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 carries an old joke at my expense. In 1973 my father quietly changed my birth year from 1957 to 1956 so that I could enter medical college on time, a story told in full earlier in this book. He solved a problem then and, without meaning to, made one for 2026. I would take the trade again.
I arrived at MGIMS in the summer of 1982 as a senior registrar in medicine, expecting to stay a year. I stayed forty-four.
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:
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.
Replies came in from former students and a few colleagues. I copied them from my inbox onto the blog, where sixty-six now sit under the post, from sixty-five people. They write from Singapore, Gurgaon, Jalgaon, Pune and San Ramon, California. Thirteen gave their batch year, and those run from 1979 to 2006. About half are a line or two of good wishes. I have quoted here only the ones that told me something I had not known about myself. Few quoted a lecture back to me. What they remembered was something I had done.
Ramesh Pandey recalled his first lesson from me, in second MBBS: “You did 2D Echo of a patient and injected air bubbles to demonstrate right to left shunt.” Sheetal Bodkhe remembered “you supervising the cathlab preparations at 2 am in the night.” Balram Agrawal, whose thesis I guided, had once mentioned that ordinary gloves gave him a reaction, and “latex-free gloves were arranged for me from the very next day.” He remembered, too, that poor patients from the villages had their charges “waived or reduced when genuinely needed.” And he wrote that when I was Medical Superintendent I had “a strong aura and authority,” that he was “honestly a little afraid to approach you,” and that he had never spoken as openly as he was speaking now.
Hari Oam, a year my junior, had failed his MD examination just before I joined. I neither consoled him nor gave advice, he wrote, which was the last thing he needed. He remembered sitting with me on my Chetak scooter, parked beside the lecture theatre in the old hospital building, sharing my home-cooked food, and listening to my stories of quarrels among the seniors, which he found “kind of therapeutic.”
Rishi Adhikary, then a second-year student, approached me on my scooter in 2007 and asked whether there was a research project he could work on. It was, he says, so unlike him that he still cannot explain it. “My research career started the following day,” with a health economics project on drug-resistant tuberculosis, and it continues. The scooter appears in two of these accounts, decades apart. He also listed what he had picked up from me: “the ‘Main Hoon Na’ style of donning a stethoscope and the use of ‘air bunnies.’” I cannot say I was aware of either.
Debjyoti Roy, now a senior consultant in Singapore, wrote that MGIMS was “a place where we learned how to think like physicians.” He listed what that meant: listening to the patient, examining carefully, and “the discipline of thinking before ordering another investigation.” None of it is glamorous. It is what the bedside is for. The nearest anyone came to quoting me was Fali Langdana, who remembered my handwriting and my “quotable quotes” and did not quote one.
Some knew me outside the ward. Alok Kumar Singh began “Dear Uncle” and wrote that my guidance ran from his school days to the wards at MGIMS. Vikas Karvasara recalled a visit I once made to Barmer, which he called “a cherished memory,” and asked, half in earnest, when I would come again.
Some replies were candid about the writers rather than about me. Anuj Taneja, of the 1993 batch, confessed that his “immaturity and youth” made him miss many of my lectures and rounds, but that the few he attended were “sheer magic.” Gaurav Nigam remembered the day his class entered the Medicine department, having heard that I was a professor back from overseas, ready to learn “the brand-new medicine, as we thought at that time.” Ayesha Siddiqui apologised for a late reply. She had just taken her daughter to London, to start a degree in political science rather than medicine; the two of them, she wrote, had not managed to inspire her.
Monica Ahuja Sinha reached MGIMS in the same summer as I did, and lasted nine years, most of them “kicking and screaming and in tears at wanting to go back home to Bombay.” The campus saying was “Majboori ka naam Mahatma Gandhi”: if you could live in Sevagram, you could live anywhere. She wrote that she now thinks she was lucky, that she made friendships that lasted and got a foundation in the art of medicine, and that she was accepted for her MD “by accident and a lot of luck.”
More than twenty replies picked up my cricket and gave it back, some of them more precisely than I had played it. Ashish Bhalla wrote that I had retired from T20 but would go on playing ODIs, like Virat Kohli. Amit Bhatt scored my career as a Test match: registrar, professor, administrator, and now the fourth innings. Siddharth Rao declined to keep the scorecard at all. My innings, he wrote, was better measured in patients served and careers built than in days, and by that measure, “that Sir, is the best 16,190 days anyone can ever hope to spend.” I had written about pads and third man. They had a better grasp of the scorebook, and some of them, of the arithmetic underneath it.
Two replies set the department against the man. Milind Joshi, now a professor of surgery in Jalgaon, wrote that it was hard to imagine the department of medicine without “the fab four”: Gupta Sir, Jain Sir, Jajoo Sir and me. Sudhir Bhave, a psychiatrist in Nagpur, reached for the Emergency: in 1975 Dev Kant Barooah had said of Indira Gandhi, “Indira is India, and India is Indira.” Bhave wrote: “SP is MGIMS, and MGIMS is SP.” Both were kind. Joshi’s is the more accurate.
The alumni who had left wrote a different kind of note. Abhoy Sinha said that as long as I was there, “we have someone to look up to for MGIMS updates.” Pradeep Gupta had left MGIMS before I joined and never met me. He knew me through my writing, which he forwarded to friends and patients, and wrote that with me in Sevagram, “we will always feel ourselves to be physically present in Sevagram.” Arundhatee Khare, of the 1991 batch, left Sevagram in 1996 for Pune and is now a paediatric endocrinologist. She had missed her teachers’ mentorship, and my email, she wrote, “reduced the sense of loss I sometimes feel about it.” I had expected to stay a year, and had never thought of staying as something I did for anyone.
Some writers stood outside the fold. Kishore Shah, a private practitioner, wrote that he has no luxury of retiring and does not know whether it is “a blessing or a curse.” He hoped I would now write more. Shivnarayan Acharya, a Nagpur nephrologist and GMC Nagpur alumnus from 1976, wrote that he wished he had studied at Sevagram instead, if only to have had a teacher like me. It takes an odd loyalty to envy a college you never attended, for a professor you never had.
Three of the sixty-six, under five per cent, came from inside MGIMS: Ramesh Pandey, professor of surgery; Pravin Zopate, professor of forensic medicine; and Suma Antony, an ICU nurse, who thanked me for the Cardiology Unit and called it “your dream project.” From my own department there was near silence. The colleague I would have expected to hear from first 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 say more about me than about him.
Five replies came in Hindi, and one, from Rajkumar Jajoo of the Maheshwari Mandal in Wardha, ran to a poem, cricket carried all the way through in verse I have not attempted to render in English here. Bharati Pandya, writing in English, reached instead for Richard Bach: “How do I know if my work in this world is over or not? If you are alive, it is not.” Superannuation, she wrote, does not settle that question. I am not sure it does either.
Gayatri Iyer, of the 1997 batch, works in San Ramon, California, where she teaches residents rotating through the emergency department. Her fifteenth work anniversary fell on the same day I retired, 1 September. She remembered parts of her first lecture from me, on nephrology, and still finds it amazing that the kidneys “consistently make the same urine, no matter what we drink.” She admitted she is still learning to teach it herself. Her note ended with an invitation. If I am ever in the area, I should stay with her. “I have room.”