The Accidental Academic

A Twist of Fate in Jajoo Wadi

In life, big turns rarely arrive with a drumbeat. They come softly—almost shyly—like someone clearing their throat before speaking.

In the summer of 1982, I had finished my MD at Government Medical College, Nagpur. Like most young doctors, I stood at a familiar crossroads: private practice or hospital life.

My father had already drawn a neat map for me. He had built a modest structure in Wardha, well placed and full of promise. From its windows you could see the bustle of Indira Market and, not far away, the quieter lanes of Maganwadi. It was meant to be my clinic. He could already picture the signboard, the waiting room, the steady income, and our family name taking root in the town.

Only my heart hadn’t signed the papers.

The thought of sitting alone in a clinic all day made me uneasy. I wanted the noise and discipline of a teaching hospital—the ward rounds, the residents, the arguments over diagnosis, the quiet pride of watching a student grow into a doctor. I didn’t have a better plan. I only had a restlessness that refused to leave me.

One afternoon, I went to meet my childhood friend, Suhas Jajoo, at his home in Jajoo Wadi, Wardha. As luck would have it, I ran into his elder brother, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo. He was senior to me at GMC Nagpur (Class of 1968) and had known me since I was a boy. Suhas and I had grown up together through school and medical college. Ulhas, meanwhile, was now a Reader in Medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram.

He looked at me for a moment—long enough to sense what I wasn’t saying—and asked, almost casually, “Why don’t you join us at Sevagram?”

There was no speech. No persuasion. No “think about it.”

Ulhas did what people of his generation often did when they wanted to help: he acted.

He spoke to Dr. Karunakar Trivedi, the Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital. Things moved with a speed that feels unreal today. I met Dr. Trivedi soon after. He was a man of few words and quick decisions. He glanced at my papers, asked a couple of questions, nodded once, and offered me the post of Senior Registrar.

The salary was ₹650 a month—small on paper, but to me it felt like a king’s ransom.

I said yes, almost before he finished the sentence.

When I told my father, he tried to hide his disappointment, but it slipped out through his eyes. The clinic he had imagined so carefully—the steady, respectable life he had planned for his son—had dissolved in one afternoon.

Yet he didn’t stop me. He never did.

With a grace I understood better only later, he stepped aside and let me choose my own road.

That road led to Sevagram—and then, without my knowing it, to the rest of my life.

The Hospital in the Guest House

It was a scorching afternoon on May 4, 1982, when I rode my Bajaj Priya scooter through the gates of MGIMS.

After the imposing stone buildings of GMC Nagpur, Sevagram felt like another country. This was not a purpose-built medical complex. The “hospital” I first saw was an old guest house built by Mr. G.D. Birla in 1940—two storeys, creaking wooden floors, and walls peeling in tired layers. Even the building seemed to carry a memory.

That memory went back to 1969, when Dr. Sushila Nayar began the medical school in this very structure. In those early years, the entire world of MGIMS fit into these two floors. The basic science departments—Anatomy, Physiology, Pharmacology, and Pathology—worked here. So did the library, dissection hall, laboratories, outpatient clinics, pharmacy, X-ray room, wards, an operation theatre, labour rooms, and even a small ICU.

It was cramped, but it was complete.

Over the next decade, the institute grew out of its guest-house skin. By 1982, a new, larger hospital building had come up on the hill, and most departments had moved there. The old Birla guest house, once the whole institution, had become the home of just one department—Medicine. It still housed 140 beds, a small ICU, and, lest I forget, the seminar room where we tried to sound wiser than we were.

Postgraduate training in Medicine had started only two years earlier. Two final-year residents, Hari Om and Ashok Birbal—who would later add “Jain” to his name to be more visible in the local Jain community—were preparing for their MD examinations due in November 1982.

The general wards on the ground floor felt like oversized dormitories. Tube lights glowed dimly, as if they were tired too, and the corners stayed stubbornly dark. The place was spartan—no ventilators, no multipara monitors, no infusion pumps. Central oxygen and suction were still ideas waiting for their turn.

We practised medicine the old way: with a stethoscope, a steady hand, and whatever judgement we could gather at the bedside.

The “ICU” was more a label than a unit. And yet, for all its shortages, this hospital had something Nagpur rarely gave us—stillness. A quiet that softened the day. The air smelled of neem and warm earth, not just spirit and phenyl.

Enter “Kissu”

That very first afternoon, I walked into the male medicine ward and saw a resident bent over a patient, doing a pleural tap with the calm ease of someone who had done it a hundred times before. A Littmann stethoscope—rare in those days—hung around his neck, not as a showpiece, but as if it belonged there.

He looked up. Sweat beaded on his forehead, his spectacles sat slightly crooked, and his eyes measured me in a quick scan.

His voice was blunt, but not unfriendly.
“Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

In my crisp new shirt, I suddenly felt like a schoolboy on his first day.
“I’m Dr. S.P. Kalantri,” I said. “I’ve joined as Senior Registrar.”

He paused for a moment. Then his face broke into a wide, sheepish grin. He peeled off his gloves and held out his hand.

“I’m Krishan,” he said. “But you can call me Kissu.”

That handshake steadied me.

I didn’t know it then, but Krishan Kumar Aggarwal—Kissu—would become one of my closest friends in Sevagram. The kind you don’t plan for. The kind life quietly slips into your story. There would be laughter, shared tiffins, long days, longer nights, and the silent understanding that grows between two doctors trying to make sense of rural medicine.

Later, after his MD, Kissu moved to Delhi. He joined Moolchand Hospital, built a formidable career in cardiology, and became a familiar face in the media. Wherever he went, his stethoscope went with him—hospital corridor, home, car, restaurant, even an airport lounge. It hung around his neck like a habit, like a signature.

He was awarded the Padma Shri. And then, in a twist none of us could accept, we lost him during the COVID pandemic—to the very disease he had spent a year explaining, warning against, and fighting every single day.

Even now, when I think of my first day in Sevagram, I see his crooked spectacles and that grin.

The Morning Ritual

If the hospital building was the body of the department, the faculty were its soul. In those days, the Department of Medicine had three men at its centre—Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. A.P. Jain, and Dr. Ulhas Jajoo.

Dr. O.P. Gupta, the Head of the Department, lived nearby in MLK Colony. This was long before mobile phones and the constant buzzing of “urgent” messages. His life ran on a simple axis: home and hospital. He appeared in the wards without warning, his sharp eyes catching a missing chart or a crumpled bedsheet from what felt like across the ward.

He disliked waste the way some people dislike dishonesty—deeply, almost personally.

“Why are the residents wasting ECG paper?” he would grumble, holding up a long rhythm strip as if it were a luxury item. “I sanctioned two rolls a month ago!”

Every morning at exactly 8:00 AM, a ritual unfolded in his chamber that made residents straighten their backs and swallow hard: ECG correction.

We lined up outside his room with the night’s ECGs clutched like confession letters. Inside, Gupta, Jain, and Jajoo sat shoulder to shoulder, studying each strip with the seriousness of a court hearing. Nothing escaped them—not a missed P wave, not a lazy measurement, not a careless conclusion.

“Why hasn’t this resident calculated the Estes’ score for left ventricular hypertrophy?” Dr. Gupta would ask, peering over his glasses.

“And why can’t they remember the causes of a tall R wave in V1?” Dr. Jain would add, his impatience sharpened by precision.

“They still haven’t mastered vectors,” Dr. Jajoo would sigh, as if our ignorance was a personal tragedy.

It felt like a daily trial by fire. But it was also the finest classroom I ever attended. In that small room—between scolding, silence, and sudden insight—we learned what medicine teaches again and again: the answer is usually hiding in the details.

Settling In

Soon my life found a rhythm. Every morning I rode in from Wardha on my scooter, the Vidarbha wind slapping my face like a hot towel. On Tuesdays and Fridays, when I was on emergency duty, I stayed on campus in Kabir Colony—Kabir Niwas, barely three hundred metres from the hospital.

The quarters were modest, even by our standards. Two small rooms squeezed into about 400 square feet, a kavelu roof above, and a farshi floor below that stayed cool under bare feet. The toilets were the old kind—squat only, no commode, no frills, no pretending. Thirteen of these quarters stood in a row, and in our little corner of Kabir Niwas, two of us lived together, making space for ourselves the way young doctors always do—by adjusting without complaint.

I shared the apartment with Dr. Sanjay Shrivastava, an ophthalmologist who somehow managed to look calm even when the rest of us were running on tea, adrenaline, and borrowed sleep. Sanjay stayed for two years, then returned to his hometown, Bhopal, to start private practice. Years later, he would become Joint Secretary of the Medical Council of India. In those days, though, he was simply Sanjay—quiet, steady, and good company on an exhausting night.

One evening in Kabir Niwas, we were doing what young men with little money and big appetites for life often did—huddled around a radio, listening to cricket commentary as if it were a national bulletin. It was 1983, and India was playing Pakistan in Delhi in what people called the first day–night match in India. The lights were new, the excitement was real, and every boundary sounded brighter on the radio.

In the middle of it, I noticed a young man standing quietly outside our door, half in the corridor, half in shadow. He looked hesitant, as if he had walked there and then changed his mind twice.

Dark, shy, self-effaced, and polite to the core—M.V.R. Reddy.

At that time, he wasn’t “Dr. Reddy” yet. He was an MSc from Andhra Pradesh, doing his PhD in Biochemistry. He lived just two quarters away, but we didn’t know him.

He cleared his throat softly and knocked.
“Can I… watch the match?” he asked, almost apologetically.

“Of course,” we said, as if he had asked for a glass of water.

We offered him tea. He sat down without fuss, hands on his knees, eyes fixed on the invisible field inside the radio. For the next two hours, we listened together—four young men in a small quarter, held together by commentary, suspense, and the strange intimacy of sport.

When Kirti Azad began hitting those sixes, our little room came alive. And when India finally won, we celebrated like we had contributed something ourselves—clapping, laughing, speaking all at once, as if the victory had travelled straight from Delhi to Kabir Niwas and stopped at our door.

That was my first real interaction with Reddy.

I had no idea then that this quiet, shy man would become my closest friend, a next-door neighbour for a decade, and almost family. Our children—Ashwini and Amrita—would grow up alongside his boys, Srikant and Sridhar, as contemporaries, as playmates, as if this had been decided that night.

Back home, my mother and my sister-in-law, Kanta Bhabhi, made sure I never went hungry. My tiffin carried the taste of my world—soft parathas, spicy chutneys, and Marwari vegetables cooked the way only home can manage. I often shared it with Hari Om, a warm, easygoing MD resident and an MGIMS alumnus from Etawah. Over those lunches—amid the clatter of steel boxes and the ward’s familiar noise—the feeling of being a stranger began to loosen its grip.

I had come to Sevagram. I had traded the promise of a comfortable private practice for ₹650 a month and a hospital with creaking floors.

And yet, as I walked along the quiet, tree-lined paths of the ashram hospital, I felt something settle inside me.

I was exactly where I needed to be.

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