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, expecting to stay for a year or two. More than four decades later, he is still there — teaching students, seeing patients, and walking the same wards.

His life at MGIMS has unfolded largely in classrooms, hospital wards, and crowded outpatient clinics rather than conference halls. Over the years, he became Professor of Medicine and later Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital. Administrative positions came and went. He remained, at heart, a physician.

At forty-seven, when many doctors settle into habit and certainty, he left for the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue an MPH. Berkeley sharpened an instinct he already trusted: to question easy answers and resist the seduction of certainty. He remains wary of unnecessary tests, sceptical of fashionable interventions, and convinced that sometimes the kindest decision in medicine is to 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 old Indian Coffee House, the students, clerks, lab technicians, nurses, and colleagues who rarely appear in medical textbooks but quietly shape the life of a hospital every day.