When I look back at three decades in Sevagram, my mind does not wander to the sterile hum of the lecture hall or the polite boredom of committee meetings. It goes to a smaller, messier place: my office desk.
I see faces. I see young MD residents, eyes rimmed with the specific, heavy fatigue of thirty-six-hour duties, sitting across from me and clutching sheaves of paper they hoped would eventually become a thesis. To the outside world, and perhaps even to the National Medical Commission, an MD thesis is a mere formality—a black-and-gold bound volume destined to gather dust on a library shelf, sandwiched between years of forgotten data.
For me, it was never a formality. It was a rite of passage. It was a shared struggle to wring a single drop of truth from a sea of noisy clinical data.
I was not an easy guide. I confess this now with the safety of retirement. In my younger days, I was viewed not just as strict, but as a terror. I demanded a discipline that many found unreasonable. I lost my temper when p-values were misunderstood. I sent exhausted residents back to the wards to collect data again or threw drafts into the bin because the grammar was sloppy. I can see now how that must have felt to a twenty-five-year-old doctor. But my intention was never to harass; it was to instill a singular, terrifying standard: if a document carried the Sevagram name, it had to be bulletproof.
***
The Archive of Inquiry
This archive records the lives and labors of thirty-two residents in Sevagram. I suspect—indeed, I am certain—that few enjoyed the work. During the frantic years of residency, a thesis is rarely a pursuit of truth. It is a hurdle; a bulky ghost let loose by the university to haunt a doctor through three years of training.
I have yet to find a student who claimed to love the task. None genuinely thanked destiny or their guide for the chance to master the mechanics of research. One should never trust the “Acknowledgements.” Fifteen years ago, the university removed that section to keep the manuscripts anonymous. Before then, it portrayed guides as patient demigods of wisdom—the sole reason the work ever saw the light of day. The reality was often the opposite.
The thesis is a forced march through a desert. The traveler hates every step and finds no joy in the sand, yet he knows he must reach the other side if he is ever to be called a physician.
A young doctor’s priority is the bedside. He wants to master clinical skills and ICU procedures. He needs time to digest the two voluminous editions of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. Without that, he cannot clear the MD hurdle or find the confidence to practice medicine. I do not blame them for viewing the thesis as a nuisance; I was in the same boat in 1980, treating my own manuscript with the same weary resentment.
Furthermore, a medical degree does not grant the gift of data management. Most residents arrived with little idea of how to collect evidence, let alone how to clean, analyze, or reference it. In the early years, they wrung out manuscripts by hand. They suffered the labor of physical rewriting and the whims of professional typists. Only when the computer became universal were residents freed from the caprice of the stenographer to type their own thoughts.
Be that as it may, here is the record of those thirty-two journeys.
The Pioneers and the Rebels
It began with the rhythmic clack-clack of the typewriter. Those were the days of carbon paper and the sharp, chemical scent of correction fluid—the era where a single typo on page 80 could induce a minor nervous breakdown.
Monica Ahuja was the first to break the mold. A Mumbai girl from Borivali, she was studying the prognostic value of stress tests after a heart attack. While the rest of the department was drowning in handwritten drafts, Monica quietly rebelled. She carried her manuscript to Baroda because a friend there had access to a computer—a machine then as rare as a unicorn in Sevagram. She returned with a manuscript that looked like it had fallen from the future: crisp, laser-printed, and devoid of the smudge marks that defined our era. That thesis didn’t just impress me; it frightened me. It signaled that the world was moving, and we had to move with it.
Not everyone had the stomach for the long haul. Vijay Subbarao lasted exactly fifteen days. He took one look at the rigor I required, realized that Sevagram—and perhaps the particular brand of academic penance I practiced—was not the canvas for his life, and left. He was right to do so. Some people change continents, but they rarely change their nature. Vijay moved to the United States and became an accomplished cardiologist in Denver, the city where Madhuri Dixit also lives. Today, when he isn’t fixing broken hearts in his cath lab, he spends his time riding his bike, reading, and practicing photography.
***
The June Baby and the Red Ink
Then there was Anju Gupta, Class of 1982. She had fallen in love with Irfan, a junior, transformed into Anjum Amreliwala, and brought a fierce, quiet determination to her work. Anjum was my partner in a new craft I had just brought back from Mumbai: fiber-optic bronchoscopy.
We were threading thin, lit tubes into the lungs of patients to see if “bronchial washing” could catch tuberculosis bacilli that routine samples missed. Anjum was allotted this topic—a top-down decree from guide to student that remains a stubborn tradition in Indian medical colleges today. We hand out topics like inheritance, and students accept them like fate.
May 1991 was a month of heavy air. Rajiv Gandhi had just been assassinated; I recall hearing the news on the platform at Itarsi station, feeling the specific chill that ripples through a nation when a leader falls. While the country mourned, Anjum was in the final phase of her thesis. She was also full-term pregnant.
In those days, the postal service was our only “shared drive.” I was in Bhopal; Anjum was in Jalgaon. Every few days, a thick brown envelope would arrive. I would bleed red ink all over her drafts and post them back. On June 18, 1991, the race ended in a tie. Anjum delivered her first baby girl, and she delivered her thesis. We never published it—a mix of laziness and the relentless pace of the wards—but it remains a quiet biography of a summer of red ink and a June baby.
***
The Tapper from Tripura
Parimal Sarkar, Class of 1985, arrived from the far reaches of Tripura. He survived on the unadvertised kindness of peers who pooled money for his food. He was a brilliant, silent boy who navigated Hindi and English with a thick, melodic Bengali accent. He was too poor to afford the trip home to Agartala, so he stayed in the hostel, a permanent fixture of the campus.
His thesis was pure Sevagram: The diagnostic value of percussion in assessing heart size.
We were born and brought up on the holy trinity of eyes, ears, and hands. Parimal spent two years tapping on chests, listening for the transition from the resonant thud of the lungs to the flat dullness of the heart. He was trying to prove that a doctor’s touch could still compete with the machine.
Alas, even Hutchison’s Clinical Methods has now quietly amputated percussion from its chapters on the heart. It is a discarded skill. But Parimal’s journey did not end there. The boy who once relied on classmates for a meal is now a Professor of Medicine in Agartala. He is no longer the silent student; he is the mentor, likely teaching a new generation that there is still truth to be found in the tips of one’s fingers.
***
The Bedside as a Laboratory
Others followed, each taking a slice of the human condition. Dhanraj Singh spent his residency palpating spleens, asking the oldest question in medicine: Is it really enlarged? Manoj Singh explored the mystery of fever, trying to quantify how accurately a patient knows their own body temperature before the thermometer touches them. Priya Badam and Vaishali Solao walked the wards looking at stroke patients, trying to predict subtypes by clinical presentation alone, while Ravindra Indra hunted for the hidden signs of hypothyroidism in those who simply looked “tired.”
These were not abstract inquiries. They were battles against death. Amandeep spent his nights in the ICU, asking why patients with venomous snake bites were dying despite our best efforts. Sumedh cataloged the grim spectrum of pesticide poisoning, a tragedy that haunts the cotton fields of Vidarbha. Madhuri Meena looked at diagnosing malaria with rapid tests, while Swati Waghdahare dusted off century-old textbooks to see if the classic signs of meningitis were science or merely medical folklore.
***
The “Ghostwriter” and the Silent Partner
I had one odd habit: I did not just supervise; I infiltrated. I would sit with residents until midnight, typing their drafts and obsessing over the font size of their references. I was the ghostwriter who couldn’t help himself. If a sentence was clumsy, I physically couldn’t leave it alone. I wanted the English to be as precise as the science.
This once led to a moment of supreme comedy. A resident—now a successful oncologist—walked into my office, saw the pristine, finished manuscript I had largely polished, and asked with total innocence:
“Sir, since you have done so much… can you also write the Acknowledgement section for me?”
I laughed so loud I startled the pigeons on the windowsill. “My dear friend,” I asked, “How do I thank myself? Do I write a paragraph about how wonderful Dr. Kalantri is and sign your name to it?” That was the limit. I stopped writing Acknowledgements.
The real work, however, happened at my dining table. Residents would arrive after rounds, hungry and hollowed out. This is where Bhavana, my wife, became the silent partner in all thirty-two theses. She never understood the p-values, but she understood the hunger. She served endless tea, cooked late-night dinners, and turned our home into a sanctuary. When these doctors meet me today in the UK or Australia, they rarely talk about statistics. They talk about Bhavana’s dal. They remember the warmth of the kitchen more than the chill of the library.
***
The Legacy of the Ledger
I eventually forced the department into the digital age—Word, Excel, EndNote—treating software as a weapon against error. But one rule was absolute: the resident was always the first author. The sweat was theirs. The glory had to be theirs.
Most of these thirty-two did not become career researchers. They became practitioners and teachers. For a long time, I felt a pang of failure about that. I wanted to build an army of scientists. But I see it differently now. The thesis was never really about the book; it was about the mind.
It was meant to teach a doctor how to think. How to spot the lie in a glossy pharmaceutical brochure. How to respect the uncertainty of biology. How to understand that a “significant P-value” is not the same thing as the truth.
Those black-and-gold books sit in the MGIMS library now. The paper is yellowing. The protocols are outdated. But to me, they are a ledger of our lives together—a record of the nights we spent trying to stop death with nothing but a stethoscope, a question, and a typewriter.
***