On 15 August 2026 I completed seventy years of age. Under the rules of Kasturba Health Society, which runs MGIMS, Sevagram, a teacher retires at the end of the term in which he turns seventy. There is no appeal against arithmetic, and I did not attempt one.
The arithmetic itself, though, carries an old joke at my expense. My official date of birth is 15 August 1956; my real one is 15 August 1957 — the year my father quietly corrected at the Nagar Parishad so I could enter medical college a year early, a story I have told in full earlier in this book.
Nobody in that room in 1973 could have foreseen the shape of things fifty years on. What looked like a short-term gain — one year saved at the start of a career — turned out to carry a long-term cost: one year lost at the end of it. My father solved a problem in 1973 and, without meaning to, created one for 2026. I have made my peace with the trade. On balance, I would take it again.
That innings — whatever its true length — was full. I arrived at MGIMS in the summer of 1982 as a senior registrar in medicine, expecting to stay a year. I stayed forty-four. Sevagram gave me more than I had asked for or thought to want.
I was not a natural teacher. That skill I had to build, case by case, ward round by ward round, over years. Somewhere along the way I learned how to hold a class of restless postgraduates for an hour, how to teach the discipline of bedside examination so that it stuck, and how to keep a department seminar from turning into a formality nobody remembered by evening. Later in my career I became, to my own surprise, a reasonably good public speaker — able to talk for half an hour without notes, admitting my own doubts and mistakes along with whatever I had got right. In the 1990s I found evidence-based medicine, and it found a permanent place in how I taught: not only the theory of it, but the harder, more useful business of teaching residents and faculty how to choose a diagnostic test or a treatment at the bedside and defend the choice with evidence rather than habit.
On 1 September 2026 I sent an email, a WhatsApp message, and a Facebook post announcing that my term as Director-Professor had ended and that I would continue, from that date, as Emeritus Professor. This is what I wrote:
The response taught me something about where forty-four years actually live. Hundreds of emails and WhatsApp messages came in, along with comments on the Facebook post, most of them from former students. They went down memory lane — my ward rounds, the bedside teaching, the post-round discussions — and many quoted lines back to me that I had said once, in some class, and long forgotten.
From MGIMS itself, the response was thin. Two colleagues wrote back with any warmth: Dr Ramesh Pande, professor of surgery and a member of the 1989 MGIMS batch, and Dr P.R. Zopate, professor of forensic medicine. Both wished me well for what they called my second innings. From my own department, near silence. The colleague I might have expected to hear from first — a student I had taught as an undergraduate, then guided through his postgraduate years, then watched grow into a resident and finally a colleague, and who now heads Unit IV of Medicine, the unit I had myself set up in 1992 — did not come by, and did not write. For a few days this disappointed me, then it saddened me, then, briefly, it made me angry. I let it go. This is simply how people are, and how the world moves on; making too much of it would have said more about me than about him.
Two responses stayed with me for a different reason. Dr Sudhir Bhave, a psychiatrist in Nagpur, wrote in. So did Girish, a friend from the 1976 MGIMS batch, who reached for a line from the Emergency years of 1975 — Dev Kant Barooah’s notorious “Indira is India, India is Indira” — and turned it, half in jest, into something kinder: that in the world beyond Sevagram, MGIMS was SP, and SP was MGIMS.
It takes time to settle into a new role, whatever its name. The terms of this one are plain enough. I continue for five years on a monthly honorarium of one lakh rupees. I no longer head a unit or guide a postgraduate thesis. What I keep is the thing that matters most at seventy: a reason to get up in the morning, and somewhere to go. The alternative — the particular loneliness of a retired man with nothing ahead of him but the day itself — frightens most people who reach this point. Sevagram has spared me that. Retirement, or at least this first stretch of it, is not an ending. It is a new chapter, still being written, in a life and a legacy that began by accident in a Nagar Parishad office in 1973.