For nearly four decades, writing had been part of my profession. I wrote case records, discharge summaries, research papers, grant applications, editorials, and the occasional newspaper article. Each of these demanded precision. Each had to be supported by evidence. And yet none of them belonged entirely to me. They were written for a purpose outside myself — a patient’s file, a journal’s requirements, an institution’s needs. The writing I am describing in this chapter began somewhere else: in the small, unclaimed hours when nothing was owed to anybody.
The Quiet Beginning
Long before social media made everybody a publisher, I had already discovered a modest version of it. I would write a short essay every few months and email it to a small circle of friends. My first email address, [email protected], became an unlikely publishing platform — read, at most, by a few dozen people, most of whom replied out of affection rather than admiration. In 2003 I moved to Rediffmail. A couple of years later, shortly before I left Berkeley and returned to Sevagram, I opened the Gmail account I still use today.
These essays were written whenever an experience refused to leave me alone. I would sit down, write it out, and press “Send.” That was the whole ritual. There was no editor to please and no deadline to meet, only the quiet obligation to get the sentence right. The replies I received, however few, were what kept me going. I did not know it then, but I was already becoming a chronicler. I simply had no name for it.
Those early essays are scattered now — buried in old email folders, forgotten hard drives, and backups that no longer power on. I did not think of them as the beginning of anything. They were just letters to friends. It took many years before I understood that they were the seeds of a much larger project.
A Public Address
A few years later, my son Ashwini suggested that I stop writing only for friends. He opened a Blogger account in my name and built a simple website around it. For the first time, my writing had a public address — a place a stranger could stumble upon without an invitation.
Blogger, roughly fifteen years ago, became my first real digital home. Publishing suddenly required no permission. I no longer needed a newspaper editor or a journal reviewer to decide whether an experience of mine was worth sharing. If something moved me enough, I wrote about it, and anyone willing to read could find it.
The subjects wandered wherever my life had wandered. I wrote about medicine, and about the unnecessary investigations and quiet unkindnesses that pass for standard practice in it. I wrote about surviving my first heart attack, about discovering long-distance cycling in middle age, and about the particular satisfaction of finishing a brevet ride that had seemed impossible at the start. I wrote about books that had shaped me and teachers who had shaped me more. None of it followed a plan. Months would pass with nothing written at all.
Thirteen Years of Interruption
In September 2009, I became Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital, and the trickle of writing very nearly ran dry. Administration does not merely take your time; it colonises your mind. Meetings, budgets, construction, crises — the decisions I made during the day continued to echo through the night. Whatever writing survived those years usually grew directly out of that experience: the ethical dilemmas of running a hospital, the daily compromises of public healthcare, the struggle to keep a large charitable institution functioning on limited means. What little else I wrote wandered wherever the rest of my life happened to wander — medicine, and the unnecessary investigations and quiet unkindnesses that pass for standard practice in it; surviving my first heart attack; discovering long-distance cycling in middle age; the particular satisfaction of finishing a brevet ride that had seemed impossible at the start; books that had shaped me, and teachers who had shaped me more. None of it followed a plan. Months would pass with nothing written at all.
Then, in January 2020, Covid reached India. Our first case was admitted to our hospital two months later. That October, Sahaj, Ashwini, and I wrote a letter to The Lancet Infectious Diseases questioning the use of hydroxychloroquine prophylaxis for Covid-19 contacts in India (The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2020; 20: 1118–1119). It has since been cited 167 times in biomedical journals, and was picked up by journalists and the print media as well.
Something in me shifted after that. I began tweeting almost daily, and posting on Facebook, on everything Covid touched. I wrote poems about the pandemic and put them out on Twitter and Facebook, where they found a far larger audience than anything I had written before. I argued, whenever I could, for trusting and practising science in a time that had little patience for either, and I did not hold back when it came to the irrational use of unproven drugs during the epidemic. But all of this lived on social media. There were no blogs. Whatever discipline I had once brought to a considered essay, written slowly and revised more than once, gave way for those two years to something faster, shorter, and far more reactive — useful in its moment, perhaps, but not the kind of writing that outlasts its moment.
In February 2022, after nearly thirteen years in that post, I stepped down. For the first time in a long while, I was responsible for only two things that had always given me genuine satisfaction — teaching and the care of patients. And something else happened, something I had not expected. The silence that administration leaves behind when it finally departs is louder than the noise it made while it lasted. Into that silence came two things: books, and writing.
An Accidental Discovery
One afternoon, out of nothing more than curiosity, I opened my Google Drive and found that I had quietly accumulated nearly three thousand typed pages over the years — unfinished essays, travel notes, lecture transcripts, family histories, scanned documents, research notes, and fragments of stories I had always intended to finish “someday.” The one thing all this material shared was disorder.
I did not find this overwhelming. I found it, oddly, diagnostic — a familiar kind of problem. Forty years of clinical training had taught me that before you treat anything, you must first take a proper history. Before I could write anything new, I had to organise what already existed. That single, unglamorous exercise — sorting, dating, labelling — turned out to decide the entire direction of my retirement.
GMC 1973: A Class Growing Old Together
The first serious project to emerge from this sorting was, unexpectedly, the most personal. Since 2013 I had been collecting scraps of information about my classmates from Government Medical College, Nagpur — the batch of 1973, a group of teenagers who had entered medical school together and were now, decades later, approaching old age together.
I began by wanting to know only where everyone had settled and what they had made of their lives. The project quickly outgrew that modest ambition. One phone call led to another; calls that were meant to last ten minutes stretched past an hour. WhatsApp carried corrections, forgotten incidents, and old photographs rescued from albums nobody had opened in decades. I drafted each profile, sent it back to its subject for correction, revised it, and sent it back again. Many classmates became, in effect, co-authors of their own stories. Others trusted me with memories they had never written down for anyone, including their own families.
The hardest profiles to write were the twenty-five obituaries. Writing about someone who once shared your lecture hall, your hostel room, and your examination anxiety is not the same as writing a conventional obituary. Each one closed a chapter of a memory that had, until then, belonged to all of us collectively. Each was an attempt to set down a life before it slipped into silence altogether.
By the time the project reached maturity, I had documented all 204 members of our batch. It took hundreds of hours, most of them spent listening rather than writing. I do not think of it as having written 204 biographies. I think of it as having kept an entire generation from being forgotten a little longer than it otherwise would have been.
The People Whose Names Never Appear in the Annual Report
Around the same time, my attention shifted from my classmates to Sevagram itself. Visitors to this village usually remember it through Mahatma Gandhi, or Kasturba Hospital, or the medical institute that grew up around them. I have come to remember it differently.
For me, Sevagram also belongs to the barber who watched generations of students grow old under his scissors, the tea seller who knew every resident by name and by usual order, the dhobi who ironed thousands of white coats over the decades, the bread vendor who arrived before the sun, and the milkmen, attendants, laboratory technicians, and shopkeepers whose names never once appear in an official history of the institution.
One afternoon I sat down in the barber’s tiny shop and asked him a simple question: when did you first come to Sevagram? His answer took nearly two hours. That conversation changed how I looked at the village. I understood, perhaps for the first time, that history is not confined to annual reports or institutional archives — it lives just as fully in people whose stories nobody has ever thought worth writing down.
Over the following months I visited homes, tea stalls, shops, and workplaces, sometimes in person and sometimes over long telephone conversations, asking people how they had arrived in Sevagram, what the village had looked like in its early years, and how their own lives had grown alongside the hospital’s. When I began posting these stories on Facebook, the response surprised me more than anything else in this whole undertaking. Former students, retired teachers, and residents of Wardha recognised faces that had quietly shaped their own years here, and wrote back with memories of their own. History, I realised then, does not belong only to the famous. Every community is held together, just as much, by people who never make it to the front page.
Architects of MGIMS
The response to those stories led naturally to something larger. If the ordinary people of Sevagram deserved to be remembered, so did the men and women who had actually built the institution — its founders, principals, deans, professors, administrators, and trustees. The idea slowly became a project called Architects of MGIMS, and my intention from the start was to write human history rather than institutional history — a distinction that matters more than it sounds.
It eventually grew into ninety-three detailed profiles, beginning with Dr Sushila Nayar herself. Writing them required more than conversation. With the management’s permission, I went through every annual report published since the early 1970s, along with service records, appointment letters, and promotion files. These documents were reliable for dates and facts, but they told me almost nothing about character. Character came from elsewhere — from colleagues, former students, spouses, friends, and the kind of anecdote that never makes it into a file: a difficult decision, an act of quiet generosity, an occasional and very human failure. Every profile went through several rounds of revision, because facts needed checking, dates needed verifying, and memory, however precious, is never quite reliable.
Sevagram Remembered
Almost at the same time, another question occurred to me: what had become of the earliest graduates of MGIMS? Starting with the pioneering class of 1969 and continuing through 1980, I chose one hundred and fifty alumni across every discipline — physicians, surgeons, obstetricians, paediatricians, pathologists, anaesthesiologists, community health workers, and others besides. Their stories became Sevagram Remembered.
Once again, the telephone proved to be my most valuable instrument. Each conversation turned up another forgotten detail of the institute’s early years — the mud roads, the modest hostels, the sparsely equipped laboratories, the demanding teachers, and the peculiar idealism that seems to belong only to institutions in their formative years. Together, these alumni recreated an MGIMS that no longer exists anywhere except in memory. The interviews took well over a year. The revisions took longer still.
The Autobiography
The last of these projects began, of all places, on a warm evening in Buldhana. Bhavana and I had travelled there with Ulhas and Suhas Jajoo and their wives, to spend a weekend with our old friends Dr Prakash Gupta and Dr Suresh Chanjed. As happens at every reunion of ageing doctors, the conversation drifted backward — one story led to another until we were all somewhere in medical school again, or in early practice, or back in the middle of some long-forgotten family episode.
At some point Ulhas interrupted me mid-sentence. “You should write your autobiography,” he said. The conversation moved on to something else, as conversations do. His sentence, however, did not move on with it. On the drive back to Sevagram I kept returning to those seven words. Perhaps he was right. If I did not write these stories down now, most of them would disappear with me, and no one else was in a position to write them for me.
That evening became the real beginning of Stetho in Sevagram. I began speaking to my sisters about our childhood, to old school friends from Craddock High School and Swavalambi Vidyalaya, to classmates from Government Medical College, Nagpur, and to Bhavana, Ashwini, Amrita, and Shaily, along with colleagues who had shared different stretches of my life. I went back through handwritten diaries, old letters, fading photographs, institutional records, forgotten emails, and thousands of digital documents I had never properly looked at. The book assembled itself slowly, the way a large jigsaw puzzle does — a piece here, a piece there, and long stretches where nothing seemed to fit at all. Some memories returned easily. Others needed real detective work, and a few needed correction once a second or third person remembered the same event quite differently. Every chapter went through revision after revision, not until it sounded impressive, but until it sounded true — not merely factually accurate, but honest in the way it felt.
An Unexpected Teacher
It was around this time that artificial intelligence entered my life, at first as a curiosity and then as a genuine writing companion. It helped me question sentences I had grown too fond of, catch claims I had not actually supported, reorganise chapters that refused to sit in the right order, and, eventually, work out the architecture of the websites on which all these projects would come to live.
Learning to work alongside it pulled me, somewhat against my expectations, into territory I had never planned to enter. I learned WordPress. Then HTML. Then CSS. Then PHP. Visual Studio Code replaced the text editor I had used for years. GitHub became my archive and my safety net. I found myself debugging code and fixing broken layouts with the same stubborn curiosity I had once brought to learning electrocardiography or evidence-based medicine. At an age when most people grow cautious about learning anything new, I found myself, quite unexpectedly, a student again.
Five Homes
What began as one small website eventually grew into five interconnected ones. Matter of Fact, my essays and blogs, holds the writing that started it all. Stetho in Sevagram is this memoir. Architects of MGIMS preserves the lives of the people who built the institution. GMC 1973 documents all 204 members of my medical school batch. Sevagram Remembered carries the memories of the earliest generations of MGIMS alumni. Each of these exists not only as a website but as a searchable archive, and in downloadable PDF and EPUB form as well — so that none of it depends on a single server, or a single browser, or my own continued presence to remain readable.
Renewal, Not Retirement
I sometimes wonder whether “retirement” is even the right word for this stretch of my life. It has not felt like a withdrawal from anything. It has felt, if anything, like a continuation under a different name.
For forty years I documented illnesses, weighed evidence, and wrote scientific papers. Those habits never really left me; only their subject changed. Instead of documenting diseases, I found myself documenting lives. Instead of preserving case records, I found myself preserving memories. The tools changed — a keyboard instead of a stethoscope, a camera instead of a case sheet — but the underlying discipline did not: observe carefully, verify patiently, and tell the story as truthfully as you can manage. Medicine taught me how to care for people while they were in front of me. Writing, I have come to think, is teaching me how to make sure they are not forgotten once they are not.