Dr. Arun C. Tikle

Professor & Head of Anaesthesiology · MGIMS

MBBS, Government Medical College Nagpur (1967)
MD Anaesthesiology, Government Medical College Nagpur (1977)

b. 25 July 1944, Yavatmal, Maharashtra   ·   d. 20 August 1999, Sevagram

Surgeons would burst into the operating theatre with massively complicated cases, severely limited time, and inadequate equipment. Dr. Arun Tikle's response was always identical: "Go ahead. I'll handle the rest." Senior surgeons who worked alongside him during those bare-bones years would recall this quality decades later with the particular wistfulness of people who know they will never see its like again.

Overworked, often visibly exhausted, operating with whatever the rural department currently had available—which in the 1970s meant a Boyle’s machine, ether, and sheer clinical intuition—he never hesitated. Senior surgeons who worked alongside him during those bare-bones years would recall this quality decades later with the particular wistfulness of people who know they will never see its like again.

He was the son of a Deputy Superintendent of Police, which perhaps explains his unyielding dedication to duty. It does not, however, explain the gentleness. That came from somewhere else entirely—from his own particular nature, which consciously chose kindness over command and softness over authority in every interaction, every single day, for twenty-six years.

The Detour to the Other Side of the Table

Arun Chintaman Tikle was born on July 25, 1944, in Yavatmal, Maharashtra. He entered Government Medical College (GMC), Nagpur, in 1963 and graduated with his MBBS in 1967.

He had deeply wanted to be a surgeon. He enrolled in an MS General Surgery program, but just six months in, severe financial constraints forced him to stop. He stepped back, calmly assessed his situation, and pivoted entirely to Anaesthesiology—the specialty that put him, as he would later say with a quiet smile, “on the other side of the operating table.”

The forced detour became his life’s vocation. He earned his Diploma in Anaesthesiology in 1971. On March 6, 1973, he joined MGIMS Sevagram as a Lecturer in Anaesthesiology. His first salary was exactly ₹740 per month. He accepted it without a single word of complaint.

The Department He Inherited

The operating theatre of early MGIMS was housed in the old hospital building and equipped strictly with what was available, rather than what was ideal.

There was a Boyle’s machine delivering anesthetic gases, with ether serving as the primary agent. There was exactly one Puritan Bennett ventilator, which had to be nervously shared between Medicine and Paediatrics. There were no recovery rooms. There were no pulse oximeters. There were no multiparameter monitors. “Monitoring” was entirely clinical: watching the pulse, observing the rise and fall of respiration, checking the patient’s skin color, and measuring blood pressure manually with a mercury sphygmomanometer.

The anaesthesiologist’s skill and experience were the monitoring system.

In 1977, four years after joining, Dr. Tikle took study leave to complete his MD in Anaesthesiology at GMC Nagpur, returning with formal postgraduate credentials to a department where none of the original faculty had held them. He became a Reader in 1980, assumed the department headship in December 1983 (succeeding the formidable Dr. R.N. Shetti), and was appointed Head of the Operating Theatres in 1986.

He and Dr. Shetti had been striking contrasts as colleagues. Shetti was imposing and authoritative—a presence felt immediately the second he entered a room. Dr. Tikle was soft-spoken and gentle, moving effortlessly between theatre orderlies, technicians, surgeons, and residents without ever needing to assert his authority. Where Shetti’s influence was felt through force, Tikle’s was felt through profound kindness. The department had been shaped by both, and the transition from one to the other had been absorbed without a single fracture.

What He Did With Nothing

The stories of Dr. Tikle in the operating theatre share one incredibly consistent feature: his absolute calm in the face of things going disastrously wrong.

Hypotension, hypoxia, unexpected hemorrhages mid-procedure—he navigated terrifying crises without allowing a single trace of anxiety to cross his face. He never communicated to surgeons or patients that a situation was deteriorating. This composure was not a performance; it was the hard-earned product of years of working in rural conditions where equipment routinely failed and improvisation was simply not optional. He had learned early that panic in an OR is highly contagious and utterly useless, and that the single most important thing an anaesthesiologist can give a surgical team is confidence.

He worked alongside Dr. K.K. Trivedi on highly complex cardiac procedures—open mitral valvotomy and pericardiectomy—conducted with the starkly limited monitoring resources of the 1970s. That such massive procedures were performed successfully at MGIMS in that era was a testament to two specialists pushing together against the absolute limits of what their setting could reasonably achieve.

Between 1984 and 1998, he mentored twenty-two MD students through their postgraduate training. He invested deeply in these students, not because the administrative structure required it, but because he intimately understood the terror young doctors faced when learning a specialty where a single error has immediate, fatal consequences. He prioritized their success over his own convenience, regularly, and entirely without announcement.

The Body That Would Not Cooperate

His blood pressure had been dangerously elevated for years, its exact cause unclear, and its management severely limited by the diagnostic tools and medications available at the time. On February 1, 1993, he suffered a massive heart attack. Thrombolysis was administered, but persistent chest pain required an urgent transfer to Bombay Hospital for coronary artery bypass surgery. He was only forty-eight.

During this terrifying family crisis, his son Harshvardhan sat for his MGIMS entrance examinations, writing three comprehensive science papers and a paper on Gandhian Thought while his father was actively recovering from open-heart surgery.

Dr. Tikle returned to work. He never allowed his compromised health to interfere with his responsibilities in any way that was visible to others. Vacations were routinely missed. Night calls were answered even when he was not officially scheduled. His colleagues were covered when they were overwhelmed. The pattern of exhausting service continued exactly as before, simply with the additional, dangerous variable of a failing cardiovascular system.

What He Left

In the early hours of August 20, 1999, he died of a brain hemorrhage in the old Medicine ICU at Kasturba Hospital—the exact same institution where he had worked for twenty-six years. His family and friends were present, including Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, who remained steadily by his side. Understanding that death is a natural part of life, the family declined aggressive, futile interventions and allowed him to pass peacefully, with the exact same quiet dignity that had characterized everything he had done in life. He was fifty-five years old.

His wife, Kanchan, whom he had married in 1972, served as the warden of the MGIMS Girls’ Hostel for twenty years, remaining a steadfast pillar of the campus long after his death until her retirement in 2010. She had been his steady companion through the colony quarters, the years of unreliable health, the cardiac surgery, and the final, quiet hours.

Their son, Harshvardhan, graduated from MGIMS in 1993 and completed his MD in Anaesthesiology from the exact same institution. He took the precise path his father had taken, in the department his father had built, anesthetizing patients in the very operating theatres where his father had once stood. (He now practices in Mumbai, while their daughter, Devyani, lives in Nagpur).

Gardening, cooking, and long solitary walks—these were the quiet pleasures of a man who did not need much outside the operating theatre and his small circle of friends. He had been handed a painful detour at twenty-six when his money ran out and his dream of surgery became impossible. He took that detour with deep equanimity and turned it into a magnificent life.

For twenty-six years in Sevagram, through inadequate equipment, institutional instability, and his own rapidly declining health, he had given the desperate surgeons his reliable “yes.” And none of them ever had cause to regret it.

 

 

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Dr. Arun C. Tikle

Overworked, often visibly exhausted, operating with whatever the rural department currently had available—which in the 1970s meant a Boyle’s machine, ether, and sheer clinical intuition—he never hesitated. Senior surgeons who worked alongside him during those bare-bones years would recall this quality decades later with the particular wistfulness of people who know they will never see its like again.

He was the son of a Deputy Superintendent of Police, which perhaps explains his unyielding dedication to duty. It does not, however, explain the gentleness. That came from somewhere else entirely—from his own particular nature, which consciously chose kindness over command and softness over authority in every interaction, every single day, for twenty-six years.

The Detour to the Other Side of the Table

Arun Chintaman Tikle was born on July 25, 1944, in Yavatmal, Maharashtra. He entered Government Medical College (GMC), Nagpur, in 1963 and graduated with his MBBS in 1967.

He had deeply wanted to be a surgeon. He enrolled in an MS General Surgery program, but just six months in, severe financial constraints forced him to stop. He stepped back, calmly assessed his situation, and pivoted entirely to Anaesthesiology—the specialty that put him, as he would later say with a quiet smile, “on the other side of the operating table.”

The forced detour became his life’s vocation. He earned his Diploma in Anaesthesiology in 1971. On March 6, 1973, he joined MGIMS Sevagram as a Lecturer in Anaesthesiology. His first salary was exactly ₹740 per month. He accepted it without a single word of complaint.

The Department He Inherited

The operating theatre of early MGIMS was housed in the old hospital building and equipped strictly with what was available, rather than what was ideal.

There was a Boyle’s machine delivering anesthetic gases, with ether serving as the primary agent. There was exactly one Puritan Bennett ventilator, which had to be nervously shared between Medicine and Paediatrics. There were no recovery rooms. There were no pulse oximeters. There were no multiparameter monitors. “Monitoring” was entirely clinical: watching the pulse, observing the rise and fall of respiration, checking the patient’s skin color, and measuring blood pressure manually with a mercury sphygmomanometer.

The anaesthesiologist’s skill and experience were the monitoring system.

In 1977, four years after joining, Dr. Tikle took study leave to complete his MD in Anaesthesiology at GMC Nagpur, returning with formal postgraduate credentials to a department where none of the original faculty had held them. He became a Reader in 1980, assumed the department headship in December 1983 (succeeding the formidable Dr. R.N. Shetti), and was appointed Head of the Operating Theatres in 1986.

He and Dr. Shetti had been striking contrasts as colleagues. Shetti was imposing and authoritative—a presence felt immediately the second he entered a room. Dr. Tikle was soft-spoken and gentle, moving effortlessly between theatre orderlies, technicians, surgeons, and residents without ever needing to assert his authority. Where Shetti’s influence was felt through force, Tikle’s was felt through profound kindness. The department had been shaped by both, and the transition from one to the other had been absorbed without a single fracture.

What He Did With Nothing

The stories of Dr. Tikle in the operating theatre share one incredibly consistent feature: his absolute calm in the face of things going disastrously wrong.

Hypotension, hypoxia, unexpected hemorrhages mid-procedure—he navigated terrifying crises without allowing a single trace of anxiety to cross his face. He never communicated to surgeons or patients that a situation was deteriorating. This composure was not a performance; it was the hard-earned product of years of working in rural conditions where equipment routinely failed and improvisation was simply not optional. He had learned early that panic in an OR is highly contagious and utterly useless, and that the single most important thing an anaesthesiologist can give a surgical team is confidence.

He worked alongside Dr. K.K. Trivedi on highly complex cardiac procedures—open mitral valvotomy and pericardiectomy—conducted with the starkly limited monitoring resources of the 1970s. That such massive procedures were performed successfully at MGIMS in that era was a testament to two specialists pushing together against the absolute limits of what their setting could reasonably achieve.

Between 1984 and 1998, he mentored twenty-two MD students through their postgraduate training. He invested deeply in these students, not because the administrative structure required it, but because he intimately understood the terror young doctors faced when learning a specialty where a single error has immediate, fatal consequences. He prioritized their success over his own convenience, regularly, and entirely without announcement.

The Body That Would Not Cooperate

His blood pressure had been dangerously elevated for years, its exact cause unclear, and its management severely limited by the diagnostic tools and medications available at the time. On February 1, 1993, he suffered a massive heart attack. Thrombolysis was administered, but persistent chest pain required an urgent transfer to Bombay Hospital for coronary artery bypass surgery. He was only forty-eight.

During this terrifying family crisis, his son Harshvardhan sat for his MGIMS entrance examinations, writing three comprehensive science papers and a paper on Gandhian Thought while his father was actively recovering from open-heart surgery.

Dr. Tikle returned to work. He never allowed his compromised health to interfere with his responsibilities in any way that was visible to others. Vacations were routinely missed. Night calls were answered even when he was not officially scheduled. His colleagues were covered when they were overwhelmed. The pattern of exhausting service continued exactly as before, simply with the additional, dangerous variable of a failing cardiovascular system.

What He Left

In the early hours of August 20, 1999, he died of a brain hemorrhage in the old Medicine ICU at Kasturba Hospital—the exact same institution where he had worked for twenty-six years. His family and friends were present, including Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, who remained steadily by his side. Understanding that death is a natural part of life, the family declined aggressive, futile interventions and allowed him to pass peacefully, with the exact same quiet dignity that had characterized everything he had done in life. He was fifty-five years old.

His wife, Kanchan, whom he had married in 1972, served as the warden of the MGIMS Girls’ Hostel for twenty years, remaining a steadfast pillar of the campus long after his death until her retirement in 2010. She had been his steady companion through the colony quarters, the years of unreliable health, the cardiac surgery, and the final, quiet hours.

Their son, Harshvardhan, graduated from MGIMS in 1993 and completed his MD in Anaesthesiology from the exact same institution. He took the precise path his father had taken, in the department his father had built, anesthetizing patients in the very operating theatres where his father had once stood. (He now practices in Mumbai, while their daughter, Devyani, lives in Nagpur).

Gardening, cooking, and long solitary walks—these were the quiet pleasures of a man who did not need much outside the operating theatre and his small circle of friends. He had been handed a painful detour at twenty-six when his money ran out and his dream of surgery became impossible. He took that detour with deep equanimity and turned it into a magnificent life.

For twenty-six years in Sevagram, through inadequate equipment, institutional instability, and his own rapidly declining health, he had given the desperate surgeons his reliable “yes.” And none of them ever had cause to regret it.