government Medical College (GMC) and Indira Gandhi Medical College (IGMC) sat in neat, huddled groups. They looked fresh, crisp, and intimidatingly prepared. They had the calm faces of people who had slept well, eaten a proper breakfast, and revised their notes. We were the rural cousins. The underdogs.
But then, the lights went out. The hall plunged into darkness, save for the single, piercing beam of the carousel slide projector. The hum of the projector fan filled the room. “Question One,” the quizmaster’s voice boomed.
Medicine does not care about the starch in your shirt or the money in your pocket. A question is a question—whether you read it in a library in Nagpur or face it in the casualty ward of Sevagram at 2:00 AM. The first slide clicked into place. A blurry image of a retina. The buzzer rounds were brutal. You had seconds to decide.
“Roth Spots,” Prabhat whispered instantly. “Hit it,” I said. Ravi slammed the buzzer. “Correct.”
The questions came fast, a mix of the obscure and the everyday. A chest X-ray showing an odd shadow. An ECG strip with a wandering baseline. A history of a farmer with fever and muscle pain.
This is where the Sevagram grind paid off. Our competitors knew the books. But we knew the patients. We had seen the farmer with Leptospirosis; we had smelled the organophosphorus poisoning; we had held the wrist of the patient with the collapsing pulse. Prabhat was the encyclopedia—he provided the syndrome names. Ravi was the pragmatist—he spotted the fractures and the surgical signs. I played the conductor, keeping us calm, filtering the answers. We worked as a single organism. No ego. No “I think.” Just a whispered consensus and a hand on the buzzer.
There was a moment in the visual round that turned the tide. A slide showed a peculiar skin rash. The other teams hesitated. They were looking for textbook descriptions. Ravi leaned in, squinting at the screen. “That’s Pellagra,” he muttered. “Look at the necklace distribution. We saw a case last week in the OPD.” We buzzed. We scored. By the final round, the “outsiders” label had vanished. The audience was leaning forward. We weren’t just participating; we were dominating.
***
A Hundred Rupees and a Bonus Salary
When the lights came back on, the scoreboard told the story. We had won.
The organizers called us to the stage. There was applause—polite from the rivals, enthusiastic from Sudhir Bhave. They handed us a gleaming trophy and certificates. Then, they handed us an envelope. Inside was the cash prize: ₹100 each.
To a modern reader, a hundred rupees is barely a tip. It won’t buy you a coffee at an airport. But in 1994, with two months of unpaid wages haunting us, that red note felt like a brick of gold. It wasn’t the purchasing power; it was the timing. It felt like an unexpected IV line when the vein has been playing hide-and-seek for hours. It was validation. It was survival money. We stood there, clutching our certificates and our hundred-rupee notes, grinning like we had won the Nobel Prize.
Lunch followed. And what a lunch it was. The Academy of Medical Sciences did not scrimp. There were steaming vessels of rice, rich gravies, paneer that melted in the mouth, and sweets dripping with syrup. We ate like men who had marched across a desert. We went back for seconds. We scraped our plates. The food tasted better not just because of the hunger, but because we had earned it with our wits.
***
The Silent Victory Lap
The journey back to Sevagram was a blur of exhaustion and euphoria. The trophy sat on my lap like a newborn child that needed guarding. We took a shared auto back to the station and boarded the evening train. This time, we managed to find seats.
The compartment was just as noisy as before, but we were in our own bubble. We replayed the quiz, question by question. “I can’t believe they missed the Atrial Myxoma sound!” “I thought we lost points on that Pharmacology question.” “Did you see the face of the GMC team when we answered the spleen question?”
There were no smartphones in 1994. No WhatsApp groups to flood with “Winner!” emojis. No Instagram stories to post with a #ProudMoment caption. We couldn’t broadcast our victory to the world. We couldn’t even tell our wives until we physically walked through our front doors.
Oddly, that digital silence made the win sweeter. The victory stayed strictly between the three of us, sealed in the rocking motion of the train and the smell of coal smoke. We carried the news home the way people once carried love letters—tucked inside a pocket, private and precious.
When we finally reached Sevagram, dusty and dishevelled, we told our families. Their smiles completed the circle. We had left that morning on an unreserved ticket, unpaid, unprepared, and anxious. We returned with a metal cup, three hundred rupees in our pockets, and the lightness that comes from a small victory when the world feels heavy.
For one day, amidst the salary crisis and the politics, three broke doctors felt like kings.