Dr. K. Shankar Bhat

Professor of Physiology · MGIMS

MSc Medical Physiology (JIPMER) [1973]
PhD Physiology (MGIMS, Sevagram) [1992]

b. 18 September 1946, Mudipu, Dakshina Kannada   ·   d. —

Tenure: 1981 – 1990

Make two columns in life — one for blessings, one for difficulties. You will find that blessings always outnumber hardships by a wide margin.

Professor & Head of Physiology · First Physiology PhD at MGIMS · The Man Who Counted His Blessings and Always Found Them More

His father had given him a piece of advice that stayed with him for seventy years: make two columns in life, one for blessings and one for difficulties, and you will find that blessings always outnumber hardships by a wide margin. If you understand this, you will always be content.

Kunhikatta Shankar Bhat understood it. A man who had wanted to be a doctor and could not afford the fees, who became a physiology teacher instead and found it suited him completely, who was made a hostel warden against his nature and found the role genuinely difficult, who retired from a long academic career and then — quietly, without drama — returned to the other inheritance his father had left him, performing Shiva Poojas and Ganapati Havans with the same sincerity he had brought to explaining endocrinology to first-year MBBS students. He counted his blessings. They outnumbered the hardships.

Mudipu to JIPMER: The Doctor Who Became a Teacher

Shankar Bhat was born on September 18, 1946, in Mudipu, a small hamlet in Bantwal Taluka of Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka, the eldest of seven siblings. His father was a farmer and a priest — a lineage of sacred duties passed across generations that young Shankar absorbed without knowing he would one day return to it.

He was a bright student, moving through Sri V.V. High School in Kodlamogaru, PUC at MGM College, Udupi, and a BSc from St. Aloysius College, Mangalore. In the medical qualifying examination, he secured 71% — enough to earn admission to Mysore Medical College for MBBS. It was a genuine achievement. His father could not afford the fees. He let the dream go.

The route that opened instead was not a consolation prize. In the 1960s, India faced an acute shortage of medical teachers, and institutions including AIIMS, PGI, and JIPMER launched MSc programmes in Anatomy and Physiology, offering a stipend of ₹500 a month to attract science graduates. Bhat joined JIPMER’s Physiology programme. Practicality brought him in; passion kept him.

The programme had one requirement he found genuinely distressing: students had to kill and dissect dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, and cats for animal experiments. His upbringing and convictions would not allow it. “That was a very tough period,” he recalled. “I don’t know how I managed to get through without killing animals for experiments.” He managed. He completed his MSc in Medical Physiology in 1973 and began looking for a place to teach.

He found one 2,500 kilometres north.

Faridkot, Delhi, and the Road to Sevagram

In 1974, he joined the newly established Guru Gobind Singh Medical College in Faridkot, Punjab — the same institution where Jayaram Anbalagan had arrived the same year, from the same programme, for the same purpose. They worked alongside each other under the same principal, Professor K.S. Sachdeva. The parallel was striking enough even then; it would become more so later.

After a year in Faridkot, he moved to Delhi, taking a post as Scientific Officer at the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences — an institute focused on human performance research in extreme and wartime conditions. Pure research did not suit him. “I didn’t want to spend my life with a pencil and rubber,” he would say, with the directness of someone who had identified exactly what he needed from his working life. He craved a classroom.

Lady Hardinge Medical College provided that. The academic culture appealed to him, the students were engaged, and it felt, for a time, like home. But Lady Hardinge did not offer a PhD programme in Physiology, and his mentor Dr. O.P. Bagga urged him to look elsewhere for doctoral work.

In 1981, he appeared before the MGIMS selection board in Sevagram. Among the panelists was a familiar face: Professor K.S. Sachdeva, now Dean of MGIMS — the same man who had been his principal at Faridkot seven years earlier. Bhat’s academic record was recognised with three salary increments at appointment, a gesture that signalled clearly what the institution thought of its new hire.

Settling into Sevagram was an education of its own kind. The Gandhian ethos — vegetarian food, Friday prayers, shramdan, khadi — was unlike anything in his previous experience. “For the first time in my life,” he recalled, “I learned that you could survive months without money.” He adapted. The simplicity, once unfamiliar, came to feel like the right register for a life he had always intended to live seriously.

He had married Ratna — an MA and MD in Hindi Literature from Andhra University — on February 19, 1977. They were allotted a Type-II quarter at Sevagram, later moving to MLK Quarters No. 10 after his promotion to Reader, where their neighbours included Professors O.P. Gupta, A.P. Jain, Sutikshna Pande, A.C. Tikle, and Dr. M.L. Sharma. It was the kind of residential community that forms naturally when people of similar professional commitment live in close proximity — bound by intellect, shared purpose, and the ordinary daily warmth of neighbours who become friends.

Teaching, Research, and the First Physiology PhD

The department he joined was led by Dr. K.N. Ingley, with Dr. Sutikshna Pande as Reader. The three-member teaching faculty divided the subject between them: Ingley taught the nervous system, Pande covered cardiovascular and respiratory physiology, and Bhat took endocrinology and related topics. Together they delivered 180 lectures, 90 practicals, 40 demonstrations, and 40 tutorials to each batch of first-year MBBS students — an intensive commitment that left little ambiguity about where the department’s priorities lay.

Bhat understood his students’ position precisely. “They weren’t seeking deep physiological insights,” he said later. “Just a way to survive the first year and pass. The real understanding would come later.” He taught accordingly — distilling Guyton and Ganong into clear, retainable notes, simplifying without falsifying, giving students tools they could actually use.

For his PhD, he chose semen analysis in infertile men — the department housed a well-established infertility lab, and the clinical question was genuinely unresolved. Dr. Ingley was his guide and, by Bhat’s account, an ideal one: “He never interfered. He let me ask my own questions, design my own pro forma, collect and analyze my data, and write my thesis in my own way.”

The research produced a finding that cut against the department’s existing assumptions. Analysis of 300 infertile men revealed that the traditional drugs being used to treat infertility showed no impact. Men with very low sperm counts were simply least likely to father children, regardless of treatment. Dr. N.K. Tyagi’s statistical work uncovered the pattern. The methodological limitations were real — no randomisation, no control group, ethics committees not yet active — but the finding was honest and the analysis careful. The PhD was awarded without a viva, reviewed by one internal and two external examiners who approved it in absentia. It became the first PhD awarded in Physiology at MGIMS.

The Warden’s Burden

In the mid-1980s, the institution appointed him Warden of the Boys’ Hostel. His wife Ratna was simultaneously appointed Warden of the Girls’ Hostel — an unusual domestic arrangement in which husband and wife each oversaw separate student residences, together responsible for the daily welfare, discipline, and safety of the entire residential student population.

He was a teacher and a researcher. He was not, by instinct or temperament, an administrator or disciplinarian. Boys broke curfew, returned late, tested the institution’s rules with the creativity that boredom and youth reliably produce. Dr. Bhat, patient by nature, found the enforcement role genuinely uncomfortable.

Then Dilip Raghavan from the 1985 batch died in a motorcycle crash returning from Shirdi. Further incidents followed. Investigations began, pressure mounted, and the cumulative weight of a role he had never wanted became unbearable. He stepped down.

He did not blame the institution for assigning him the role. He understood that in a small campus with limited faculty, administrative duties were distributed as much by necessity as by aptitude. But the episode confirmed for him that his place was in the classroom and the laboratory — not in the corridors of the hostel at midnight, listening for the particular silence that meant someone had just done something they shouldn’t.

After Sevagram, and the Return to Roots

He left MGIMS in November 1990, spending a brief period at a private medical college in Latur before joining D.Y. Patil College, Kolhapur, as Professor of Physiology. The private college world was materially better resourced and spiritually thinner. Students lacked the quality of seriousness he had known in Sevagram. He carried Sevagram with him — its students, its rhythms, its simplicity — in the way that those who have lived there always do.

From Kolhapur he moved to Yenepoya Medical College, where he led the Physiology department until sixty, then continued a further decade at the management’s request, retiring finally in 2016 at seventy.

Teaching done, he returned to his father’s inheritance. He immersed himself in Sanskrit texts, relearned ancient rituals, and began performing Shiva Poojas, Satyanarayan Poojas, Durga Poojas, and Ganapati Havans — not professionally at first but out of the pull of something that had been waiting for him. His sincerity was evident, and people sought him out. “The English education system distanced us from our heritage,” he said. “But when you return to your roots, you find both meaning and a decent livelihood.”

His son chose differently — an MBA from London, his own business. Every generation makes its own calculation.

A Parallel Worth Noting

The story of Shankar Bhat and Jayaram Anbalagan — the two South Indian MSc physiologists who took the same programme at JIPMER in the same years, traveled independently to the same medical college in Faridkot, worked under the same principal, and then arrived separately at MGIMS Sevagram within two years of each other, both completing PhDs there before returning to medical colleges in South India — is one of the quieter improbabilities of the MGIMS story. Tamil and Kannada, different departments, different years of arrival. The same arc, the same formation, the same Sevagram. Some parallels are too exact to be only coincidence and too incomplete to be called destiny. This one sits comfortably in between.

When Bhat was about to leave Sevagram, he bought a second-hand Luna. Dr. Pande bought one too. The two slow-moving vehicles, driven by two unhurried men who had each found their calling in a village in Vidarbha, navigating the same quiet roads at the same measured pace. It is as good an image as any for what Sevagram was, in those years, for the people who came to it and stayed.

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Dr. K. Shankar Bhat

Professor & Head of Physiology · First Physiology PhD at MGIMS · The Man Who Counted His Blessings and Always Found Them More

His father had given him a piece of advice that stayed with him for seventy years: make two columns in life, one for blessings and one for difficulties, and you will find that blessings always outnumber hardships by a wide margin. If you understand this, you will always be content.

Kunhikatta Shankar Bhat understood it. A man who had wanted to be a doctor and could not afford the fees, who became a physiology teacher instead and found it suited him completely, who was made a hostel warden against his nature and found the role genuinely difficult, who retired from a long academic career and then — quietly, without drama — returned to the other inheritance his father had left him, performing Shiva Poojas and Ganapati Havans with the same sincerity he had brought to explaining endocrinology to first-year MBBS students. He counted his blessings. They outnumbered the hardships.

Mudipu to JIPMER: The Doctor Who Became a Teacher

Shankar Bhat was born on September 18, 1946, in Mudipu, a small hamlet in Bantwal Taluka of Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka, the eldest of seven siblings. His father was a farmer and a priest — a lineage of sacred duties passed across generations that young Shankar absorbed without knowing he would one day return to it.

He was a bright student, moving through Sri V.V. High School in Kodlamogaru, PUC at MGM College, Udupi, and a BSc from St. Aloysius College, Mangalore. In the medical qualifying examination, he secured 71% — enough to earn admission to Mysore Medical College for MBBS. It was a genuine achievement. His father could not afford the fees. He let the dream go.

The route that opened instead was not a consolation prize. In the 1960s, India faced an acute shortage of medical teachers, and institutions including AIIMS, PGI, and JIPMER launched MSc programmes in Anatomy and Physiology, offering a stipend of ₹500 a month to attract science graduates. Bhat joined JIPMER’s Physiology programme. Practicality brought him in; passion kept him.

The programme had one requirement he found genuinely distressing: students had to kill and dissect dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, and cats for animal experiments. His upbringing and convictions would not allow it. “That was a very tough period,” he recalled. “I don’t know how I managed to get through without killing animals for experiments.” He managed. He completed his MSc in Medical Physiology in 1973 and began looking for a place to teach.

He found one 2,500 kilometres north.

Faridkot, Delhi, and the Road to Sevagram

In 1974, he joined the newly established Guru Gobind Singh Medical College in Faridkot, Punjab — the same institution where Jayaram Anbalagan had arrived the same year, from the same programme, for the same purpose. They worked alongside each other under the same principal, Professor K.S. Sachdeva. The parallel was striking enough even then; it would become more so later.

After a year in Faridkot, he moved to Delhi, taking a post as Scientific Officer at the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences — an institute focused on human performance research in extreme and wartime conditions. Pure research did not suit him. “I didn’t want to spend my life with a pencil and rubber,” he would say, with the directness of someone who had identified exactly what he needed from his working life. He craved a classroom.

Lady Hardinge Medical College provided that. The academic culture appealed to him, the students were engaged, and it felt, for a time, like home. But Lady Hardinge did not offer a PhD programme in Physiology, and his mentor Dr. O.P. Bagga urged him to look elsewhere for doctoral work.

In 1981, he appeared before the MGIMS selection board in Sevagram. Among the panelists was a familiar face: Professor K.S. Sachdeva, now Dean of MGIMS — the same man who had been his principal at Faridkot seven years earlier. Bhat’s academic record was recognised with three salary increments at appointment, a gesture that signalled clearly what the institution thought of its new hire.

Settling into Sevagram was an education of its own kind. The Gandhian ethos — vegetarian food, Friday prayers, shramdan, khadi — was unlike anything in his previous experience. “For the first time in my life,” he recalled, “I learned that you could survive months without money.” He adapted. The simplicity, once unfamiliar, came to feel like the right register for a life he had always intended to live seriously.

He had married Ratna — an MA and MD in Hindi Literature from Andhra University — on February 19, 1977. They were allotted a Type-II quarter at Sevagram, later moving to MLK Quarters No. 10 after his promotion to Reader, where their neighbours included Professors O.P. Gupta, A.P. Jain, Sutikshna Pande, A.C. Tikle, and Dr. M.L. Sharma. It was the kind of residential community that forms naturally when people of similar professional commitment live in close proximity — bound by intellect, shared purpose, and the ordinary daily warmth of neighbours who become friends.

Teaching, Research, and the First Physiology PhD

The department he joined was led by Dr. K.N. Ingley, with Dr. Sutikshna Pande as Reader. The three-member teaching faculty divided the subject between them: Ingley taught the nervous system, Pande covered cardiovascular and respiratory physiology, and Bhat took endocrinology and related topics. Together they delivered 180 lectures, 90 practicals, 40 demonstrations, and 40 tutorials to each batch of first-year MBBS students — an intensive commitment that left little ambiguity about where the department’s priorities lay.

Bhat understood his students’ position precisely. “They weren’t seeking deep physiological insights,” he said later. “Just a way to survive the first year and pass. The real understanding would come later.” He taught accordingly — distilling Guyton and Ganong into clear, retainable notes, simplifying without falsifying, giving students tools they could actually use.

For his PhD, he chose semen analysis in infertile men — the department housed a well-established infertility lab, and the clinical question was genuinely unresolved. Dr. Ingley was his guide and, by Bhat’s account, an ideal one: “He never interfered. He let me ask my own questions, design my own pro forma, collect and analyze my data, and write my thesis in my own way.”

The research produced a finding that cut against the department’s existing assumptions. Analysis of 300 infertile men revealed that the traditional drugs being used to treat infertility showed no impact. Men with very low sperm counts were simply least likely to father children, regardless of treatment. Dr. N.K. Tyagi’s statistical work uncovered the pattern. The methodological limitations were real — no randomisation, no control group, ethics committees not yet active — but the finding was honest and the analysis careful. The PhD was awarded without a viva, reviewed by one internal and two external examiners who approved it in absentia. It became the first PhD awarded in Physiology at MGIMS.

The Warden’s Burden

In the mid-1980s, the institution appointed him Warden of the Boys’ Hostel. His wife Ratna was simultaneously appointed Warden of the Girls’ Hostel — an unusual domestic arrangement in which husband and wife each oversaw separate student residences, together responsible for the daily welfare, discipline, and safety of the entire residential student population.

He was a teacher and a researcher. He was not, by instinct or temperament, an administrator or disciplinarian. Boys broke curfew, returned late, tested the institution’s rules with the creativity that boredom and youth reliably produce. Dr. Bhat, patient by nature, found the enforcement role genuinely uncomfortable.

Then Dilip Raghavan from the 1985 batch died in a motorcycle crash returning from Shirdi. Further incidents followed. Investigations began, pressure mounted, and the cumulative weight of a role he had never wanted became unbearable. He stepped down.

He did not blame the institution for assigning him the role. He understood that in a small campus with limited faculty, administrative duties were distributed as much by necessity as by aptitude. But the episode confirmed for him that his place was in the classroom and the laboratory — not in the corridors of the hostel at midnight, listening for the particular silence that meant someone had just done something they shouldn’t.

After Sevagram, and the Return to Roots

He left MGIMS in November 1990, spending a brief period at a private medical college in Latur before joining D.Y. Patil College, Kolhapur, as Professor of Physiology. The private college world was materially better resourced and spiritually thinner. Students lacked the quality of seriousness he had known in Sevagram. He carried Sevagram with him — its students, its rhythms, its simplicity — in the way that those who have lived there always do.

From Kolhapur he moved to Yenepoya Medical College, where he led the Physiology department until sixty, then continued a further decade at the management’s request, retiring finally in 2016 at seventy.

Teaching done, he returned to his father’s inheritance. He immersed himself in Sanskrit texts, relearned ancient rituals, and began performing Shiva Poojas, Satyanarayan Poojas, Durga Poojas, and Ganapati Havans — not professionally at first but out of the pull of something that had been waiting for him. His sincerity was evident, and people sought him out. “The English education system distanced us from our heritage,” he said. “But when you return to your roots, you find both meaning and a decent livelihood.”

His son chose differently — an MBA from London, his own business. Every generation makes its own calculation.

A Parallel Worth Noting

The story of Shankar Bhat and Jayaram Anbalagan — the two South Indian MSc physiologists who took the same programme at JIPMER in the same years, traveled independently to the same medical college in Faridkot, worked under the same principal, and then arrived separately at MGIMS Sevagram within two years of each other, both completing PhDs there before returning to medical colleges in South India — is one of the quieter improbabilities of the MGIMS story. Tamil and Kannada, different departments, different years of arrival. The same arc, the same formation, the same Sevagram. Some parallels are too exact to be only coincidence and too incomplete to be called destiny. This one sits comfortably in between.

When Bhat was about to leave Sevagram, he bought a second-hand Luna. Dr. Pande bought one too. The two slow-moving vehicles, driven by two unhurried men who had each found their calling in a village in Vidarbha, navigating the same quiet roads at the same measured pace. It is as good an image as any for what Sevagram was, in those years, for the people who came to it and stayed.