In the summer of 1982, a young physician arrived in Sevagram with a freshly minted MD degree and a new stethoscope. He expected to stay a year or two. More than four decades later, he is still there.

Born in Wardha in 1957 and trained at Government Medical College, Nagpur, he joined the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences almost by accident. What began as a temporary appointment slowly became a life’s work.

Over the years, he served as Professor of Medicine and later Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital, helping shape its teaching, clinical care, and digital systems. He remains deeply interested in evidence-based medicine, ethics, rational therapeutics, and the quiet discipline of listening carefully before intervening.

At forty-seven, he became a student again — this time at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. That year changed how he thought about medicine, research, uncertainty, and the social forces that shape illness.

Outside the wards, he cycles through the villages around Sevagram at dawn, reads widely, and writes about the people who inhabit this landscape — students, nurses, ward boys, dhobis, barbers, patients, and teachers. Many of them appear in his long-running blog, Matter of Fact, where he writes about life, medicine, people, and almost anything that interests him.

He lives in Sevagram with his wife, Bhavana, whose work helped modernise the hospital’s information systems long before digital healthcare became fashionable.

Stetho in Sevagram is his memoir — one hundred and eighty chapters written over many years, assembled from notes, letters, memory, and the voices of the people who shaped him: patients, yes, but also parents, teachers, friends, and the small daily dramas of a life lived in one place for a very long time. It is as much about a marriage, a family, and a landscape as it is about medicine.