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7.21
Chasing the Score in Seven Minutes
A High-Stakes Encounter with the Vice-President
The Headmaster’s Watch
History is often told in decades, but sometimes, the essence of an entire institution must be distilled into minutes. On 27 February 2018, while the ink was still wet on our Kayakalp citation and the pride of being ranked fourth in India was still fresh in the corridors, I found myself facing a clock that seemed to be ticking twice as fast as usual.
Mr. M. Venkaiah Naidu, the Vice-President of India, had arrived in Sevagram to inaugurate our new operating theatre complex. My task was to stand before him and narrate the saga of MGIMS—a fifty-year journey that began in 1969. I had prepared a story of heritage and community, a five-decade-long tapestry of service.
But as I stepped toward the podium, the Vice-President looked at me with the probing eyes of a stern headmaster coming down hard on a pupil who hadn’t done his homework. “Move fast,” he said, his impatience palpable. “Don’t waste time. I already know the background of your institute.”
The Seven-Minute Sprint
Forty years ago, such a rebuke would have left me paralyzed—heart hammering against my ribs, tongue-tied, and a cold sweat blooming on my forehead. But at sixty-plus, I had a different kind of calm. I made a quick mental calculation. I had prepared for a leisurely 50-over cricket match, but the Vice-President had just invoked the Duckworth-Lewis method. I had barely seven minutes to chase the score.
My presentation was thirty slides long. Half were just pictures; the rest had a single word in the center. I began to breeze through them. Each image was a thousand words I didn’t have time to say: the dusty rural clinics of the 70s, the first ICCU, the faces of farmers who had found a second lease on life in our wards.
I stole a glance at my wristwatch as I clicked the thirtieth slide: seven minutes flat. I had upped the pace without scrambling the message. I had survived the gauntlet, but the physical race was only beginning.
Elbowing through the Chaos
As soon as the presentation ended, the Vice-President was whisked away to the OT for the inauguration. I had to get there before him. I found myself physically running, elbowing my way through a chaotic procession of camera crews, television teams, and petulant local politicians.
I reached the passage housing the inauguration plaque just as he arrived, catching my breath in the nick of time. As he unveiled the stone, he turned to me with the sharp curiosity of a man who values self-reliance. “Do you have an on-campus faculty, or do you import them from Nagpur?” he asked. “And are you prescribing generic drugs?”
I answered him with the pride of an administrator who knew every corner of his hospital. Yes, our faculty lived here, in the village, among the people they served. And yes, we fought the battle for affordable medicine every single day with generics.
He offered a few kind words—a nod of acknowledgment to the work being done in this quiet corner of Maharashtra—and then he was gone, walking briskly toward the auditorium to confer the International Gandhi Award for Leprosy on two doctor-researchers.
I had started the morning fearing I would have to run a gauntlet. Instead, on a sunny Sunday in Sevagram, I realized I still had a good run left in me.