The Platform at Wardha East
He had almost left on the very evening he arrived.
The Dakshin Express had pulled into Wardha East station well past dusk. The platform was dimly lit and uninviting. The mosquitoes on the hostel terrace were relentless. The breakfast at the local hotel the next morning was entirely tasteless. The hospital itself was a quiet, bare-bones village institution, possessing absolutely nothing of the kinetic energy of Chandigarh or Delhi. By the following afternoon, Dr. Ravinder Narang had firmly decided: one day was enough. He packed his bags and walked back toward Wardha East station, determined to board the first train back to Delhi.
He was stopped—twice.
First by Dr. Dhawan, who mentioned that the Head of Surgery, Dr. Raj Kumar, wanted to see him before he left. Narang flatly refused the meeting and boarded the train anyway. Then, a week later, Dr. Raj Kumar actually tracked him down in Delhi and made the case directly: Give it a few months. After that, the choice is entirely yours.
Caught between his initial doubt and an inexplicable pull he could not quite name, Dr. Narang sighed and agreed. He returned to Sevagram in June 1973.
He finally left on December 1, 2020—exactly 17,280 days later.
Sargodha, Partition, and the Cleared Waitlist
Ravinder Narang was born on December 7, 1940, in Sargodha, Punjab (now in Pakistan). His father was a doctor. Watching his father endure the long hours, the heavy sacrifices, and the particular toll of a life surrendered to other people’s emergencies gave young Ravinder deep pause when considering medicine for himself. In 1947, when he was seven, the extreme violence of Partition forced his family to flee Sargodha with only what they could carry. They began again in Ludhiana, alongside hundreds of thousands of displaced families across the bleeding subcontinent.
He attended Arya Samaj High School, proved bright and intensely curious, and eventually set his sights on medicine. He quickly discovered, however, that Dayanand Medical School required five years’ tuition paid upfront—a sum his refugee family simply could not produce. He applied to the new Medical College at Rohtak and found himself 114th on the waitlist. He applied to Christian Medical College, Ludhiana, and was rejected. Defeated, he enrolled in a BSc Honours program at Punjab University in Chandigarh, actively arranging his mind for a completely different future.
Three months later, the Rohtak waitlist miraculously cleared. He enrolled immediately, completing his first three years at Medical College, Patiala (where the program had temporarily relocated) before returning to Rohtak. He graduated with his MBBS in 1965. The boy who had spent three months languishing on a waitlist and studying general science had arrived at his medical degree by the longest possible route.
The Circuitous Path to the Operating Theatre
He desperately wanted Internal Medicine for his postgraduate training—he felt it was his true calling—but the seat slipped away. Settling, he chose ophthalmology at PGI Chandigarh. He spent his days sitting in the dim darkness of an examination room, peering through an ophthalmoscope at the narrow, restricted world of the eye. The silence and confinement gnawed at him. “I needed more than just the eye,” he would say later. “I needed the whole patient.”
He switched to the MS Surgery course, viewing it at the time merely as a necessary stepping stone toward the orthopaedics he truly wanted. Instead, he discovered something profound inside the general operating theatre: a rhythm of precision and absolute purpose that settled the question permanently. In 1969, he earned his MS in General Surgery from PGI Chandigarh under Dr. I.C. Pathak. He would carry Pathak’s central aphorism for the rest of his career: “Work with young minds and you’ll stay young at heart. A medical school is where you’ll find that energy.”
From 1969 to 1973, he served as a resident at AIIMS Delhi, training under Dr. Atma Prakash and Dr. B.M.L. Kapur—two of the sharpest surgical minds of the era. It was Dr. Kapur who, when the residency concluded, explicitly suggested he look at Sevagram.
The Department He Found
He joined the Department of Surgery on June 1, 1973. It was a department experiencing constant, turbulent transition: Dr. Raj Kumar was at the helm on temporary deputation from the Bhilai Steel Plant, Dr. Karunakar Trivedi had recently departed for Madhya Pradesh, and multiple colleagues were on study leave or in flux.
He adapted. He settled into his role, took charge of the sports section of the student association, and became part of the small, fiercely close-knit faculty community.
When Dr. Raj Kumar departed in July 1976, Dr. Narang stepped up as Department Head. A year later, Dr. Karunakar Trivedi returned in triumph and reclaimed the captaincy. Dr. Narang simply stepped back, continued operating, continued building, and waited. (In 1979, sheer frustration prompted him to apply to BYL Nair Hospital in Mumbai. An offer came through, but housing in Mumbai proved impossible to arrange, and the plan dissolved).
When Dr. Trivedi finally left for good in June 1984, Dr. Narang was asked to lead once more. He accepted. He led the Surgery department continuously for the next two decades, until his retirement in 2005.
The Surgeon
His areas of particular mastery were thyroid surgery, parotid surgery, and urology—specifically kidney malignancies and complex stone surgeries of the kidney and ureter. He approached severe abdominal cases with the steady hands and unshakeable judgment of someone who had been operating in a resource-constrained environment long enough to develop techniques uniquely appropriate to that reality. In a rural hospital where what was actually available was rarely what the textbooks assumed, he found ways to make things work.
“I always had a passion for urology,” he liked to joke. “I left no stone unturned—not just in my career, but literally, with kidney and ureter stone surgeries.”
In 1992, a WHO fellowship took him to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the Mayo Clinic, and the Royal Marsden Hospital. He absorbed exposure to the world’s finest, most technologically advanced surgical centers, brought that knowledge back to Sevagram, and successfully applied it within Sevagram’s strict constraints.
He fiercely believed in human senses over the machine. “A CT scan or ultrasound gives images,” he told his students regularly, “but it’s the human touch and connection with the patient that reveal what machines cannot.” He was notoriously strict at the bedside and in the theatre—instilling discipline through the heavy pressure of someone who held the standard incredibly high. Yet, he consistently returned the conversation to kindness and empathy the moment the technical instruction was complete. “A good surgeon is never arrogant or difficult. We heal the body and care for those who place their trust in us.”
Between 1982 and 2009, he mentored thirty-four MS thesis students, guiding young surgeons until he was sixty-five with the consistency of a man who understood that this was the entire point of being in a teaching hospital.
The Medical Superintendent and the Declined Deanship
Between 1990 and 2000, he served simultaneously as Medical Superintendent. He waded through the mountain of paperwork, the complex regulations, the employee disputes, the endless bills, and the brutal procurement of equipment. Crucially, he managed it all while continuing to see outpatients and perform the most difficult surgeries the department faced. The operating room was where his joy lived, and he flatly refused to let administration displace it.
He had dreamed for years of becoming the Dean of MGIMS—the highest institutional achievement available, and the position toward which his entire career seemed to be pointing. But when it finally came within reach, he looked at it with absolute clarity: endless paperwork, strict regulatory rules, and the grinding, daily management of budgets and politicians.
His heart was simply not there. He voluntarily stepped back from the Dean’s office and returned to the operating room and the classroom. The dream had shifted. The joy remained.
17,280 Days
In the winter of 2020, he walked out of his outpatient clinic for the final time as Emeritus Professor of Surgery. His wife joined him silently as he passed through the corridors he had walked continuously since 1973.
His wife, Dr. Pratibha Narang, had joined MGIMS on the exact same day in 1973 as its first Microbiology lecturer. She had built that department from nothing while he built Surgery. She had gone with him to the Wardha East station on the day he almost left, and she had returned with him when Dr. Raj Kumar persuaded him to come back. Their careers at MGIMS ran in perfect parallel for nearly fifty years: two departments, one campus, one incredibly long commitment.
He had come to Sevagram wanting Internal Medicine, tried Ophthalmology, aimed for Orthopaedics, found General Surgery instead, and spent five decades with it. It was not the fiery romance of first choices, but the deepening, unbreakable bond of a commitment made and kept—the kind of constancy that outlasts passion and becomes something infinitely more reliable.
His mentor Dr. Pathak had told him that a medical school was where young minds would keep his passion alive. He had believed it fully enough to return from the train platform when a man found him in Delhi and said: Give it a few months. The months became forty-seven years. The years became the foundation of a surgery department, thirty-four MS graduates, countless thyroid and kidney operations, and a legacy that will outlast them all.