The Last Conversation
Four days before he fell, Dr. A.P. Jain walked into Dr. Kalantri’s office and sat down. They spoke for an hour—about the past, the present, and what he hoped for in the days ahead. His hands trembled, and his steps were heavily unsteady, but there was absolutely no fear in his voice.
He said, simply: “I take life as it comes.” Then, with shaking hands, he pushed back his chair and walked away.
On February 6, 2025, he fell in his bathroom, suffering a devastating brain hemorrhage. He spent four weeks navigating critical care units in Nagpur and Sevagram. He died on March 15, 2025, inside the very ICU where he had taught, treated, and mentored for nearly fifty years—connected, in the end, to the dialysis machines he himself had introduced to the hospital two decades before.
His name, Ajeet, meant unconquerable. Those who knew him found the name astonishingly precise.
Sikandrabad, Lucknow, Sevagram
Born on May 1, 1945, in Sikandrabad, western Uttar Pradesh, he was the sixth of nine children. He completed his MBBS and MD at King George’s Medical College in Lucknow. After briefly exploring psychiatry, he found his permanent, unyielding territory in internal medicine.
He married Sushila in Mumbai in 1972 and returned to Sikandrabad to establish a private practice. The practice did not survive. It failed because his patients expected treatment without payment, and he found himself expected to be a physician without sleep. After a brief, frustrating stint at the Durgapur Steel Plant Hospital—where trade unions attempted to dictate his medical prescriptions—he found a vacancy at MGIMS.
He arrived in June 1974. Sevagram in that monsoon season was a two-trains-a-day village, accessible only by horse-drawn tonga, entirely devoid of hotels or English-medium schools. For a couple raised in Lucknow and Bombay, the adjustment was sharp and unforgiving. But Sevagram had a way of making itself necessary to certain people before they quite understood how it had happened. He intended to stay briefly. He stayed for forty-nine years.
Between the Two Ears
He kept a specific, pointed phrase for medical residents who relied too quickly on laboratory tests: The area between the two ears—the brain—is a physician’s first and most powerful instrument. He meant this literally. He had trained in an era where clinical diagnosis was meticulously built from history, physical examination, and a basic X-ray. He brought that fierce discipline to Sevagram and maintained it across five decades, even as the technology around him exploded. He was not a Luddite—he introduced echocardiography to the department alongside Dr. O.P. Gupta, and he procured the hospital’s first hemodialysis unit. He simply insisted that technology must confirm what the physician’s examination had already suggested, never substitute for it.
At the bedside, he physically crouched down to the patient’s level. He listened not only to their symptoms but to their pauses, their hesitations, the things they started to say and abruptly stopped. He took the pulse. He asked a perfectly timed question. He could trace the invisible arc of an illness through history and bare hands alone. His residents watched this method not as a theatrical performance, but as a masterclass demonstrated repeatedly, available to anyone willing to pay attention.
Eight o’Clock, Without Exception
His postgraduate sessions began at 8:00 a.m. Punctuality was not a preference; it was the baseline condition under which teaching was even possible. The structure was beautifully rigid so the learning inside it could be fluid: Mondays were journal clubs, Tuesdays and Thursdays were bedside cases, Wednesdays were mortality reviews, Fridays were X-ray discussions.
In his early years, he was strict in a way that many residents experienced as sheer severity. He routinely dismissed people from the ward for mistakes. He had absolutely no patience for sloppy clinical thinking, careless documentation, or informal English. He corrected their grammar. He corrected their handwriting. For those who survived the crucible, he was modeling a standard of precision that medicine desperately requires but rarely enforces. Looking back across their careers, his students realized the strictness and the brilliance were inseparable.
He guided thirty-four MD students. He established the DNB Family Medicine program and the PG Geriatric Medicine course, both achieving national recognition. In a beautiful piece of institutional irony, the man who had personally failed the DNB examination in 1983 was awarded the National Board’s “Best Teacher Award” in 2018.
Dr. Nayar’s Physician
In 1995, Dr. Sushila Nayar suffered a heart attack. As the powerful founder-president, she could have demanded treatment at AIIMS. She could have flown abroad.
Instead, she chose Dr. Jain as her physician, keeping him in that role until her death six years later. He was not merely her cardiologist; he was the one person she trusted to understand what she needed and to tell her the unvarnished truth about it. To be trusted completely by a woman who had spent decades ruthlessly assessing the trustworthiness of everyone around her was not a medical credential. It was a measure of absolute character.
The Ataxia and the Restraint
In 2018, he was diagnosed with a rare, progressive genetic ataxia. There is no cure. Suddenly, every physical step became a conscious, dangerous calculation. His hands, which had held a stethoscope with the relaxed authority of half a century of practice, began to tremble violently when he wrote. Vertigo constantly threatened his balance. He was forced to grip the podium during presentations. Yet, he fiercely resisted assistance.
He did not ask why. He simply continued. He led rounds, attended seminars, and participated in journal clubs until his contract ended in August 2023.
But his greatest lesson was not taught in a lecture hall. When his wife, Sushila, suffered a catastrophic cardiac crisis in 2022, and later severe sepsis in 2024, she required life support at Sevagram. On both occasions, Dr. Jain stepped back entirely. The physician who had spent his entire life fiercely insisting on his own clinical judgment chose, when it mattered most, to exercise none of it. He placed his wife’s life in the hands of the treating team without a single question, without interference, and without demanding a second opinion. That breathtaking act of restraint told his colleagues more about his profound trust in the institution than fifty years of ward rounds ever could.
The Full House
He survived long enough to see his legacy multiply. His sons, Pramod and Manish, became professors in Orthopaedics and Paediatrics at MGIMS. Their wives, Sonia and Shuchi, rose to head the departments of Dermatology and Obstetrics & Gynaecology. Today, five distinct clinical disciplines are anchored by a single family at the college where he spent his life.
He died in the ICU he had built, on the machines he had procured, inside the hospital he had served for forty-nine years. In his last recorded conversation, he said he took life exactly as it came. He pushed back his chair with shaking hands. And he walked away, unconquered.