S.P. Kalantri was born in Wardha in 1957 and trained at Government Medical College, Nagpur, where he completed his MBBS and MD in Medicine. In the summer of 1982, he arrived at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in Sevagram as a senior resident. He thought he would stay for a year or two. More than four decades later, he is still there — teaching, seeing patients, and walking the same wards.

His career at MGIMS has been built in classrooms, wards, and outpatient clinics rather than conference halls. He rose through the ranks to become Professor of Medicine and later served as Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital. Administrative posts came and went. He remained, at heart, a physician.

At 47, when most doctors settle into habit and certainty, he left for the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue an MPH. The experience sharpened an instinct he already possessed: to ask awkward questions and distrust easy answers. He is wary of unnecessary tests, sceptical of fashionable interventions, and convinced that sometimes the kindest thing a doctor can do is hold back.

He lives in Sevagram with his wife, Bhavana. At dawn, he cycles through the villages around Sevagram. He reads widely and writes about the people who give the place its character — the barber who knows everyone’s news, the tea stalls and bread-wallahs, the small hotels, the old Indian Coffee House, the students, clerks, lab technicians, and colleagues who rarely find a place in medical textbooks but shape the life of a hospital every day.