“I Hope You Recognize Me, Sir”
The letter arrived in 1999, when Rajnish was two years into his rural posting near Aligarh. It came the old way — handwritten, folded twice, carried by India Post rather than any wire. At the bottom, almost as an afterthought, he had added a line: I hope you recognize me, sir.
I opened it again only recently, and laughed the way you laugh at a photograph of yourself in bell-bottoms. Of course I recognised him. I had simply never told him so.
The Boy Who Never Raised His Hand
Rajnish belonged to the MGIMS batch of 1992. He was, by any measure, among the five best students of his year — and yet I do not remember noticing him. The toppers I remember were the ones who thrust their hands up before a question was finished, eager to be seen agreeing with the professor. Rajnish never did. He sat, he listened, he said nothing, and it took me years to understand that this was not shyness but temperament.
He describes himself, with the same understatement, as “a lifelong wanderer” — ten schools in eleven years, a childhood spent arriving. When it came time to sit the MGIMS entrance test, there was one compulsory hurdle even a brilliant student could fail on: a paper on Gandhian thought, which you had to clear outright to be considered at all. Rajnish had not read a page of Gandhi. Between the science papers, he says, he gave the subject exactly one hour — and slipped through anyway. It is the kind of story a man tells about himself only once he no longer needs to prove anything.
Eleven at Night, in a White Coat
After his internship, Rajnish went to the United States to train, with every intention of staying. A year later he came back. I have never asked him why, and by the time I knew him well enough to ask, it no longer seemed to matter. He rejoined MGIMS for his MD in Medicine, a year behind his own batch, and it was here that I first paid him any real attention.
It was the year 2000. I had been turning over an idea for weeks — our old medicine ICU was cramped and tired, and I wanted to rebuild it into something we could be proud of. Late one night, past eleven, I walked in to look the place over and found a young resident already there, standing quietly in the shadows in his white coat, watching the room the way an architect studies a plot of land before he has drawn a single line.
By eight the next morning, Rajnish had a plan sketched out on his own computer — an unheard-of possession for a resident in those years — and it showed a depth of thought that startled me. Over the following nine months, with Anil Pandit the architect and Ashish Goel the co-resident, we turned that tired ward into a proper intensive care unit. Pandit took to calling Rajnish “the chief architect,” a name that stuck to everyone but him.
The Fixer
To the junior residents who trained under him, Rajnish was something closer to ballast. Whatever went wrong on the ward — and in a teaching hospital something always does — he could usually fix it, or at least explain how to survive it. He knew, better than anyone, how to read the moods of the four senior professors residents feared most, and he passed that knowledge on freely, the way a good older sibling does.
Berkeley, By Way of Sevagram
He took his MD in 2003 and, that same year, helped carry MGIMS through its first digitisation of hospital records — one of the earliest institutes in the country to attempt it, and Rajnish the one coordinating the change on the ground. He had also, by then, volunteered to supervise fieldwork on Madhu’s tuberculosis study. Madhu noticed the same things I had been slow to notice — the sincerity, the capacity for sustained, unglamorous work, the ability to do three things at once without dropping any of them — and it was Madhu who helped steer him toward a Fogarty fellowship.
In 2005 that fellowship took him to Berkeley for a Master of Public Health. He returned the following year and threw himself into a run of studies — an evaluation of acute encephalitis in adults, serial interferon testing among healthcare workers, an audit of the hospital’s own insurance scheme — the kind of unglamorous, ground-level research that rarely gets remembered, though somewhat to his surprise, all of it eventually found its way into good journals.
He completed his PhD at Berkeley in 2009. Back at Sevagram, a newly funded global initiative on non-communicable disease put MGIMS on a map few rural institutes had reason to be on, and Rajnish led a trial testing whether non-physician health workers, properly trained, could prevent heart disease in villages that had never seen a cardiologist.
Away From Sevagram
In 2011 he paused all of it — the trial, the teaching, the department — to spend a year in rural Bihar, strengthening how tuberculosis, visceral leishmaniasis, and childhood pneumonia were treated in places considerably worse off than Vidarbha. He did not come back. It was, without either of us quite naming it as such, the year he left Sevagram for good.
A year at Sikkim Manipal followed, and then Bhopal — not simply a posting this time, but a department of medicine at AIIMS built from nothing, with Rajnish as its founding professor and, for over a decade, its head. He stepped down from that post a year ago. He remains, by choice this time, a professor there still.
The Long Correspondence
Leaving Sevagram did not end the work between us; it only moved it into email. By 2010 he and Madhu were deep into a study of tuberculosis infection among healthcare workers, chasing a result good enough for JAMA, and I remember writing to congratulate him when Berkeley — his own alma mater — topped some ranking that year. “Berkeley is the best!” I told him, and meant it more for his sake than the university’s. His messages by then were signed “Rajnish, Deepti and Avni” — a family I had watched arrive one name at a time.
The papers kept coming. When we resubmitted a manuscript to the European Respiratory Journal in 2011, Madhu wrote back within days: “Really nice work, Rajnish, and so quickly done.” In the same year Rajnish let slip, in passing, that an old email password of his had once been “Jbond007” — the kind of detail a self-effacing man reveals only by accident.
Not everything that year was light. In May, word came that Ramji Singh, a colleague, had suffered a heart attack boarding a train. By the time I heard, Rajnish was already tracking down the family. Nobody had asked him to. It was simply what he did.
In August 2012, a year after he had left, I asked him a direct question: would he and Deepti ever consider coming back? He wrote back at length and in earnest, weighing it properly rather than brushing past it — and in the end, home stayed where it was. I have never been sure whether to call that his one refusal to me, or simply the truth.
Two years later, when Amrita married, the invitation went out to “Deepti and Rajnish,” and Rajnish, being Rajnish, sent back one correction on the wedding card itself — “married to,” he pointed out, not “married with.” He has always found small errors more interesting than large occasions.
By 2018 our PREPARE study had made its slow way to JACC, and when the page proofs finally cleared the following year, Salim Yusuf wrote that with both SPREAD and PREPARE now published, perhaps we could turn to something he was already calling INSPIRE. Around the same time I sent Rajnish a spreadsheet listing everything we had published together — a small, unremarkable file that would later grow into something much larger.
Then came 2020, and a message from me that reversed a twenty-year pattern: “I need your help.” COVID had arrived, and I wanted his read on how to triage patients no one yet understood. He sent back a detailed, considered breakdown, the same instinct that once redrew an ICU floor plan now applied to a pandemic. That year Madhu also pulled the three of us into a global tuberculosis meta-analysis — a decade on, still finding reasons to work together.
In 2021 I nominated him for MGIMS’s Distinguished Alumnus award. In his own reflection for it, he traced everything back to the day in 1992 he walked in, having read about Mahatma Gandhi for exactly one hour.
Forty-Six Papers and a Postage Stamp
Over the years, our names have appeared together on forty-six research papers. What I can tell you with more confidence now is who he has become since. He remains, as he was at twenty, quick, technically minded, and instinctively good at spotting what a person is capable of before they’ve spotted it themselves. He still deflects credit as easily as he once deflected a professor’s eye.
In recent years he has taken up an unlikely pastime — collecting postage stamps, seriously enough to have built an entire website around the collection, each stamp a small lesson in history, art, or science, a landmark discovery rendered in gum and perforation. It does not surprise me at all. A man who spent his life noticing small, overlooked things was always going to end up cataloguing them.
I still have the letter. I hope you recognize me, sir, he wrote, twenty-five years ago. I do, Rajnish. I always did.