Dr Sushila Nayar (1914–2001) was the physician who turned a Gandhian village experiment into one of India’s most influential rural medical institutions. Personal doctor to Mahatma Gandhi, Union Health Minister, and founder‑director of MGIMS, she spent a lifetime proving that modern medicine and social justice could walk together.

In the winter of 1938, a twenty‑four‑year‑old woman stepped off a train at Sevagram clutching a stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff, and a single drug—reserpine. She had barely finished her MBBS; her clinical experience was thin, her confidence still tentative. Dr. B.C. Roy, personal physician to Mahatma Gandhi, had sent her to monitor the most important man in India through a dangerous spike in blood pressure—an assignment he could just as easily have given to more seasoned doctors.

Why he chose her, history does not record. But she went, taking a month’s leave from her studies in Calcutta, with no one at hand to brief her, no senior colleague to lean on, no phone line to call back if things went wrong. In that remote village, cut off from the comforts and certainties of the city, she was suddenly on her own. That month stretched into two years.

She was Sushila Nayar — doctor, freedom fighter, cabinet minister, institution builder. She would return to Sevagram again and again across six decades, drawn back each time by the same conviction: that medicine's truest work happened not in city hospitals but in villages, not in lecture theatres but in the houses of the poor. When she died on January 3, 2001, the day after her 86th birthday, she had spent the better part of her life making that conviction into brick, mortar, and a living institution.

Sushila was born on December 26, 1914, in Kunjah, a small town in the Gujarat district of West Punjab — a place now part of Pakistan. Her father was a judge in the Punjab Civil Service. Her brother Pyarelal, fifteen years her senior, would become Gandhi's personal secretary, the closest of confidants, the man who would spend his life recording the Mahatma's words. It was through Pyarelal that Sushila's path first crossed Gandhi's — briefly, when she was six years old, during his Punjab tour after the launch of the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920.

She came to medicine almost by accident. On a childhood train journey, a lady doctor asked what she wanted to be. Sushila answered carelessly, the way children do: a doctor. The family laughed at the innocent remark. Then she went and became one.

She completed her schooling in Lahore, enrolled at Lahore College for Women, and eventually made her way to Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi — the institution whose foundation stone had been laid in 1914, the very year of her birth. She graduated in 1936. She was twenty-two.

After graduation, she joined the All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in Calcutta for further studies. It was there that Dr. B.C. Roy found her and sent her to Sevagram to care for Gandhi.

Wardha in those years was plagued by malaria. Every monsoon, fevers swept through households, through the ashram, through the surrounding villages. Temperatures climbed past 102 degrees. Patients needed a week of careful nursing before they could stand. Natural treatments were tried — mud packings on the forehead and abdomen, enemas — alongside whatever medicines she had brought. She worked alongside Prabhakarji, an old ashramite who went about in a short dhoti and cared for patients with the quiet devotion of someone who had chosen simplicity as a philosophy. Together, they set up a small dispensary in one of the ashram's rooms: a microscope, disinfectants, a few medicines, a willingness to learn.

Patients came. More followed.

Then cholera broke out in the surrounding villages. Gandhi told her simply: treat the village as the hospital and the houses as the wards. She was twenty-five, alone, without colleagues to consult or seniors to guide her. The experience taught her something that no textbook had: that curative medicine was the door through which you earned a village's trust, and that once you had their trust, you could speak to them about prevention. The two could not be separated. It was a lesson she would spend the rest of her life teaching others.

She remained in Sevagram for nearly two years before returning to Lady Hardinge as a registrar to pursue postgraduate studies. In 1942, she completed her MD in Medicine.

On August 9, 1942, Sushila Nayar was arrested in Bombay. Three days later, she was transported with Gandhi, Kasturba, and other Congress leaders to the Aga Khan Palace in Pune. She would spend twenty-one months there.

In the palace, she was doctor to everyone — to Gandhi, to Kasturba, to Mahadev Desai who died of a heart attack on August 15, 1942, just days after their arrival. She attended to sixty prisoners from Yerwada jail who tended the palace gardens. She treated the police officers standing guard. She nursed Kasturba through the bronchitis that worsened through that long detention until, on February 22, 1944, it killed her. She stayed with Gandhi through severe malaria that left his kidneys damaged.

When they were finally released on May 6, 1944, Sushila emerged from the palace with something that could not be taught in any institution: the knowledge of how human beings behave under extreme conditions, what they need from a doctor, and what a doctor must be willing to give.

After Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948, Sushila did what she had always done when grief threatened paralysis — she went back to work. A WHO scholarship took her to the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore. She had planned to specialize in cardiology. Her professors persuaded her otherwise: India needed public health specialists, not more cardiologists. She stayed on, completing a master's degree and then a doctorate.

When her funds ran out in the final months, providence intervened in a characteristically unlikely form. The Quakers, moved by her dedication, invited her on a speaking tour across the United States. For two and a half months she traveled the length of the country, speaking about Gandhi, about India, about what she had witnessed. The honorarium she received — perhaps five hundred dollars, perhaps a thousand, she was never quite sure — was enough to complete her studies, visit Europe, and return home.

She arrived back in India in 1950 ready to rebuild Kasturba Hospital, the small institution she had helped establish in Sevagram. Instead, she found that those managing the hospital had quietly accepted her resignation — a resignation she had never submitted. The mystery was never resolved. She accepted the decision without bitterness. "Bapu had taught us," she said, "that the field of service is as large as the Earth itself, and that it is not necessary to rub shoulders."

She took up the post of Chief Medical Officer at Badshah Khan Hospital near Faridabad, worked in surrounding villages, started a tuberculosis wing in tents. Then came politics. She won a Delhi assembly seat in 1952, became Delhi's Health Minister, entered Parliament in 1957, and from 1962 to 1967 served as India's Union Minister for Health — one of the few women in Nehru's cabinet, responsible for the health of four hundred million people.

In 1964, two visitors arrived at her Delhi office and refused to leave. Manimala Chaudhary, then matron of Kasturba Hospital, and Dr. Anant Ranade, the hospital's young medical officer, had traveled from Sevagram with a specific purpose. Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, which had been managing Kasturba Hospital, wanted to hand it over to the government. The workers did not want that. They wanted Sushila Nayar.

"You must not refuse to help," they told her.

She didn't. On September 11, 1964, the Kasturba Health Society was registered in Nagpur, with Sushila Nayar as its president. The founding trustees were a small, faithful group: Manimala Chaudhary, Anant Ranade, Nalinbhai Mehta, Raghunath Dhotre, Shriman Narayan and Secretary Gandhi Smarak Nidhi who had kept the hospital alive through years of uncertainty. The Gandhi Smarak Nidhi transferred the hospital's management and an endowment of ten lakh rupees to the new society.

The first rural medical college in India was beginning to take shape on the horizon.

The idea had been forming for years. As Health Minister, she had confronted an arithmetic of failure: five thousand primary health centres across India sat without doctors, while ten thousand new graduates emerged from medical colleges every year. The graduates would not go to villages. They had been trained in cities, for cities. What if, she reasoned, you trained them in a village from the start — in the dust and heat and reality of rural India?

Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri heard her out in 1965 and agreed. Chief Minister Vasantrao Naik agreed. They visited Sevagram and approved the site. Then Shastri died. Naik lost power. The project stalled.

She persisted. For three years she navigated ministries, state governments, and funding committees. On August 8, 1968, Deputy Prime Minister Morarji Desai convened a meeting that finally produced a formula: fifty percent of costs from the central government, twenty-five percent from Maharashtra, twenty-five percent from the Kasturba Health Society. Her share came to one crore rupees. She had no idea where it would come from.

An old ashramite named Anant Ram laughed when she worried aloud one evening. Upar Wala deta hai to chappar phad ke deta hai, he said. God gives, and when He gives, He breaks through the roof.

The next morning, a health ministry official told her about a USAID fund looking to support developmental projects in India. Too much of the money was going to Christian organisations, he noted. Why not apply? She applied for two crores, expecting to receive one. They sanctioned two.

On August 12, 1969 — Gandhi's centenary year — the first batch of sixty students was admitted to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram. The old Kasturba Hospital, founded in 1945, its walls repaired and rooms repurposed, became the heart of the new institution. The GD Birla guest house that had once hosted dignitaries now contained the dissection hall, the laboratories, the labour room, the operation theatre, and the library, all within its modest walls.

There was resistance from the village. Locals objected to dissecting frogs in Gandhi's Sevagram. Vinoba Bhave, who lived at Pavnar nearby, stepped in and gently explained that if this was to be Gandhi's medical college, it must have everything modern medicine required. The dissections continued.

She recruited faculty with the same directness she applied to everything. Using her connections at AIIMS and PGI Chandigarh, she invited distinguished physicians to visit Sevagram and then persuaded some to stay. She secured deputation of faculty from Nagpur's Government Medical College — Dr. ML Sharma, Dr. RV Agrawal, Dr. K.N. Ingle, Dr. MD Khapre, Dr. GM Indurkar among them. On a train journey back from Delhi, she encountered Professor PS Vaishwanar, head of Physiology at Government Medical College Nagpur, and recruited his help before they reached their destination.

She brought faculty from across the country — north and south, east and west — deliberately, insisting that MGIMS would transcend barriers of caste, language, and community. The early salaries were modest, lower than government medical colleges, and it took years to bring them to parity. People came anyway.

The institution she designed reflected everything she had learned since that first year in Sevagram. Every student spent two weeks in Gandhi's Ashram after admission — learning to live simply, to work with their hands, to know the village before they knew the hospital. Community medicine was renamed from Preventive and Social Medicine, not merely as a semantic change but as a philosophical one: the community was not a subject, it was the patient. Health insurance, first collected in jowar grain from bullock carts traveling village lanes, was formalised into a scheme that covered thousands of rural families for an annual premium that began at six rupees.

She required graduates to serve two years in villages before qualifying for postgraduate studies at MGIMS. She prohibited meat on campus. She attended evening prayers and expected others to. She wore khadi.

Students sometimes found her code difficult. They appreciated the orientation camps and village postings but struggled with the khadi, the shramdan, the prayers. She remained unmoved. Her consistency between belief and action was, those who worked with her agreed, without parallel.

In 1995, she suffered a myocardial infarction. Congestive heart failure and osteoarthritis followed, severely limiting her mobility. Most people would have withdrawn. She did not. She continued working, continued thinking, continued implementing. At eighty-six, she accepted the chancellorship of Gujarat Vidyapeeth and promptly set about resolving the problems that had paralysed the institution.

She was deeply influenced by Gandhi's enumeration of seven deadly sins — commerce without ethics, pleasure without conscience, politics without principle, knowledge without character, science without humanity, wealth without work, worship without sacrifice. She did not cite them as abstractions. She used them as a diagnostic tool, holding institutions and individuals up to each one in turn.

She was also a gifted writer. She completed several volumes of the unfinished biography of Mahatma Gandhi that her brother Pyarelal had left incomplete. Her own book on Gandhi's imprisonment remains a precise and moving account. Those who heard her speak remembered a voice they called majestic — warm, authoritative, lit by a natural wit that made even difficult truths easier to receive.

Her relationship with Indira Gandhi, once close as sisters, fractured irreparably over the political manoeuvres around the 1969 presidential election. She never reconciled herself to it. She was capable of absolute loyalty and, when she felt that loyalty betrayed, absolute distance.

She endured five years after her heart attack, dying on January 3, 2001—just a week after her 86th birthday—at Prerna Kutir, her Sevagram home, encircled by those she had devoted her life to. As former Union Health Minister and founder-director of a medical college, she could have summoned the nation's top cardiologists from AIIMS, PGI, or elite corporate sanctuaries. Yet she entrusted herself wholly to her Sevagram colleagues, heeding only Dr. A.P. Jain—a Professor of Medicine, not a specialist—for those years, without a whisper of doubt or second opinion. Decades before "palliative care" entered the medical lexicon, she embraced death with profound dignity: no ICU's sterile chill, but the warmth of home and loved ones. In her final breath, not a millimeter divided her convictions from her life.

The institution she founded now serves a thousand villages, trains hundreds of doctors each year, and carries her name in everything it does — in its rural orientation, its community health programme, its insurance scheme, its insistence that medicine is not merely a profession but a form of service. She did not build MGIMS as a monument to Gandhi. She built it as a continuation of his work, the most durable kind of memorial: one that keeps doing things.

President, Kasturba Health Society · Chartered Accountant · Gandhian · The Last of the Founding Generation

"When Dr. Sushila Nayar met me in the summer of 1982 and asked me to oversee MGIMS, I was taken aback. I didn't even know how to pronounce the names of half the departments, let alone understand what they did."

He said this often, and with his characteristic candor — half laughing at the improbability of it, half genuinely awed by the chain of events that had led a seasoned corporate chartered accountant from Bombay to a rural medical college in Wardha. It was, by any reckoning, an unlikely appointment. And yet Dhirubhai Mehta spent the next four decades proving it was exactly the right one.

He died on April 22, 2024, in Bombay Hospital, forty-eight hours after being admitted for what they thought was viral pneumonia. He was eighty-seven. His son Nirad and daughter Maitri were beside him. Five days short of his eighty-eighth birthday, he was gone — and with him closed the last chapter of the founding generation of MGIMS.

Dhirubhai was born on April 27, 1936, in Songath, a small village in Gujarat's Bhavnagar district. His father Shantilal was a schoolteacher at Gurukul High School — an Arya Samaj institution — the first in his village to have passed matriculation, struggling to support nine children on a teacher's salary. Eventually, Bombay beckoned. Shantilal left the family behind, found work at the stock exchange, switched to accounting at a trading firm, saved every rupee, and gradually built enough security to move the family to a small apartment in Borivali.

His mother Savitaben had studied only to fourth standard, was engaged at five and married at thirteen. But she was, as Dhirubhai always maintained, no ordinary rural woman. When her daughter's marriage began to fail within a year, Savitaben — in a time and place where divorce was taboo and family honour paramount — told her daughter to walk away. Choose dignity over tradition. It was a kind of courage that Dhirubhai never forgot and tried, in his own fashion, to replicate.

He schooled in Gujarati medium, moved to Borivali for high school, and chose Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Churchgate for his degree — drawn partly by its prestige and partly, he admitted, by the fact that it spared him Zoology. He could not bear dissections. The irony of spending four decades at a medical college was not lost on him.

He graduated in 1957, began his three-year articleship at a firm in Fort, tutored students and took part-time work to fund his studies, and in 1961 cleared the Chartered Accountancy examination on his first attempt before turning twenty-five. He was India's 5,635th Chartered Accountant. He wore it lightly but earned it without shortcuts.

As a teenager, while peers chased fashion, Dhirubhai chose khadi. Not as an ideology performance — as a settled conviction. He opened khadi shops in Borivali. He caught the attention of Vaikunthbhai Mehta, walked into rooms where Dada Dharmadhikari and Narayan Desai spoke, and found his Gandhian formation alongside his commercial one.

After qualifying, he navigated three companies before joining the Bajaj Group in 1966 — the year he also married Nandini Bajaj, daughter of Radhakrishnaji Bajaj and granddaughter of Shrikrishnadas Jajoo, the revered freedom fighter and Gandhian leader. She was fluent in Hindi, Marathi, Marwari, and English, educated across Wardha, Banaras, and Lucknow. The marriage connected him to Wardha in ways that would prove consequential.

At Bajaj Auto, he rose steadily. Sharp in finance, investment, and taxation, he earned the trust of Kamalnayan, Ramakrishna, and Rahul Bajaj over two decades. In the early 1970s, he played a pivotal role in the Bajaj-Piaggio legal battle over the Vespa scooter. He held directorships beyond Bajaj, advised regulatory bodies, and served on committees shaping transparency and corporate governance at SEBI, CII, and FICCI.

During the Emergency of 1975, he stood with Jayaprakash Narayan at personal and financial risk — funding and sustaining the movement while thousands were jailed. He admired Vinoba Bhave but wrote him blunt letters questioning his support for the Emergency, which Vinoba had called a Festival of Discipline. Dhirubhai called it India's darkest hour. He was not a man who moderated his views for the sake of comfort, even when the person on the other end was someone he revered.

At fifty, with a successful corporate career available to him for however long he wanted it, he walked away.

"It wasn't easy," he later said. "Nirad and Maitri were still studying. Nirad had his sights set on top American universities — an expensive dream. But my family stood by me." His children both became chartered accountants. "Must be in the genes," he would say, "but they did it on their own — without ever asking for help."

Until 1982, Dhirubhai Mehta and Dr. Sushila Nayar had never met.

The connection was made by Sarla Parekh, who had managed MGIMS's finances for years and watched the institution's funding position worsen through the late 1970s. She had known Dhirubhai for decades, admired his financial acumen and his Gandhian instincts, and heard that he was leaving Bajaj Auto. She went to Dr. Nayar. Why not bring Dhirubhai to Sevagram?

Nalinibhai Mehta and Tapdiya arranged a lunch. Dr. Nayar and Dhirubhai met. Conversations turned into shared visions. What began as an introduction became a calling.

He was already familiar with Wardha — his wife's family was from there, the Bajaj Group had deep roots in the district. But familiarity with a place and choosing to give your working life to it are different things. He chose. He joined the Kasturba Health Society's governing board, began visiting Sevagram regularly, and started the long process of understanding an institution whose departments he still couldn't pronounce.

He never sought to overshadow Dr. Nayar. Where others with his corporate background might have arrived with a mandate for transformation, he arrived with humility. He worked quietly, offered his expertise where it was useful, and deferred to her vision without resentment. She, in turn, recognised what he offered — not just financial acumen but integrity, and the particular authority of a man who had no personal stake in the institution's money.

"She shaped the institution's ideals," those who watched them work together said. "He secured its foundation."

By the late 1990s, as Dr. Nayar's health declined after her heart attack, she had ceded almost all operational authority to Dhirubhai. When she died on January 3, 2001, the governing body of the Kasturba Health Society looked to no one else.

He inherited an institution built on Gandhian ideals in a landscape that was changing fast around it. Private medical colleges were multiplying. For-profit hospitals were appearing near Sevagram. The commercial logic of Indian healthcare was encroaching from every direction. Dhirubhai's task — the task he set himself — was to hold the line.

He held it.

MGIMS under his presidency cut ties with the pharmaceutical industry — a decision that alarmed many who feared the resulting loss of revenue. The money did not dry up. The institution's ethical standing strengthened. He was not a man who governed by committee consensus; he made decisions and stood behind them.

The infrastructure he built across those twenty-three years was substantial: trauma centres, ICUs, a Cath Lab, dialysis units, a de-addiction centre, a mother and child centre, a palliative care unit, proper hostels for students and residents. A low-cost drug initiative that made treatment affordable for patients who had previously struggled to buy medicines. A unit for abandoned newborns. Healthcare outreach into Melghat — the tribal Korku Adivasi communities in the Satpura hills, where malnutrition and neglect had long gone unaddressed. He secured five crore rupees for the Melghat centre, went there himself on visits that were not for show, and stood behind the doctors and nurses on the ground when the work became difficult.

He brought distinguished academics onto the KHS board, wanting MGIMS to develop not just clinical excellence but scientific temper. He strengthened community medicine. He ensured every incoming batch of students underwent the Gandhi Ashram orientation — waking before dawn for prayers, cleaning, spinning yarn, learning service before they learned surgery. This mattered to him not as ritual but as formation.

Every month, he visited Sevagram. He walked the campus. He kept his door open. He drank tea with anyone who came. His wit was quick, his stories effortless, his ability to put people at ease genuine. He saw no hierarchy worth maintaining in casual human encounter.

He was not without flaws, and a portrait that ignored them would do him a disservice.

He was susceptible to sycophancy — could be quick to form attachments to those who flattered him, sometimes misjudging people whose charm exceeded their reliability. He enjoyed dropping names — Vinoba Bhave, Jayaprakash Narayan, ministers, bureaucrats — and in his later years these stories became a refrain, repeated with a frequency that those close to him recognised but could not always redirect. As president, he had a mandate to guide and preach, and he used it with an enthusiasm that occasionally crossed into self-righteousness.

He relished the role. The access it provided, the visitors it brought, the influence it carried — he was not indifferent to any of it. And he struggled, as his final years arrived and memory began to soften his grip on administration, to do what every leader must eventually do: identify a successor and let go. He could not, or would not. He held the chair into his late eighties, when the institution needed something different from what he could still offer.

These are not small failings in a man who led an institution for twenty-three years. They should be recorded alongside his achievements, because an honest portrait serves memory better than a hagiography, and because Dhirubhai himself — who never softened the truth to spare someone's comfort — would have expected no less.

What he was not, and never became, was corrupt. In a landscape where institutional leadership and personal enrichment so often moved together, Dhirubhai remained untouched. He donated crores to MGIMS quietly, without fanfare. The house he built on campus — his home in Sevagram for decades — he willed to the institution. He left no wealth extracted from the place. He left the place better than he found it.

"All I want," he once said, "is for MGIMS to offer quality education and healthcare that everyone can afford."

One sentence. His life's work in it.

His wife Nandini died in August 2022. He grieved, and kept going. MGIMS meetings continued. Plans moved forward. On April 20, 2024, he was admitted to Bombay Hospital with what appeared to be viral pneumonia. Forty-eight hours later, on April 22, he was gone.

He had given forty years to Sevagram — more than half his life. He had arrived not knowing how to pronounce the departments. He left having built some of them.

In the 2001 MGIMS bulletin, written when he first assumed the presidency, Dr. S.P. Kalantri wrote of the responsibility Dhirubhai was taking on — to uphold Dr. Sushila Nayar's legacy, to keep the bright torch of MGIMS aloft, undimmed and untarnished, ensuring its light reached the poorest of the poor.

He kept it. Not perfectly — no one does — but faithfully, and with an integrity that the institution will measure its future leaders against for a long time to come.

President, Kasturba Health Society

In the winter of 1966, the world of Indian finance was a kingdom of polished leather, starched collars, and an unspoken code of urban elitism. Into this world stepped Parmanand Tapdiya, a twenty-one-year-old who had just performed a feat of intellectual levitation: clearing the final Chartered Accountancy examinations on his first attempt. For a boy from Pimpalkhuta, a village so obscure it seemed to defy cartography, this was not merely a result; it was a miracle.

However, the "Everest of exams" was only the first gate. The second was aesthetic. To join the prestigious firm of K.K. Mankeshwar & Co. in Nagpur, Tapdiya was told he must abandon his rural attire. No pyjamas, no loose shirts. The firm, steeped in British professional tradition, demanded a visual manifestation of competence. Tapdiya, whose pockets were as empty as his ledgers were precise, had to borrow fifty rupees—a significant sum at the time—to buy his first pair of trousers.

This borrowed suit was more than a change of clothes; it was a uniform of a new life. It marked the birth of a man who would spend the next six decades ensuring that the grand, sprawling dreams of Sevagram were properly clothed in financial reality. While others in the Mahatma’s shadow spoke of grand visions and spiritual missions, Tapdiya understood a fundamental truth: even the most selfless institution requires a balanced balance sheet to survive the friction of the real world.

To understand the President, one must understand the absolute silence of Wai—a village thirty kilometers south of Akola that in the 1950s lacked electricity, a post office, and a sense of belonging to the modern world. Here, Tapdiya learned what we might call the "mathematics of scarcity." Water was not a utility; it was a hard-won prize from two shared wells where humans and livestock drank in a communal struggle for survival.

Strachey often looked for the moment a character’s "inner steel" was forged. For Tapdiya, it was the kerosene lamp. In the total darkness of rural Maharashtra, that small, flickering flame was his only ally against the night. It was here he learned his mother Dhanibai’s first commandment: Trust numbers, not guesswork. Unlettered and widowed when Parmanand was only two, she possessed a visceral understanding of accountability. She knew that in poverty, a single miscalculated paisa could lead to hunger.

By the age of fifteen, Tapdiya had ranked 24th out of 325,000 students. He was a boy moving at the speed of light in a world of mud paths. Yet, misfortune was his constant companion. Mentors like Principal Javadekar and Radha Krishnaji Toshniwal would enter his life, offer a glimpse of hope, and then be snatched away by death. These early losses created a man who did not rely on the permanence of people, but on the permanence of principles. He chose the CA path—where only one in fifty survived—not for the wealth it promised, but for the order it imposed on a chaotic world.

The collision between the formidable Dr. Sushila Nayar and the nineteen-year-old intern Tapdiya in 1965 is the foundational myth of the MGIMS accounts department. Dr. Nayar was a colossus—a Gandhian revolutionary, a close associate of the Mahatma, and India’s Health Minister. She possessed an iron will and a visionary’s impatience. She had a British consultant’s report from Parsons and Company filled with dense, foreign projections for her proposed rural medical college.

She needed this report translated—not just into Indian rupees, but into the myriad languages of global donors: Yen for Japan, Lira for Italy, and Dollars for the United States. Tapdiya, the intern, was assigned the task. He sat in a modest room with a stone floor and a kavelu (tiled) roof. Without a calculator, without a spreadsheet, and with no formal degree yet to his name, he manually converted the lifeblood of the future MGIMS.

He was the "Human Computer" of Sevagram. He didn't just translate currencies; he translated Dr. Nayar’s fierce drive into a 150-page document that the Vatican and the Japanese could understand. He typed and retyped drafts late into the night, the rhythmic clatter of the typewriter echoing the heartbeat of an institution yet to be born. When he finally cleared his exams in 1969, the "corporate czars" of Mumbai and Delhi came calling. They offered the prestige of the metropolis; they offered the fast track. Tapdiya looked at the corridors of power and then looked back at the dusty road to Sevagram. He chose the latter, becoming an honorary consultant—a man who would manage millions without ever drawing a salary.

The early 1970s at MGIMS were a period of "Primitive Accumulation." The accounts department bore no resemblance to the clinical, digital hubs of today. It resembled a scene from a R.K. Narayan novel—a small, dedicated group working in a world of paper and ink. There was Tapdiya, the young, sharp mentor, and a trio of unlikely disciples: Dadarao Shingare, Bhimrao Pradhan, and a man known simply as Kanakdas.

The story of Kanakdas is essential to the Stracheyan narrative of MGIMS. He was a wanderer from Kerala who had stepped off a train at Wardha, penniless and searching for food. Manimala Choudhary had noticed him and given him a bell to ring to mark the hours. From ringer of bells to Chief Accountant, Kanakdas’s journey was overseen by Tapdiya.

None of these men had studied beyond the tenth grade. None had formal training in finance. Yet, under Tapdiya’s tutelage, they became the "Guardians of the Paisa." They worked with Remington typewriters and red pens, mastering the art of the ledger through sheer, dogged perseverance. In this Zen-like austerity, Tapdiya instilled a philosophy: Money is not currency; it is lifeblood. To misplace a single rupee was to bleed the institution. He taught them that in a rural hospital, a ledger entry was as vital as a surgeon's knot.

In an era where educated grooms—particularly Chartered Accountants—were traded like blue-chip stocks, Tapdiya staged his most quiet and significant rebellion. As families lined up with lucrative dowry proposals, he made a stance that was unequivocally Stracheyan in its rejection of social vanity. He declared he would only marry into a family that could not afford a dowry.

Wealth held no appeal; status meant nothing. He sought a partner whose convictions matched his own "unyielding steel." In 1969, he married Shobha Rathi in a ceremony that was a study in minimalist integrity. No gold, no lavish feast—just a coconut and a rupee.

Shobha, a scholar of Sanskrit and Political Science, became the silent partner in his mission. While he built the financial scaffolding of a medical college, she built a home that remained stubbornly simple. Their three children—Mugdha, Vaibhav, and Sourabh—grew up in an environment where "value" was measured in character, not in bank balances. This personal domestic "audit" ensured that Tapdiya remained unencumbered by the greed that often fells men in positions of financial power.

The Tapdiya of the 1980s and 90s was not the mellowed elder we see today. He was described by colleagues as impatient, tough, and at times, unyielding. He was the "Grand Inquisitor" of the balance sheet. In a Gandhian institution where "service" could sometimes be used as an excuse for administrative sloppiness, Tapdiya was the corrective force.

He called a spade a spade, and if the spade was over-budget, he was merciless. He set a standard of perfection that few could meet. This "toughness" was not a character flaw; it was a strategic necessity. For thirty-one years, he served as the internal auditor, a hawk-like presence that saw through every inflated estimate and every misplaced expense.

Yet, as the decades passed, a transformation occurred—the "surgical" biographer’s favorite theme. The man who once demanded perfection began to practice patience. He learned to bend without breaking. He realized that to lead a community of doctors and teachers, one had to lead with the heart as much as the calculator. He shed the sharp edges of the auditor for the steady hand of the trustee.

When Tapdiya took the baton as President of the Kasturba Health Society in 2024, at the age of seventy-seven, he was the third runner in a sixty-year relay. Dr. Sushila Nayar had been the Architect; Dhirubhai Mehta had been the Builder; Tapdiya became the Custodian.

The transition was not merely a change in name, but a change in "class." Dr. Nayar was a political giant; Dhirubhai was a corporate titan. Tapdiya was, as he called himself, a "homespun" professional. He had neither political backing in Delhi nor a corporate network in Mumbai. He was a "Son of the Soil," rooted in the realities of Wardha.

He inherited an institution facing unprecedented challenges. The "Golden Age" of government funding had passed. Private medical colleges were sprouting like weeds, offering salaries that a mission-based hospital could never match. Faculty recruitment became a battle; maintaining the Gandhian "Code of Conduct" in a consumerist age felt like holding back the tide.

Tapdiya met these challenges with the same "first principles" he had used in the 1960s. He didn't look for flashy consultants; he looked at the numbers. He trimmed waste with a surgeon's precision. He reminded everyone that medicine at MGIMS was a calling, not just a career. Under his stewardship, the budget, which once stood at a single lakh, now exceeded 250 crores. But to Tapdiya, the complexity hadn't changed—the discipline remained the same.

In the final analysis, Parmanand Tapdiya’s life is a testament to the power of "Meticulous Integrity." Most biographies of great leaders focus on their speeches or their grand gestures. Tapdiya’s greatness is found in the quiet of the night, in the thousands of ledgers he reviewed, and in the "No" he said to wasteful expenditures that would have compromised the hospital's mission.

Dhirubhai Mehta once remarked that while he looked at the big picture, Tapdiya moved step-by-step. It is this "Zen of the Detail" that has saved MGIMS during its darkest financial hours. He is the leader MGIMS trusts because he is the only one who knows exactly where every brick is buried and how much it cost.

As he sits today in the President's chair, the boy who once studied by a kerosene lamp is now the man who ensures the lights stay on for thousands of patients and students. He remains an iconoclast—a man who rejects the pretension of power in favor of the clarity of logic. In the history of MGIMS, many have provided the vision, but Tapdiya provided the ground upon which that vision could stand. For sixty years, he has been the man with whom the buck stops, and history bears witness: no challenge is too great for a man who turns adversity into the most disciplined form of opportunity.

Founder of Kasturba Health Society • Builder of MGIMS • Chhoti Behenji of Sevagram

A Woman of Sevagram

The year 2023 marked the birth centenary of Manimala Roy Choudhary — "Chhoti Behenji" of Sevagram. Hers was a remarkable life: one of struggle, dedication, and quiet devotion.

She was born in Bengal in 1923, though the exact date of her birth is not known. Her early years were spent in Calcutta. She came from an elite family of judges, but her childhood was shadowed by absence. After her mother's death, her father renounced the world and left as a sanyasi, leaving behind four young children. Manimala, her sister, and her two brothers were raised by their maternal uncle — Chhoto Mama, a distinguished High Court judge — and their aunt, Shejo Mashi, who had been a neighbour of Subhash Chandra Bose in Cuttack. Under their careful guidance, Manimala grew into a woman of compassion, resilience, and determination. Both brothers were sent to England to study law, and returned as barristers — but also brought back tuberculosis. The younger brother did not survive.

Marriage, Illness, and the Road to Nursing

After completing her matriculation, Manimala was married to a doctor employed by the French government in Kakinada District. Within a few years, she too contracted pulmonary tuberculosis. Still in her teens, she was compelled to leave her one-year-old daughter in the care of her mother-in-law and travel to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kausani, Uttarakhand, for treatment. This was an era before antitubercular drugs — before Streptomycin, Isoniazid, Rifampicin, and Ethambutol. The only remedies available were rest, fresh air, and nourishing food.

She remained in Kausani for nearly four years. Her family could sustain her expenses for only a year or two. Realising that her recovery would require a longer stay — and eventually a lobectomy — she turned to herself for support. She began knitting sweaters and shawls, and took to educating fellow patients about their health. Her zeal caught the attention of the surgeon in charge, who offered to send her to Lahore for nursing training at the medical college there. She accepted without hesitation, staying four years to complete the course. During that time, she also learned to read and write both Gurmukhi and Urdu.

The Wandering Years: From Lahore to Sevagram

Driven by an indomitable spirit, Manimala continued to push herself further. From Lahore, she travelled to Patna and Solapur to acquire skills in nursing administration and surgical nursing. By now her daughter, aged around ten, was waiting in Kakinada for her mother to come home.

Manimala did return — for a few months. She lived as a respected doctor's wife, comfortable and secure. But the comfort felt like a cage. Something in her remained restless, unsatisfied, unable to settle. It was at this point that she came in contact with Padmaja Naidu — a distant relative through her sister's marriage — daughter of Sarojini Naidu, the celebrated poet and political leader. Padmaja suggested that Manimala visit Mahatma Gandhi at the Sevagram Ashram, which lay close to Nagpur, where her sister lived.

Barely twenty-seven years old, and with her sister's help, Manimala made her way to Sevagram. Gandhiji advised her to work with Dr. Sushila Nayar, who had recently established a modest five-bed facility called Kasturba Hospital at Sevagram. The encounter transformed her. She chose to give up a comfortable, well-established life and take a path few would have chosen — much to the dismay of her family and society. Yet both her husband and mother-in-law gave her their blessing, a generosity she never forgot. Having made her choice, she worked, for the rest of her life, to keep her family relationships whole.

The Assassination, and an Unshaken Resolve

Manimala had returned to Calcutta after meeting Gandhiji, to pack her belongings. On her way back to Sevagram, she heard the news of his assassination. She did not waver. She arrived at the Ashram and began her nursing career under the tutelage of Barbara Hartland — renamed Vasantiben by Gandhiji himself — who had been running the Ashram's dispensary and self-help groups since 1945. When Barbara returned to England after Gandhiji's death, she handed all responsibilities to Manimala. Manimala assumed the role of Matron, overseeing both the hospital and the maternity and child welfare centre at Kasturba Hospital.

Learning to Belong

Coming from a privileged background, Manimala was initially shaken by the poverty around her — the scarcity of water, the sparse diet, the unfamiliar customs of Vidarbha. She bristled at being called "Bai," a word she understood as derogatory in northern and eastern India. But she learned Marathi quickly, and before long the villagers were calling her "Mothi Daktarin Bai" — the big lady doctor — a reference to her height compared to Dr. Sushila Nayar. With time, she came to understand that in this part of the country, "Bai" carried deep respect. The word had humbled her.

She worked closely with Dr. Sushila Nayar, with Asha Devi Aryanayakam — founder of the Nayi Taleem Sangh — and with Prabhakarji, Secretary of the Ashram, who was intimately involved with the hospital's affairs. Together they approached the local government and established a nursing school for ANM training at Kasturba Hospital — one of the first of its kind in rural India.

Beyond the Hospital Walls

Manimala's commitment to healthcare extended well beyond the wards. She worked in villages to promote microinsurance, self-help groups, disease prevention, and health education. Through these efforts — steady, unhurried, year after year — she rose from Matron of Kasturba Hospital to Nursing Superintendent, and eventually to Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society, established in September 1964.

The formation of that Society was itself a milestone. After Gandhiji's death, Dr. Sushila Nayar had left for the United States in June 1948 to pursue a degree in public health at Johns Hopkins University. During her absence, Kasturba Hospital passed through several phases of management — first under the Sevagram Ashram with Prabhakarji, Dr. Wardekar, and Dr. Ranade; then under the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi. Manimala was a trusted associate through each of these transitions. When the time came to give the hospital a permanent, independent home, it was Manimala, together with Shri R.R. Diwakar, Dr. A.D. Ranade, and Nalinbhai Mehta, who persuaded Dr. Sushila Nayar to lead the newly constituted Kasturba Health Society. On September 11, 1964, the Society came into existence. The Gandhi Smarak Nidhi transferred to it the land, buildings, equipment, and a founding contribution of ten lakh rupees. A new chapter had begun.

Building a Medical College

Dr. Sushila Nayar's vision reached further still. In August 1969, the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences — MGIMS — admitted its first batch of students, becoming India's first rural medical college. What followed was a decade of extraordinary labour. Together, Dr. Nayar and Manimala undertook the daunting work of constructing the hospital, designing lecture halls, outpatient departments, hostels, and laboratories — equipping every department, recruiting every faculty member.

Their temperaments were opposite, and perfectly matched. Dr. Sushila Nayar blazed with impulsive energy; Manimala moved with serene calm. Together — "Badi Behenji" and "Chhoti Behenji" — they functioned like yin and yang. Manimala personally supervised the construction of operation theatres, wards, the kitchen, the library, the water supply, and the solar electric installations. Together they turned an audacious vision into a functioning institution.

A Trusted Confidante

Manimala's bond with Dr. Sushila Nayar was one of deep mutual trust. She was among the very few people who could speak her mind to Dr. Nayar without reservation, offering honest counsel where others might have held back. She served as a sounding board, a conscience, and a quiet anchor.

Dr. Nayar's vision for MGIMS was not merely medical. It was Gandhian — rooted in austerity, simplicity, and humility. She asked Manimala to ensure these values lived in the institution's daily rhythms. Every appointment, every purchase, every construction decision, she insisted, must serve society first. In this spirit, Manimala was willing to bend conventional rules — to the irritation of her more formally qualified colleagues — when she recognised in a man or woman from a neighbouring village a talent or dedication that no certificate could confer. She had a gift for seeing potential in ordinary people, and she used it to make MGIMS an institution that belonged to its surroundings.

Nurse, Builder, Visionary

Manimala was pivotal in establishing a partnership with the Catholic Mission to advance general nursing training, and helped found the first nursing school in rural India — an institution that has since grown into a degree college. She also created Kasturba Vidyamandir, a school for the children of the hospital's doctors and staff, sustained in its early years by the voluntary effort of the senior doctors' wives. She encouraged her staff to form a cooperative housing society, enabling families to own homes after retirement.

A Gandhian in both letter and spirit, she wore khadi, took part in community meals, convened prayer meetings, promoted shramdaan, yoga, and Ayurvedic sciences. MGIMS, under her stewardship, became a health resource not only for its own community but for neighbouring ashrams such as Vinoba Bhave's Ashram at Pawnar.

Her influence over the institution's administration was singular. Beginning with Dr. B.G. Kane, MGIMS's first principal, successive principals — Dr. I.D. Singh, Dr. M.L. Sharma, Dr. K.S. Sachdeva — all reported, in practical terms, to a nurse. They respected her not because of a degree but because of her integrity, her transparency, and the quiet authority of a life lived without compromise.

Stepping Back

In the mid-1980s, her health beginning to fail, Manimala handed over her responsibilities to Ms. Kamala Desikan — a trusted colleague from the Ashram's earliest days. By then, MGIMS had seen sixteen batches of medical students graduate, with over a thousand trained within its walls. She continued to live in Sevagram as a life member of the Kasturba Health Society, remaining close to the institution she had helped build for another seventeen years.

The doctors and staff of MGIMS were, in every meaningful sense, her family. Her only daughter, Bithika — who had grown up without her mother and harboured, for a long time, a resentment towards medicine and Gandhiji for the same reason — chose not to enter the profession. Yet Manimala lived to see her two granddaughters, Prabhati Lahiri (1983 batch) and Deepika Lahiri (1990 batch), receive their degrees from MGIMS. Something had come full circle.

A Gracious Farewell

Manimala Choudhary, twice nominated for the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation Award for lifetime achievement, passed away peacefully at her home in Guru Nanak Colony, Sevagram, on 26th February 2002. Nearly all of Sevagram, along with people from the surrounding villages, came to pay their respects. The woman they mourned had arrived among them more than half a century earlier as an outsider — a Bengali widow from Calcutta — and had given herself entirely to the land and its people.

She left behind no institution in her name, no endowed chair, no statue. She left behind MGIMS.

Kamala Desikan’s story begins in 1927, in the quiet village of Nalluru in Andhra Pradesh. She was the only child of her parents, but her mother’s death from tuberculosis within months of her birth left her in the care of her grandmother. Her father remarried, but his influence on Kamala was profound. An intelligent landlord with a sharp interest in politics, he wore khadi with pride and spoke passionately about Sarvodaya and Gandhi. As a little girl, Kamala sat beside him during these discussions, absorbing the ideals of justice, simplicity, and service. Gandhi’s vision became her own, and the dream of living in his ashram took root early.

When she was nearing twenty, she chose to follow that dream. Moving to Sewagram Ashram, she entered a world of discipline and service. Under the guidance of Prabhakarji, a veteran Gandhian, and Dr. Sushila Nayar, she trained as a nurse at Kasturba Hospital. She cared for patients with quiet dedication, and in a twist of fate, became the hospital’s first surgical patient when Dr. Nayar operated on her tonsils. Gandhi himself visited her afterwards, a moment that eclipsed her pain and etched itself into her memory. Her bond with fellow Gandhian Smt. Manimala Choudhary began here, a friendship that lasted a lifetime.

Her years at Sewagram shaped her spirit. She worked with refugees after Partition along with Dr. Sushila Nayar. Later, when Vinoba Bhave began his Bhoodan Yatra, she was inspired by his vision of Gramdaan—villages gifted for the poor. She volunteered to serve in Garanda, a remote tribal settlement in the Koraput district of Orissa. The journey to Garanda itself was arduous: trains, buses, and finally a sixteen-kilometre walk through dense forests. Life in Garanda was spartan—rice, dal, and brinjal were the only staples, malaria was rampant, and huts were their shelter. Kamala, the only trained health care provider, administered quinine injections to everyone, including herself. Yet she found fulfilment in this hardship, serving the tribals with courage and compassion.

In 1957, her life took a new turn. She married Dr. K.V. Desikan, a leprologist she had met at Sewagram, in a simple Gandhian wedding that cost only thirteen rupees. Together, they moved to Chilakalapalle village, where leprosy was widespread. While Desikan treated patients, Kamala immersed herself in the harijan colony. She brought spinning machines to train women, taught embroidery and painting, and encouraged girls to study beyond primary school. She co-founded Gramodaya Samiti to support education, healthcare, and women’s emancipation. At night, she tutored mischievous boys at home, giving them guidance and shelter. Years later, when those boys returned as successful professionals, the reunion was joyous proof of her quiet influence.

Her work soon extended beyond India. In the early sixties, Shri Jayaprakash Narayan, a Gandhian socialist and political leader, had visited Israel. He had been very impressed by the community working groups – the “Kibbutz”, in that country. He felt that the concept of the Kibbutz could be applied to Vinoba’s “Gramdaan” villages, and decided to send a team of Sarvodaya workers to Israel. In view of her work in the “Gramdaan” village, Goranda, in Orissa, Kamala was selected to the team. She spent six months in Israel, studying the way of life in a Kibbutz, participating in community work, visiting villages, and learning about the travails faced during the holocaust. Once, the then Prime Minister of Israel, Ben Gurion, addressed the group. Kamala sketched a picture of him as he was addressing them. Ben Gurion saw the sketch and, with a broad smile, autographed it.  Later, Golda Meir, then a member of the Israeli Knesset, interacted with the group. A photograph of Kamala talking to her captured the warmth between them. Kamala returned to India with a broader vision and renewed energy, convinced that grassroots cooperation could transform villages back home.

Soon after Kamala’s return, Desikan and Kamala moved to Vellore. Desikan joined the MD Pathology course in the Christian Medical College (CMC), at Vellore. Kamala joined an ICMR project on Streptococci under Dr. Grace Koshy, Professor of Microbiology at CMC, involving community work. While working in an urban slum in Vellore, Kamala encountered a woman burdened with caring for her late sister’s four children in addition to her own, while her husband, disabled by leprosy, could not contribute. The woman struggled as the sole breadwinner, working as a domestic help in many households. Kamala stepped in with characteristic compassion and pragmatism: she arranged for two of the children to be cared for by relatives, placed another in a children’s home linked to an ICMR nutrition project, and personally supported one herself. The faculty at CMC responded generously whenever Kamala sought help, and through these efforts, she not only eased the family’s hardship but also forged enduring friendships with colleagues—bonds that lasted throughout her life.

After completing his MD in Pathology, Desikan joined the Central Leprosy Teaching and Research Institute at Chengalapattu, Tamil Nadu, in 1967. Around this time, Kamala was expecting their first child, and for the delivery she returned to the familiar surroundings of CMC Vellore. In July that year, their daughter was born—a little girl they named Prabha, in honour of Prabhakarji, Kamala’s mentor from Sewagram, who had guided her so deeply in her early years. 

The family settled in Chengalapattu, where they lived for the next ten years. Kamala devoted herself wholeheartedly to raising Prabha, pouring her energy into motherhood with the same compassion and commitment she had always shown in her social work. Yet even in those years, she continued to nurture her own passions. For a brief period, she enrolled in an art school in Madras, honing her skills in painting and exploring her creative side. It was a time of balance—between family and personal growth, between nurturing her child and cultivating her own talents, a reflection of the rich, multifaceted life she would continue to lead. 

In 1976, Desikan was appointed Director of the ICMR’s Central JALMA Institute for Leprosy in Agra, and the family—Desikan, Kamala, and their daughter Prabha—moved there. For Kamala, Agra became a new chapter of service. She quickly noticed that many children of class IV employees were not attending school. Concerned, she began teaching them the alphabet in the verandah of her home. Word spread, and soon more children arrived daily. When her home could no longer accommodate them, she turned an empty garage at the institute into a makeshift classroom. As the numbers grew, she enlisted the wives and daughters of JALMA staff and scientists to help teach. Before long, children from neighbouring villages were flocking to the little garage school, which soon ran out of space. 

Recognising the need for a proper institution, ICMR permitted the use of land on the JALMA premises, but Kamala had to raise funds for construction. She met the challenge head-on, bargaining tirelessly for building materials and drawing support from unexpected quarters, including Rev. Tokiwa, the high priest of the Tsubosaka Dera temple in Nara, Japan. With such generosity and her persistence, the school was built. Named Lopamudra Vidya Mandir, it began as a primary school, grew into a secondary school, and eventually a high school. Recognised by the Government of Uttar Pradesh, it quickly became a respected local institution. Rev. Tokiwa later invited Kamala to Japan to share her experiences, and with his help, she arranged for teachers from the school to visit Japan and learn from the practices there. To this day, the school continues to provide education to children who might otherwise have had none.

Her compassion extended beyond education. Kamala noticed that leprosy patients arriving from distant towns had nowhere to stay if they reached Agra on weekends. Lodges refused them rooms, forcing them to sleep under trees or in makeshift shelters. She discovered an old leprosy home near JALMA, a fortress-like eighteenth-century building with rooms around a central courtyard, then housing only a handful of patients. Meeting with the municipal commissioner, she secured permission to revive the place. She formed the Kushth Sewa Samiti, gathered prominent locals, and renamed the building Kushth Sewa Sadan. The municipal corporation provided food for existing inmates, while JALMA supported referred patients, but Kamala knew more was needed. With help from LEPRA and Rev. Shoken Tokiwa, she arranged funds for food and clothing. She even procured a cow, cared for by one of the patients, whose milk provided both nourishment and a small income. She encouraged carpet weaving among patients, giving them dignity and purpose. Her regular visits built bonds of trust so deep that some patients, abandoned by their families, asked her to perform their funeral rites. She honoured their wishes, accompanying their bodies to the cremation ground and carrying out the rites herself.

In Agra, Kamala became affectionately known as “Mataji”—mother to all whose lives she touched. When she was diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma and underwent surgery at AIIMS, New Delhi, many of those she had helped volunteered to donate blood. The operation was successful, though it left her with facial palsy. Where others might have retreated, Kamala trained a domestic helper to perform daily physiotherapy massages and simply carried on with her work, undeterred.

Her interests were as varied as her service. She played the sitar and violin, loved both Carnatic and Hindustani music, and encouraged Prabha to train in Bharatanatyam. Painting was a passion—she created watercolours and oils of portraits, still life, landscapes, and scenes that moved her: the Taj Mahal, Gandhi from photographs, her lodgings in London and Japan, Niagara Falls, and the Himalayas in every shade of daylight. Gardening was another love. With guidance from the superintendent of the Taj Mahal gardens, she developed JALMA’s grounds into prize-winning displays. Her ikebana flower arrangements filled entire pavilions at Agra’s annual flower show, becoming star attractions. Even Agra’s famed carpet industry inspired her—she installed a loom at home and wove two hand-knotted Persian carpets, or “galeechas,” with her own hands.

Another defining chapter of her life came when she returned to Sewagram as Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society after Dr. Desikan retired. It was a role that demanded courage, conviction, and vision. She managed both the hospital and the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, ensuring that Gandhian simplicity guided modern medical education. Dealing with the administrative issues of a larger institution brought its own challenges, from managing the hospital and medical college staff to confronting politically motivated agitators who sought to disrupt the work of the Kasturba Health Society. Kamala faced disputes over land, unrest among employees, and the constant need to balance Gandhian simplicity with the demands of modern medical education. Yet she met each challenge with courage and clarity, resolving conflicts before they escalated, and ensuring that the institution remained a sanctuary of service. Her leadership was marked by both strength and compassion—she could be unyielding when defending principles, but equally nurturing when creating opportunities for women, students, and the disadvantaged.

When politically motivated groups tried to seize land belonging to the Society, Kamala confronted them directly, unflinching even when her male colleagues feared violence. Her presence alone was enough to make the agitators retreat. She dealt with staff disputes and quelled unrest before it could disrupt the institution. At the same time, she created opportunities for disadvantaged women by founding Udyami Mahila Mandal, a cooperative that provided hot meals and employment. She set up a crèche for working mothers, ensuring that women could balance family and career. She also encouraged the development of a bakery and food stalls, run by destitute women, which became a lifeline for students and staff. Her initiatives combined practicality with compassion, strengthening the institution while uplifting those who needed support most.

Her vision extended beyond administration. She believed the campus should be a living example of Gandhian ideals, where self-reliance and community flourished. She promoted horticulture, organized flower shows that brought families together, and encouraged staff to participate in cultural activities. She was fearless in defending the institution’s integrity, but equally nurturing in creating spaces where women, children, and the disadvantaged could thrive.

Kamala stepped down from the post of Secretary, KHS, in 2002. On the 15th of October, 2004, she started the Soundari Smriti Shikshan Kendra, in memory of a much loved sister-in-law, to provide free tuition classes to village school children who could not afford such classes. By evening, that day, she was no more. She had passed on just the way she wanted, graciously, in the service of society. Her daughter, Prabha Desikan, and son-in-law, Skand Trivedi, both alumni of MGIMS, survive her.

Most people walking past the quiet stretch along the Dean’s office at MGIMS today do not know the story behind Anna Sagar. They see a serene pond, but they do not hear the echo of the hands that dug it—medical students, nurses, clerks, technicians, doctors, petty shopkeepers, and villagers, all working side by side in the soil. Fewer still know the man whose vision brought that water to the surface: Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe. He was a man who actively avoided the limelight, yet possessed a willpower that fundamentally shaped the soul of Sevagram.

Between 1968 and 1980, the first and most fragile decade of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Annasaheb served as the Vice President of the Kasturba Health Society. His name rarely appeared in official administrative records. He was not one to sit at the center of group photographs. But behind the scenes, he was an unshakable pillar of strength for Dr. Sushila Nayar. As she navigated the colossal task of building India’s first rural medical college, Annasaheb offered the quiet advice, encouragement, and moral clarity required to keep the institution anchored to its village roots.

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Anant Vasudev Sahastrabuddhe was born on 7 October 1897 in Gupchup Wada, Shaniwar Peth, Pune. His father, a primary school teacher, was subjected to frequent postings across the remote villages of the Amravati district—Daryapur, Elichpur (now Achalpur), and Karajgaon. Each transfer meant packing the family’s meager belongings into a bullock cart and journeying over muddy, unforgiving tracks. Consequently, young Anant attended a new school nearly every year until the sixth grade.

In 1910, he returned to Pune to live with his grandfather and study at the New English School. There, he was taught by Ram Ganesh Gadkari, though it was only years later that Anant realized he had been in the presence of the great Marathi dramatist. Academically, the boy struggled, finding far more joy in the physicality of sports and the discipline of wrestling.

“The worst period in my life was 1908 to 1914,” he would later write in his autobiography. Following his grandfather’s death, Anant and his mother were forced to live in tiny, cramped rented homes while his father continued teaching in distant Vidarbha. Milk became an unattainable luxury. Dignity was hard to find. Yet, this intense poverty did not break him; it opened his eyes to the profound suffering of others.

The true turning point of his youth occurred when he began teaching in the Mang colony in Pune. Brought face to face with brutal caste-based discrimination and utter deprivation, young Anant found his life’s purpose. He organized night schools for Harijan children, offering them not merely literacy, but a radical sense of self-worth. The psychological impact of this experience never left him.

By 1920, deeply inspired by the fiery intellect of Lokmanya Tilak and moved by Mahatma Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation, he took two vows that would dictate the rest of his life: he would never accept a government job, and he would never marry. From that moment forward, service became his only calling.

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Annasaheb spent transformative time at the Sabarmati Ashram, internalizing the rigors of khadi and the inherent dignity of voluntary physical labor. Between 1921 and 1925, he taught at the National School in Chinchwad and worked in agriculture in Belapur. In 1926, he formally immersed himself in the khadi movement. Unlike those who merely spun yarn symbolically, Annasaheb learned the hard, practical ropes of both production and marketing, training extensively at the Kalbadevi Khadi Bhandar.

In 1929, at the invitation of Jamnalal Bajaj, he moved to Wardha. He would remain spiritually and physically bound to this region for the rest of his life. He became the secretary of the Charkha Sangh in 1935 and later established a Khadi Vidyalaya in Mul, Vidarbha.

During the tumultuous decades of the 1930s and '40s, Annasaheb threw himself into the thick of India’s freedom struggle. He marched in the Salt Satyagraha, faced repeated imprisonments, and operated underground during the Quit India movement under the alias “Sunderlal.” Though he was initially convinced that bombs and conspiracies were the only way to shatter British rule, he soon underwent a profound shift, aligning entirely with Gandhiji’s long-term vision of constructive village work. In 1942, he was imprisoned once again in connection with the Capital Bomb Case.

When independence finally dawned, Annasaheb did not seek political office. Instead, he poured his boundless energy into village upliftment—championing Bhudan, Gramdan, Sarvodaya, and Khadi. Working closely with the Sarva Seva Sangh, he traveled the length and breadth of the country to spread Gandhian ideals of equity.

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In 1959, Annasaheb returned to Sevagram and launched a new chapter focused on rural development through agriculture. He was instrumental in helping the Nai Talim educational philosophy rise like a phoenix from the ashes of neglect, establishing a regional planning institute in 1960. As Vice President of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, and later as head of the Planning Commission’s rural industries committee, he fought to completely reimagine how the Indian state planned for its villages. Though bureaucratic red tape frequently blocked his vision, his persistence was absolute.

He worked alongside stalwarts like Shrikrishnadas Jajoo, Raghunath Dhotre, and Achyut Patwardhan, and drew deep inspiration from Vinoba Bhave and Sane Guruji. Yet, Annasaheb was entirely unique in his independence of thought. Although Vinoba was only two years his senior, Annasaheb considered him a contemporary rather than a guru to be followed unquestioningly.

Throughout his life, he steadfastly refused to be a blind follower—even of Gandhi or Vinoba. He relied on his own accumulated wisdom and grounded insight to choose paths that were both appropriate and pragmatic. He was guided by an unyielding internal compass: honesty, ethical conduct in public life, total accountability, and self-effacement. Having witnessed it up close in his youth, he viewed poverty as a grave, systemic affliction. His life’s mission was to help the poor escape the vicious cycle of debt and become fiercely self-reliant.

Collaborating with economists like Dr. D.R. Gadgil and Dr. Prabhakar Nair, he built grassroots district planning models that sought to integrate small, forgotten workers—tea sellers, barbers, grocers—into the formal village economy. His visionary Panchsutra framework, tested in Koraput, Odisha, tackled alcoholism, illiteracy, fear, poverty, and dependence simultaneously. It offered the young Indian nation one of its earliest and most holistic templates for rural development.

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When Dr. Sushila Nayar set out to build MGIMS, Annasaheb was immediately by her side. True to his nature, he was not found in boardrooms or posed for press photographs; he was out in the field. He advised her on land use, helped shape the rural ethos of the college, and quietly ensured that the village and the campus grew in tandem, rather than the hospital swallowing the community.

Anna Sagar, the campus pond, was born of his philosophy. He envisioned it not merely as a functional water source, but as a profound symbol of collective ownership. When villagers, hospital staff, and medical students picked up shovels together, it ceased to be an act of charity. It became the forging of a community.

Annasaheb held numerous high-profile positions over his life—chief secretary of the Gandhi Seva Sangh, president of the Sevagram Ashram, and advisor to national boards. Yet, power and prestige slid off him like water. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi offered him the prestigious Padma Bhushan in 1970, he accepted it quietly, and never mentioned it again.

He was a man who had mastered the rare art of loving people freely—without drama, without conditions. He seamlessly blended into the lives of those he met, sharing their joys and sorrows with a calm, deeply attentive presence.

He had no family, no home, and no property. He lived by the maxim: “Nadi behti bhali, sadhu chalta bhala”—a flowing river is good, a wandering sadhu even better. He lived exactly like that river, always in motion, never tied down.

Among the many Gandhians of his era, Anna stood apart. Publicity meant nothing to him. Dressed in a simple khadi shirt, a dhoti, and worn-out chappals, he carried only an extra pair of clothes. Any money he received, he quietly routed to those in need. He rarely stayed more than two nights in one place, except when he returned to Sevagram or the ashrams he considered his spiritual home. In those ashrams, he was not a guest; he was the patriarch. He helped people solve their everyday domestic problems with the exact same gravity he brought to international economic issues.

Once, a curious observer asked him why he had never married. Anna smiled warmly and replied, “When I was of marriageable age, I was in love with social work. And when that fire settled… it was too late.”

 *    *      *

Anna Saheb earned national respect as an authority on rural development not through academic theory, but through calloused hands. He had tilled land, raised cattle, and worked alongside laborers. In 1961, when Prime Minister Nehru launched the Planning Commission’s efforts on rural development, Anna was invited to join a working group tasked with defining a national minimum standard of living. Alongside experts like D.R. Gadgil and Ashok Mehta, he helped draft a landmark report recommending a poverty line of Rs. 100 per month for a five-member household, calculated on essential needs like food, clothing, housing, and fuel. (They notably excluded health and education, firmly believing the State was morally obligated to provide those for free).

However, the sterile bureaucracy of Delhi clashed violently with his action-oriented soul. Frustrated by endless red tape and political inertia, he quietly resigned and took the train back to Sevagram—preferring to serve in the dirt rather than sit in an office. Even during that short, lucrative government stint, he lived on a floor mat and sent his entire salary, by money order, to support eight impoverished children.

His connection to Sevagram was visceral. It was the laboratory where he proved that even the most modest village activity could become self-sustaining. When Prof. Madhu Dandavate became Minister of Railways in 1977, Anna personally insisted that local vendors be allowed to sell fresh cow’s milk at Wardha and nearby railway stations—a small, highly specific victory that perfectly illustrated his insistence on rural economic independence.

He was not trapped by historical ideology. He admired E.F. Schumacher’s philosophy of Small is Beautiful and personally brought the famed economist to Sevagram. He also invited two agricultural scientists from Israel to the ashram, deeply believing in “appropriate technology”—modern solutions specifically tailored to suit the rural poor.

 *    *      *

In his later years, Anna’s body grew frail. A serious accident left his hands trembling and his neck shaking, but he refused to slow down. His speeches remained simple, clear, and full of nishtha—unshakable commitment. His eyes still burned with quiet determination.

He found profound comfort in spiritual practice, regularly reciting the Vishnu Sahasranama. Often, he would pause mid-verse, chanting with deep, overwhelming feeling, drawing immense solace from its sacred rhythm.

At the age of 83, his heart began to fail, its rhythm fluctuating dangerously. True to the vows he took in 1920, he flatly refused to spend a single rupee on his own medical treatment. It was only through the desperate insistence of his well-wishers that he was finally taken to Bombay Hospital to receive a pacemaker.

He passed away in that hospital on 11 March 1980, before the procedure could be completed.

Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe left behind more than writings or institutions; he left behind a blueprint for living. For decades, the student who topped the Gandhian Thought paper in the MGIMS medical entrance exam was awarded the Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe Medal.

His was the kind of work that rarely makes the evening news. But if one walks through Sevagram today, and looks closely at the soil, the water, and the walls of MGIMS, his presence is everywhere. In silence. In the soil. In the spirit.

No one knew where Prabhakarji was born, or when. No one knew his family name, his caste, or his religion. He never told anyone. It was as if he simply arrived in Wardha one day in 1935, quietly blending with the dusty roads and neem trees, drawn by the sound of Mahatma Gandhi's voice at the Grama Sevak Vidyalaya in Maganwadi. He stayed for the rest of his life.

In a book of portraits — lives defined by dates, degrees, and departments — Prabhakarji defies the form entirely. He had no qualifications to list, no titles to record, no salary scale to document. What he had was something rarer: an absolute, uncomplicated devotion to whoever was suffering in front of him. He nursed malaria patients with mud packs and enemas when there was nothing else. He helped found a five-bed dispensary that became a thousand-bed teaching hospital. He brought Manimala Chaudhary to Sevagram and set her on the path that would make her a founding trustee of the Kasturba Health Society. He managed Kasturba Hospital alone when Dr. Sushila Nayar was in prison with Gandhi and later in America pursuing her doctorate.

He died in Andhra Pradesh in June 1979, in the middle of relief work after a cyclone. He was removed from the ashram shortly before his death, dismissed without ceremony for supporting workers in a wage dispute. He accepted this without protest and went straight back to serving people. He owned nothing. He left nothing. Except everything that MGIMS stands on.

His full name was Prabhakaran Joseph. He had, at some point, converted to Christianity. He had been born into a community in Andhra Pradesh where meat consumption — including carrion — was customary. His mother was a hospital attendant who drank toddy to cope with the difficulty of their lives. He failed the matriculation examination twice.

At the Andhra Jateeya Kalasala, he encountered Young India, Gandhi's publication. Something in Gandhi's writing on cow protection and non-violence reached him where nothing else had. He gave up meat, gave up toddy, and set about remaking himself through the slow discipline of Gandhian practice. He was a young man then, with six years of schooling, whose entire understanding of the world was about to change.

In 1940, he came to Maganwadi in Wardha as a Harijan student, learning paper-making, bee-keeping, and soap-making. Mahadev Desai noticed him. He introduced the boy to Gandhi. A letter in the Harijan dated September 15, 1940, records a characteristic exchange: Prabhakar confessed to Gandhi about his past — his diet, his upbringing — and announced he intended to abstain from milk as penance. Gandhi, moved by the sincerity but practical as always, told him to resume milk consumption. The cow's service to humanity, he said, was too valuable to be declined.

Gandhi agreed to let him stay in the ashram. He never left — not really, not even after he was pushed out forty years later.

In those years, Wardha was notorious for malaria. Every monsoon swept through households and the ashram alike, leaving patients bedridden with fevers above 102 degrees. Recovery required a week of devoted nursing. There were no antibiotics. There was mud — applied in packs to foreheads and abdomens. There were enemas. There was Prabhakarji, moving between cots with a mother's unhurried tenderness.

His work brought him close to Dr. Sushila Nayar, who had arrived in Sevagram as Gandhi's doctor and was building what would become Kasturba Hospital. Together, they set up a small dispensary in one of the ashram's rooms — a few medicines, some disinfectants, a willingness to try. Patients came. More followed. Gandhi eventually suggested moving the dispensary out of the ashram to a newly constructed guest house built by G.D. Birla a few furlongs away. The guest house became a five-bed hospital. That five-bed hospital is today a thousand-bed teaching institution affiliated with MGIMS.

When Dr. Sushila Nayar was imprisoned at the Aga Khan Palace with Gandhi and Kasturba in 1942, Prabhakarji ran the hospital. When she left for America in 1948 to pursue her doctorate at Johns Hopkins, he continued to manage it, assisted by Dr. R.V. Wardekar. Around him also worked Dr. Anant Ranade and Manimala Chaudhary — but it was Prabhakarji who held the centre, who kept the institution functional through years of uncertainty when it had no secure funding, no institutional backing, and no guarantee of survival.

He recruited staff from the surrounding villages, trained them, and turned them into dependable healthcare workers. Many of them later became the backbone of MGIMS when the medical college opened in 1969.

Prabhakarji was what he himself called a Pawanvasi — like the wind, rootless and free. He owned nothing of consequence. Whatever he had, he spent on others. Whatever energy he carried, he directed toward whoever needed it most. He travelled constantly across Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, training young volunteers and health workers, setting up leprosy services, responding to disasters. When he traveled, he never stayed in guest houses or hotels — always in the homes of friends, sharing their meals and their moments.

He carried a small basket of fruit when he traveled. Children always knew the basket was theirs.

He never delivered lectures. He never wrote articles. "His life was his message," those who knew him said, "and his actions were his teachings." He met the Prime Minister with the same simplicity with which he met the most destitute villager in the most remote hamlet. The uniform treatment was not performance — it was how he saw people.

He formed bonds that lasted decades. It was Prabhakarji who first brought Manimala Chaudhary to Sevagram and encouraged her to train in nursing — an act whose consequences neither of them could have foreseen. She would go on to become matron of Kasturba Hospital, founding trustee of the Kasturba Health Society, and one of the central figures in the founding of MGIMS. The thread that connects Prabhakarji to the modern medical institution is direct and unbroken.

When Gandhi began treating Sushila Shastri and others with leprosy in Sevagram, Prabhakarji stood beside him, caring for the sick without hesitation or fear. He worked at Datta Pura Leprosy Hospital, at Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation, at the small hospital in Pavnar that Gandhi opened and that Dr. Krishna Nair later expanded. Wherever the need was greatest and the glamour least, Prabhakarji went.

He had a phrase he used to describe his rhythm of life: "Thirty days a month, I travel to serve. Thirty nights a month, I return to sleep at Sevagram Ashram after taking Bapuji's blessings."

It was not a boast. It was simply the schedule.

He never married. He had no children, no property, no wealth. He found joy — genuine, uncomplicated joy — in the smallest tasks: working in the fields, cleaning the kitchen, nursing a patient, mending a labourer's torn shirt. Ego never found a home in him. He was perhaps the purest embodiment of Gandhi's ashram ideal that the ashram itself produced.

His models were Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave, and he lived their principles of non-attachment without apparent effort, as if it required no discipline at all — as if it was simply who he was.

In 1978, the ashram faced internal unrest. Workers were demanding wage parity with employees at the neighbouring medical college. Prabhakarji, always an advocate for those without power, supported their demands. His position put him at odds with the ashram management. In a decision that those who loved him found deeply contrary to Gandhian values of dialogue and consensus, he was removed from his post as Secretary of Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan — dismissed without ceremony, without the conversation his decades of service deserved.

He accepted the decision without protest. He left the ashram. And then he went back to work.

Despite his declining health, he traveled to Andhra Pradesh to help in the aftermath of a cyclone. He died there on June 17, 1979, still serving, still moving, as he had for more than four decades.

After his death, Dr. K.V. Desikan — a pioneering figure in leprosy medicine and later a key figure at MGIMS — instituted an award in Prabhakarji's memory, given to distinguished social workers in leprosy care. The Desikans' feeling for Prabhakarji ran so deep that when their daughter was born in 1967, they named her Prabha in his honour. She would go on to become a doctor herself, an alumna of MGIMS.

These are small monuments to an unmonumental man. Prabhakarji would have found them touching and faintly embarrassing in equal measure.

He arrived in Wardha in 1935 with six years of schooling and no plan beyond the desire to be useful. He left behind a hospital, a trained workforce, an institution, and an example of how completely a human life can be given to others. He never asked what he would get in return. The question would not have occurred to him.

In a book about the men and women who built MGIMS, most are remembered for what they created — departments, curricula, research programmes, clinical protocols. Prabhakarji is remembered for something harder to name and impossible to replicate: a quality of presence, an unconditional availability to human need, a life in which the distance between belief and action was, as far as anyone could tell, exactly zero.

Founding Trustee, Kasturba Health Society · Secretary to Jamnalal Bajaj · Disciple of Vinoba Bhave · The Continuity of Sevagram

When Raghunath Shridhar Dhotre died in Wardha on May 16, 1967, the President of India sent condolences to his widow. It was a gesture that would have puzzled Dhotre himself, a man who spent fifty years in deliberate retreat from public recognition. He had never contested an election, never sought a platform, never written the memoir his friends urged him to set down. He served — quietly, precisely, behind the scenes of the freedom struggle and its Gandhian aftermath — and then he was gone, his name already fading by the time the condolences arrived.

He deserves to be remembered.

Dhotre was born on June 10, 1897, into a generation that would spend its youth fighting for a country that did not yet exist. In 1918, he came to Sabarmati Ashram alongside Acharya Vinoba Bhave — not as a famous arrival but as a committed young man beginning a life organised around khadi, village upliftment, and service without ambition.

When Vinoba founded Param Dham Ashram in Wardha in 1921 as a branch of the Sabarmati Satyagraha Ashram, Dhotre was with him. Together, they taught at the Ruia Shram School for Women, established by Jamnalal Bajaj. For Dhotre, teaching was not a profession — it was his contribution to what Gandhi called constructive work: the patient, unglamorous nation-building that continued regardless of whether the British were being confronted or not.

Jamnalal Bajaj, who had a sharp eye for reliable men, appointed Dhotre his secretary. It was a role that suited him exactly — administrative, trust-based, demanding precision and discretion rather than oratory or ambition. Under Bajaj's leadership, Dhotre developed organisational skills that would serve Gandhian institutions for decades: the ability to hold multiple threads simultaneously, to keep records impeccably, and to move between the visionary and the practical without losing either.

In the 1920s, as secretary of the Maharashtra Charkha Sangh, Dhotre helped turn spinning into something more than a cottage industry. The charkha was Gandhi's symbol of economic self-reliance and rural dignity — the act of spinning one's own cloth as a political statement against colonial dependency. Dhotre's work was to make this symbol operational: organising, training, distributing, sustaining the infrastructure of a movement that required as much administrative support as ideological conviction.

He was no orator. He inspired not through speeches but through the consistency of his own example and the quality of his quiet encouragement. One of those he influenced was Annasaheb Sahasrabuddhe, who would go on to devote his life to village work in the remote districts of Wardha and later serve as Vice President of the Kasturba Health Society. The thread that runs from Dhotre's mentorship to Sahasrabuddhe's decades of rural work to the founding of MGIMS is direct, even if it is invisible in any formal record.

In 1940, Dhotre served as Secretary of the Gandhi Seva Sangh, bringing him into close working contact with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, P.C. Ghosh, and Gangadharrao Deshpande — the senior generation of the freedom struggle. After independence, when Dadasaheb Mavlankar became President of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, Dhotre was appointed its Secretary, traveling across India to support constructive initiatives and advise the Khadi Board, of which he was a respected informal member though never formally constituted.

Through it all — Sabarmati, Wardha, Delhi, Tryambak — he remained a man without political ambition. He never contested an election. He never sought a public platform. He found his purpose elsewhere.

The Dhotres' home in Sevagram, adjacent to Jamnalalji's guest house, was known to everyone who passed through the ashram world as a place of unusual warmth. The ashram itself could be austere, demanding, occasionally overwhelming to visitors unaccustomed to its rhythms. Dhotre's house was different.

His wife Sharayutai — born August 5, 1910, known to everyone as Akka — ran the household with a gracious hospitality that seemed effortless. There were always refreshments, always laughter, always conversation that moved freely between the serious and the ordinary. Akka never appeared tired or flustered. Every guest was received with the same attentive dignity, whether they were a passing Sarvodaya worker or a senior Congress leader.

Visitors who felt daunted by the moral gravity of Gandhian ashram life found particular comfort in one of Dhotre's characteristic remarks: "We are ordinary householders, just like you." It was not false modesty. It was a genuine hospitality — an invitation to lay down the performative weight of ideology and simply be a person among people.

Their home became a sanctuary. In a world of causes and commitments, it offered the rarer thing: welcome.

In September 1964, when the Kasturba Health Society was registered in Nagpur to take formal charge of what would become MGIMS, Dhotre was among its seven founding trustees. He joined Dr. Sushila Nayar, Manimala Chaudhary, Dr. Anant Ranade, Shriman Narayan of the Planning Commission, Laxmidas Shrikant of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, and Nalinibhai Mehta — a group bound not by institutional affiliation but by a shared formation in Gandhian values and decades of acquaintance with each other's character.

Dhotre represented something specific in that group: continuity. He had been in Wardha since 1921. He had known Jamnalal Bajaj personally. He had worked with Vinoba Bhave at the beginning of the Param Dham Ashram. He carried the institutional memory of the ashram world in a way that the others, many of whom had come to Sevagram later, could not. His presence on the founding board was a form of testimony — that this new medical institution was not a departure from the Gandhian tradition but its continuation.

He died on May 16, 1967, three years after the Kasturba Health Society's founding and two years before MGIMS admitted its first students. Heart and kidney failure. He had been hospitalised in Nagpur, barely conscious in his final days. He did not live to see what the institution became.

His daughter's daughter did. Bhakti — granddaughter of Raghunath and Sharayutai Dhotre — was a member of the first batch of MGIMS in 1969. The Gandhian values had passed from generation to generation, from khadi to stethoscope, in exactly the way the founders had hoped they would.

In his later years, friends urged Dhotre to write down his memories. He had the material. He had been present at enough significant moments, alongside enough significant people, to fill a substantial volume. His recollections were sharp, his observations — of great men and their contradictions, of meetings that shaped the nation's course — reportedly candid and illuminating.

He never wrote it. The memoir was planned, discussed, and left undone. Whether from modesty, from the press of continuing work, or simply from the sense that his life had been lived rather than narrated, the record was never set down. What remains is fragmentary — the testimonies of those who knew him, the institutional traces of his work, the charkhas still turned by hand in Sevagram homes.

It is one of the quiet losses of that generation: the men and women who were present at the founding of things, who knew everything and wrote down nothing, trusting instead that the work itself would be sufficient testimony.

For Dhotre, it mostly was. The Kasturba Health Society endures. MGIMS endures. The school of thought that placed rural healthcare and rural education at the centre of post-independence nation-building endures, however battered. He was part of its planting.

He never sought the limelight. In that retreat, he became — as those who remember him say — the flame by which others found their way. Akka outlived him by thirty-two years, dying on January 29, 1999, still in Sevagram, still the warm centre of whatever company gathered around her. She was, in her way, as much a part of the institution's founding as her husband — the hospitality that made idealism liveable, the household that gave the movement a human face.

Founding Trustee & Finance Manager, Kasturba Health Society · Disciple of J.C. Kumarappa · The Third Pillar of MGIMS

He began work at four in the morning.

"Son," he would chuckle, "four a.m. — that was my happy hour. Three quiet hours, just me and the numbers. No phone calls, no meetings, no interruptions. I could balance the books, track every paisa, and get things in order. Once the office opened, it was chaos. I had to be ready."

In the dim hours before Sevagram woke, Nalinibhai Mehta sat with his ledgers and made the numbers yield their truth. He had been doing this, in one form or another, since he was a teenager apprenticing under a photographer in Surendranagar because there was no money for college. Numbers had always spoken to him — not as abstractions but as instruments of discipline, of accountability, of institutional survival. Without sound finances, he understood, a dream remained a dream. With them, MGIMS took shape.

He was the third pillar of the founding trio, less celebrated than Dr. Sushila Nayar or Manimala Chaudhary, rarely photographed, seldom quoted. But when Dr. Nayar visited him after his stroke in 1991 and found him confined to his home, unable to move his right arm and leg, she wept. "Nalinbhai," she said, "I had no idea how meticulously you kept the accounts. Where will I find someone like you?"

She never did.

Nalinibhai was born on January 17, 1917, in Karachi. His mother died when he was three. His father — a merchant trading fine crockery between Karachi and Bombay — lost his entire inventory in 1922 when the ship carrying it sank. The family went bankrupt. His father died when Nalinibhai was seven. He was sent to Halvad, a small town in Gujarat's Morbi district, to be raised by a stepmother and an uncle.

He schooled in Surendranagar, worked as an apprentice to a photographer named J.J. Mehta to pay his way, and at nineteen joined the freedom struggle. He spent four months in a British prison — a steep price for a teenager, one he never regretted. Somewhere in those years of scarcity and self-reliance, he developed what would become his defining quality: an almost physical aversion to waste.

In 1936, a Sarvodaya worker named Babalbhai Mehta urged him to visit Sevagram and meet Gandhi. He went. Gandhi sent him to the Khadi Gramodyog Vidyalaya to work under J.C. Kumarappa — economist, freedom fighter, and one of Gandhi's closest intellectual collaborators. The apprenticeship transformed him.

Kumarappa's vision was of self-sufficient villages built on local resources and diversified skills. His financial philosophy was equally exacting: precision in record-keeping, rigour in balancing accounts, the discipline of making every rupee yield its maximum worth. Nalinibhai did not merely absorb these lessons — he lived them. He shaved his head to save on haircuts. He wore simple clothes to conserve fabric. He treated every paisa as a moral responsibility.

The bond between mentor and disciple deepened into something like family. When Nalinibhai married Madhu Lata, Kumarappa marked the occasion with rare warmth — gifting her a gold armlet, and presenting Nalinibhai with two prized possessions: an Omega watch and a Zeiss Ikon camera. They were, as Nalinibhai understood them, not gifts but tokens of trust.

When Nalinibhai arrived at MGIMS in 1969 as founding trustee and member in-charge of finance, the accounts office was two cramped rooms under a sloping kavelu roof. Stone floors cool against the Vidarbha heat. A flickering tubelight. Wooden shelves sagging under the weight of thick ledgers. A noisy table fan pushing warm air over yellowing files. The smell of ink and old paper.

Three men shared a single battered wooden desk: Dadarao Shingare, who had left school after sixth grade but handled the hospital's cash flow with meticulous care; Kanakdas, a boy from Kerala who had arrived in Wardha in the mid-sixties nearly illiterate and orphaned, found by Manimala Chaudhary lingering near the ashram kitchen, given a job ringing the hourly chime, who then taught himself Hindi and English and the General Financial Rules by kerosene lamplight until the bell boy became the chief accountant; and Bhimrao Pradhan, who had studied to tenth grade in Yavatmal and worked his way from laboratory attendant to accountant through sheer observation and persistence.

None had studied commerce. None had trained under an accountant. Together, they managed an annual budget of one lakh rupees.

"Am I to blame," Dr. Sushila Nayar once said, defending these men, "if I entrust sensitive jobs to men who may not be very bright but on whom I can rely?"

Nalinibhai understood exactly what she meant, because he had built his own career on the same principle — that reliability, precision, and integrity were worth more than any qualification. He supervised the three men, trained them further, and stood behind them when anyone questioned their credentials. The accounts office under his watch was impenetrable. Auditors found nothing to fault. Not once.

The founding years of MGIMS were financially precarious in ways that those who joined the institution later can scarcely imagine. The Gandhi Smarak Nidhi provided a one-time grant of one million rupees when MGIMS opened in 1969, with a clear condition attached: no further funds. The institution had to become self-sustaining from that moment.

Nalinibhai accepted this as a challenge, not a constraint. Government grants, hospital revenues, donations, interest from the KHS endowment — he tracked every source, stretched every allocation, and maintained balance sheets of such clarity that they served as models of institutional transparency. He convinced Dr. Nayar that the three of them — she, Manimala Chaudhary, and himself — would accept only a nominal honorarium of ₹500 per month. This increased in small increments over the years, reaching ₹2,000 by the time his stroke ended his working life. For a man who had access to an institution's entire finances, the restraint was extraordinary and deliberate.

For five years he shuttled between Delhi and Sevagram — Delhi for the Gandhi Centenary Year programmes and the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi's fundraising work, Sevagram for the accounts. When in Sevagram, he slept on the floor and rode a bicycle to inspect the society's agricultural land. He kept the same hours — four in the morning, ledger open, pencil moving — regardless of which city he was in.

In 1970 he settled permanently in Sevagram. He was fifty-three years old. He would spend the next twenty-one years managing the finances of a growing medical institution, never wavering in precision or principle.

His desk, those who worked alongside him recall, was not merely a workstation. It was a stronghold. A single misplaced digit in a ledger would prompt a sharp glance. An unclear expense would summon a booming interrogation. He was frank, outspoken, and sometimes blunt — a man who called a spade a spade without social lubrication. Nobody minded, because the frankness came from conviction, not malice. He had no personal stake in any financial decision. He had only the institution.

He built relationships with donors through the same quality. With Sarla Parekh — who became a holding trustee of the Kasturba Health Society — and with contributors large and small, he understood that fundraising was not about solicitation but about trust. A small gift from a local shopkeeper mattered as much as a corporate donation. He treated every donor with identical respect. People gave not just money but faith, because Nalinibhai made the institution's integrity visible in his own person.

In 1982, he and P.L. Tapdiya — who had come to MGIMS as a young chartered accountancy apprentice in 1965 and stayed for six decades — arranged a lunch between Dr. Sushila Nayar and Dhirubhai Mehta. That meeting brought Dhirubhai into the KHS fold. After Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe's death, Dhirubhai became Vice President, then Dr. Nayar's most trusted ally, and after her death led the institution for twenty-four years. One lunch, arranged by Nalinibhai, shaped the next quarter century of MGIMS governance.

Through the working years, Madhu Lata was beside him — battling rheumatic heart disease for nearly thirty years, her heart weakened by a blocked valve, yet maintaining the household and raising their three children: sons Rajiv Lochan and Bharat Bhushan, and a daughter, Vrinda. On May 19, 1987, in Ahmedabad, she died. The family she had built and held together remained her lasting legacy. Nalinibhai, who had balanced institutional accounts with iron discipline for decades, was less equipped for this particular loss. It was his daughter-in-law Lata who held things together then, and who would do so again when the stroke came.

In 1991, while in Gujarat, Nalinibhai suffered a stroke. It took his voice — that booming, interrogating, never-uncertain voice — and left him unable to move his right arm and leg. He was seventy-four years old. He came home to Ramdas Colony in Sevagram and did not leave again.

Lata cared for him through the final decade with unwavering devotion. He spent his days confined to home, the ledgers gone, the four o'clock mornings gone, the chaos of office hours that he had always been three hours ahead of — all of it gone.

Dr. Sushila Nayar visited him. She wept. She had not known, she said, how meticulous he had been. It was a strange thing to say about a man she had worked alongside for twenty-seven years — but perhaps the full dimension of his precision only became visible in its absence, when the accounts had to be managed without him.

He died on June 17, 2000, at home in Ramdas Colony, surrounded by Lata, Bharat, and his family. Six months later, Dr. Sushila Nayar followed him.

They had both witnessed MGIMS entire — from the two cramped rooms under the kavelu roof to the thousand-bed teaching hospital it became. Between them, they had held the institution's vision and its finances, its direction and its discipline, in careful, complementary hands for more than three decades. One without the other would have been insufficient. Together, they built something that outlasted them both.

Warden · Orientation In-Charge · Eight Years at Sevagram · The Kettle Was Always On

Laxman Radhakrishna Pandit — known to every student, nurse, clerk, driver, and doctor who passed through the early years of MGIMS as Pandit Kaka — was the quiet human infrastructure of the institution's founding years. His door was always open. A kettle of tea was always on the boil. When students missed their mothers, his wife Manorama Tai ensured they got warm, homely meals. When hostel corridors filled with homesickness in the small hours, Pandit Kaka would appear in his unhurried way and remind them, in a voice so calm it was almost a form of reassurance in itself: "You are here to serve, to learn, and to grow."

He was not a strict warden. He understood that boys would be boys, that discipline earned through kindness went deeper than discipline imposed by authority. He had been living this understanding since before most of them were born.

Pandit Kaka was born on April 4, 1909, in the princely state of Bastar in what is now Chhattisgarh. His father died young. His mother raised him with a fierce insistence on education. He grew up mastering English, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, mathematics, and economics, and learned agriculture alongside his studies — a combination of skills that would serve him across five decades of institutional work.

Gandhi's message was sweeping across India in his formative years, and Pandit Kaka made an early vow: he would never work for the British government. He meant it. While still a young man, he built a modest school in his village and began teaching — the quiet nation-building that Gandhi called constructive work, carried out in ordinary places by ordinary people with extraordinary commitment.

In 1935, a khadi salesman came through. His name was Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe. He was selling cloth, but what he carried was something more compelling — a vision of village self-reliance and a life of purposeful service. Pandit Kaka left with him. He traveled to Wardha, joined the Charkha Sangh, and never really left. Branches of the Sangh began springing up in Metpally, Savali, and Mul — each a quiet testament to his ability to get things done without seeking recognition for doing them.

By 1944, he had become secretary of the Charkha Sangh and took charge as principal of the Sevagram Khadi Vidyalaya. He had married Manorama Mainkar of Nagpur in 1936. Together, recruited by Jamnalal Bajaj and Vinoba Bhave, they ran the Vidyalaya as a shared act of service — Pandit Kaka teaching and administering, Manorama Tai overseeing the kitchen, teaching children, and ensuring the school felt more like a home than an institution. Students came from across India and found not just education but warmth, structure, and the strange comfort of discipline tempered by care.

There is a less-known chapter.

While Pandit Kaka was working in Mul, a group of freedom fighters raided a British bank. They did not keep the money. They brought it to him. It was a vote of trust — the kind extended only to men whose reliability is beyond question. He took the bundle, silent and steady, as the British police got wind of the operation.

For several days, he lay low. Beside him were Dattoba Dastane and Apte Guruji — watchful, moving with purpose but without panic. The money, meant for the underground resistance, had to reach its destination. How he eluded the police dragnet, how he moved through their perimeter and smuggled the funds where they needed to go — he never boasted, never wrote it down. Those who knew, knew.

In that moment, he was not merely a Gandhian teacher. He was a krantikari in khadi — waging revolution without violence, practicing rebellion with restraint. He then returned to his school, his charkha, his ledgers, as if nothing had happened.

In 1955, he moved briefly to Nashik as principal of the Khadi Grama Vidyalaya before returning to Sevagram to head the Regional Planning Institute founded by Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe. He became a central figure in the Gandhi Research Centre and helped organise the Gandhi Centenary programmes of 1969 with meticulous care.

When Dr. Sushila Nayar started MGIMS that same year, Pandit Kaka became her man Friday — a phrase that understates the reality. He took on the role of director for students during their Gandhi Ashram orientation month, ensuring that their introduction to Gandhian philosophy was practical and felt rather than theoretical and imposed. He participated in the Gyan Yatras. He was instrumental in starting Vinoba Bhave's Bhoodan Yatra from Sevagram. He did everything, all the time, without announcement.

And then came the administrative work that only someone of his particular combination of qualities could have managed: when MGIMS began conducting its pre-medical entrance examinations, it was Pandit Kaka who published the forms, oversaw applications, verified details, organised the examination centres, checked the marks, and prepared the merit lists. This was not glamorous work. It required precision, patience, and an absolute incorruptibility in an era when government admissions were routinely manipulated by political pressure and family influence. Under his watch, merit meant merit.

He also managed accounts, maintained hostel discipline, assisted with admissions, and still found time to sit with individual students who were struggling in their first weeks. He multitasked with the effortless grace of someone who never distinguished between important work and ordinary work — who understood that an institution is held together as much by the man who checks the merit list as by the woman who builds the hospital.

Students from the early batches of MGIMS remember his house beside the Principal's office — modest, door perpetually open, kettle perpetually on. They remember his khadi, the same fabric every day, worn without self-consciousness. They remember his voice — not loud, not declamatory, but with the particular quality of speech that comes from a man who has thought carefully before opening his mouth.

He was a fine orator in the Gandhian mode: speeches rooted in philosophy, designed to stir the conscience rather than dazzle the ear. He believed in simple living and high thinking, and he embodied it in every gesture — not as a performance but as a settled way of being that had been arrived at early in life and never questioned.

He moved through the campus with quiet dignity, never seeking attention, always available. Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe was more than a mentor to him — friend, philosopher, guide, and eventually something close to family: Annasaheb's niece married Pandit Kaka's son Ratnakar. The bond between the two men was one of the deep, sustaining friendships that give institutions their invisible strength.

His brother Shivram aligned himself with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Pandit Kaka followed Gandhi. Their ideologies diverged completely. Their affection for each other did not. It was, those who knew both men said, a study in how genuine love can hold across genuine difference.

Cancer claimed him on September 1, 1977, in Sevagram — the place where he had poured his life's work, where his door had always been open and the kettle always on. He was sixty-eight years old. Manorama Tai survived him. They had five children: daughters Vijaya Potnis and Nandini Dewaikar, and sons Madhukar, Sudhakar, and Ratnakar.

MGIMS instituted the L.R. Pandit and Smt. Manorama Pandit Award — ₹500 to a first MBBS student for best performance in the Gandhi Ashram orientation camp held each year. It is a small memorial for a large presence.

Those who were there in the early years — the batch of 1969 to 1976 particularly — do not speak of Pandit Kaka as a memory. They speak of him as a presence. In every quiet act of institutional kindness, in every corner of Sevagram where a student sits at a charkha, in every merit list published without interference, something of him remains.

He never sought titles. He never raised his voice. He never wrote down the story of the bank money or the days of hiding with Dastane and Apte Guruji. He simply did what needed doing, with whatever the day required — an underground courier when the freedom struggle needed one, a warm presence when homesick eighteen-year-olds needed one, a meticulous accountant when a new institution needed one.

The kettle was always on. The door was always open. That was enough. That was everything.

• While working in Mul, a group of freedom fighters raided a British bank — they brought the money to him
• It was a vote of trust extended only to men whose reliability is beyond question
• For several days he lay low — alongside Dattoba Dastane and Apte Guruji — as British police got wind of the operation
• The funds reached their destination; the police dragnet was evaded
• He never boasted, never wrote it down — then returned to his school, his charkha, his ledgers, as if nothing had happened
• A krantikari in khadi — waging revolution without violence, practising rebellion with restraint

The bullock cart left before dawn. Two figures sat in it as it lurched down the red dirt roads of Vidarbha — a young doctor in white khadi and a determined nurse named Manimala Chaudhary. They were going to the villages to collect the harvest premium. Not cash. Jowar. A handful from one family, a sack from another, sometimes nothing but a smile and a promise. From this humble barter — grain for healthcare, goodwill for medicine — one of rural India's most enduring health insurance schemes was born.

The doctor was Anant Damodar Ranade. He was in his thirties. He would spend the next three and a half decades doing variations of this same thing: riding into villages, listening to people, operating on their eyes, delivering their children, and quietly building an institution around them. He never sought recognition. He wore the same white khadi shirt and plain chappals every day of his working life. When he finally left Sevagram in 1982, the institution he had helped found was training hundreds of doctors a year. He moved to Nagpur to live with his son and spent his days spinning on a charkha.

He died on April 29, 2019, one year short of a hundred.

Anant was born on February 22, 1920, in Jamkhandi, a princely state in what is now northern Karnataka's Bagalkot district. His father, Damodar Ranade, served as a superintendent under the local raja. The family were Chitpavan Brahmins, but their deeper allegiance was to Lokmanya Tilak's brand of nationalism. When Anant was old enough for school, his family sent him not to a government institution but to the National School in Chinchwad — a deliberate choice, rooted in the conviction that colonial education served colonial ends.

In the school library and in the magazines edited by Mahatma Gandhi, young Anant found his intellectual formation. At the urging of Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe, he later visited Sabarmati Ashram, where he learned to farm, cook, clean latrines, maintain sanitation, and spin khadi. In 1930, when he was ten years old, the entire Ranade family adopted khadi. Anant would wear it every day for the rest of his life.

After matriculating in 1939, he enrolled at the Ayurveda Mahavidyalaya in Pune. While studying, he worked with the Rashtra Seva Dal and Congress Seva Dal. He earned the title Ayurveda Visharad and trained in eye surgery — a journey, as someone who knew him later put it, from pulse to scalpel. But history called louder than either.

In August 1942, Gandhi announced the Quit India Movement from Bombay. Anant, then in his final year of Ayurvedic training, threw down his books and joined the struggle. He was imprisoned for six months. When he was released and completed his training in 1943, he travelled to Bengal, where famine had already killed millions. While the British government diverted food to the military, ordinary people died in the streets. Anant worked among them. What he witnessed in Bengal — the geometry of poverty, hunger, and preventable disease — would never leave him.

He returned from Bengal and began working at Wai Hospital. On the suggestion of Dr. Lagoo, he travelled to Pune to meet Gandhi. Dr. Lagoo told the Mahatma simply: this boy wants to work in Sevagram. Gandhi turned to Dr. Sushila Nayar and asked whether she would take him on. She agreed without hesitation.

On January 10, 1946, Anant Ranade arrived in Sevagram. He was twenty-five years old.

The Kasturba Hospital at that point was still finding its feet — a small dispensary that had moved from a room in the ashram to Birla House, a modest building a few furlongs away. Dr. Sushila Nayar, trained in Western medicine, was managing the clinical work. Gandhi, characteristically, continued to advocate for naturopathy and traditional healing alongside her. The patients who came were desperately poor. Malaria, typhoid, leprosy, complicated deliveries, cataracts — illness was as present in Sevagram as the dust and heat. Many died young and unnecessarily.

Anant began by doing what the hospital needed: everything. He rode bullock carts to surrounding villages to provide primary care. He assisted with deliveries. He watched, learned, and steadily acquired clinical skills that his Ayurvedic training had not given him. He trained in cataract surgery. Later, he went to Calcutta to study leprosy management. He was methodical and unhurried in everything, qualities that made patients trust him and colleagues rely on him.

One early lesson came directly from Gandhi. Anant had carefully prepared a hospital budget — a total of ₹25,000, with ₹5,000 allocated to preventive care and ₹20,000 to curative services. He presented it to Gandhi with some pride. Gandhi glanced at it, frowned, and said: this belongs in the wastepaper basket.

Anant was shaken. Where had he gone wrong?

Gandhi explained: reverse the figures. Put four-fifths of your resources into prevention, one-fifth into cure. Only then can a society be truly healthy.

It was a principle Anant would carry into every initiative for the rest of his working life.

In 1948, Dr. Sushila Nayar left for a WHO scholarship at Johns Hopkins. She had entrusted Kasturba Hospital — wards, staff, supplies, accounts, and the surrounding community — to a man barely thirty years old. He managed it not with bureaucratic efficiency but with the quiet authority of someone whose commitment no one doubted.

The years that followed were difficult ones for the hospital. Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, which had taken over management after Gandhi's death, found the expenses high and considered handing the hospital to the government. The staff were alarmed. This was not a government institution — it was built on an idea, on community participation, on the Gandhian conviction that health belonged to the people it served.

Dr. Ranade and Manimala Chaudhary climbed back into the bullock cart. They went from village to village during harvest time, not demanding fixed contributions but inviting what people could give. Grain, coins, blessings. Out of these offerings, the health insurance scheme took its first organised shape. Families paid a small annual premium — initially twenty-five percent of already modest hospital charges — in exchange for reliable, affordable care. It was not a policy. It was a people's promise.

By 1955, the scheme was formalised. A family could insure itself for ₹10 a year. The currency was not profit but dignity. When ₹10 became ₹35 in 1985, and ₹600 in 2022, the principle remained intact. By 2024, the scheme covered nearly four lakh individuals. Over fifty thousand health insurance cards had been issued. What began with a cart and a bag of jowar had become one of India's oldest and most studied models of community-based health insurance.

For two decades, Anant Ranade was Kasturba Hospital's only eye surgeon. In the 1950s and 1960s, he conducted eye camps every Sunday across Vidarbha, often accompanied by ophthalmologists from Nagpur — Dr. Sutaria, Dr. Joshi, Dr. Kelkar — who came out of respect for him and the work. Villagers traveled miles, some on foot, some in bullock carts, drawn by word that this doctor's hands could restore sight.

He organized each camp with the precision of someone who understood that logistics were not separate from care — they were care. Days before a camp, he would visit the village, meet the sarpanch, identify a suitable site, arrange food for the patients and the medical team, and confirm transport. Then he would stay for the duration, operating through the day and sleeping in the village until the last patient had been seen.

His cataract surgery was performed with techniques far more rudimentary than those available today. What he had instead were steady hands, deep patience, and an intuitive grasp of what each patient needed. His outcomes spoke for themselves. People who had been blind for years left his camps able to see.

Dr. K.K. Trivedi, head of surgery at MGIMS and one of the first patients ever treated at Kasturba Hospital, recalls Ranade with the particular tenderness reserved for those who shaped you. "He was my closest friend in Sevagram," Trivedi says. "Whenever my parents visited, he would sit with them for hours. They spoke the same language — simplicity, service, rural India." Trivedi adds, with a soft laugh: "He even taught me to do cataract surgery. I may have operated on a patient or two under his watchful eye."

When MGIMS opened in 1969, a formally qualified ophthalmologist with an MS degree from Chandigarh was appointed. The new head was direct with Dr. Sushila Nayar: he could not tolerate an Ayurvedic practitioner performing cataract surgeries in a modern medical college. Either Ranade operated or he did. Not both.

What followed was a quiet, painful surrender. Years of service were set aside without ceremony. Dr. Ranade was given charge of the Ayurveda Outpatient Department, inaugurated on Makar Sankranti in 1976. He managed it without complaint, seeing patients six days a week, supported by Dr. C. Dwarkanath, one of India's most respected Ayurvedic practitioners, who served as honorary advisor. In 1976 alone, the OPD recorded more than four thousand patient visits.

He was also placed in charge of the hospital's medical store. He managed it with the same meticulous attention he brought to everything, knowing which suppliers in Bombay could be trusted, which lanes in Kalbadevi Street offered good instruments at honest prices. "He once took me to a tiny galli off Kalbadevi where Jamnalal and Sons operated," Trivedi recalls. "He negotiated fiercely. We never wasted a paisa."

By the early 1960s, it was clear that Kasturba Hospital needed a permanent, independent home — an institution capable of outlasting any individual. Dr. Ranade was central to the conversations that led to the founding of the Kasturba Health Society on September 11, 1964. The founding trustees were a small faithful group: Dr. Sushila Nayar, Manimala Chaudhary, Nalinbhai Mehta, Raghunath Shridhar Dhotre, Shriman Narayan of the Planning Commission, Laxmidas Shrikant of Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, and Dr. Anant Ranade.

It was Ranade, along with Manimala and Nalinbhai Mehta, who travelled to Delhi to persuade Dr. Sushila Nayar to lead the Society. She was hesitant. They would not leave until she agreed. The Gandhi Smarak Nidhi transferred hospital management to the new Society along with an endowment of ten lakh rupees, the interest from which covered the hospital's annual deficit. It was a quiet but decisive transformation — from an ashram-style institution sustained by goodwill into a professionally managed, community-rooted organisation. Five years later, in 1969, that organisation became the parent body of MGIMS.

Those who lived alongside Anant Ranade in Sevagram remember not just the physician but the person. He lived in Guru Nanak Colony, between the homes of Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao and Manimala Chaudhary. His wife Nalini, trained in nursing and Indian classical music, gave evening baithaks in their modest home — gatherings where colleagues lost themselves in khayals and ragas. The house was a place of warmth in a community that could otherwise feel demanding and austere.

He was a Brahmin by birth who ate food prepared by Harijans, cleaned his own utensils, and participated in the ashram's prayers without theatrical devotion — simply, as part of daily life. He spun on a charkha. He attended community meetings and, as he once said, listened happily even to criticism. "I always believed we need people to point out what's wrong in the system," he said. "Without them, the hospital wouldn't run."

He never claimed credit and rarely spoke about himself. His famous remark — "I never hesitated in my life, never stepped back, and not for a moment was I bored with the work" — was made almost in passing, in writing, as if it required no elaboration.

No portrait of Anant Ranade is complete without Nalini. Born on November 10, 1931, in Dewas, she grew up in a household where her father — a bank employee and committed Gandhian — ensured that everyone wore khadi and that a khadi bhandar operated wherever he was posted. She attended Rashtriya Shala in Nadiad, a school following Gandhi's Nai Talim model, where education engaged the hand and the heart alongside the mind. She had learned classical music under Pandit Moreshwar Khare, and once danced before Gandhi at her father's request — and Gandhi laughed and encouraged the little girl warmly.

When she married Anant in 1949 and came to Sevagram, she became warden of the girls' hostel, leading all-religion prayers, nursing patients without squeamishness about cleaning wards or washing the sick, earning a BA while managing the hostel, learning multiple languages, and fostering generations of young women students with the same quiet strength she brought to everything. She left Sevagram with her husband in 1982.

His son Dr. Sharad Ranade — an ophthalmologist trained at IGMC Nagpur — settled in Nagpur with his wife Dr. Charulata, a practising gynaecologist. Their daughter Amruta, born in 1979, married Devendra Fadnavis, who would go on to become Chief Minister of Maharashtra. It is one of those quiet ironies that history occasionally produces: the granddaughter of a man who rode bullock carts through Vidarbha villages in a white khadi shirt, collecting jowar as health insurance premium, became the Chief Minister's wife. Anant Ranade would have found it faintly amusing, and then gone back to his charkha.

In his final years in Nagpur, Anant Ranade spun khadi, tended his garden, and read. His memory remained sharp into his late nineties. In 2019, he returned to Sevagram for a family function. He remembered the besan laddus made by Mrs. Gupta. He asked after Dr. Dhawan. He was ninety-nine years old.

"His departure from Sevagram wasn't how it should have been," Dr. Trivedi says quietly. "Sevagram forgot too easily. But I didn't. He was cut from the same cloth as Dr. Wardekar — spiritual, Gandhian, inspired by Vinoba Bhave. What he gave to Kasturba Hospital and later to MGIMS cannot be measured in years or posts. It was the soul of service."

He was not the kind of man institutions build statues for. He was the kind of man institutions are actually built by — in the before-dawn hours, on the back of a bullock cart, riding toward a village that needed someone to come.

Nalini Ranade was born on 10 November 1931 in Dewas, to Vishnu Narayan Bankar and Gangubai. Her parents later moved to Bilimora, Gujarat, where her father worked in a bank. But he was, above all, a stubborn Gandhian. Clad always in pure khadi, with a white khadi cap perched firmly on his head, he would go to the bank each day and, wherever he was posted, ensure a khadi bhandar was opened to promote the sale of khadi. Everyone at home wore khadi—it was not a choice but a way of life.

Nalini grew up in this environment. Instead of attending a government school, she went to Rashtriya Shala in Nadiad, a school that followed the Wardha Nai Talim Yojana, focusing on agriculture, craft, cleanliness, and self-reliance. Alongside academics, students learned drawing, music, sports, and practical skills—an education that shaped head, heart, and hand. She had just cleared her Class 10 exams when Dr. Anand Ranade from Wardha visited Nadiad, and soon after, they were married.

Nalini’s formative years had already been shaped by Gandhian institutions. Before coming to Nadiad, she had spent two years as a young girl at Sabarmati Ashram, learning various skills. Under the guidance of Panditrao Khare and his family, she received training in classical music and learned to sing mythological songs and bhajans, a love that would stay with her for life.

On a visit to Sevagram with her father, she met Gandhiji. At her father’s request, she danced before Gandhiji to a song composed in his honour. Gandhiji laughed, encouraging the little girl warmly.

Another turning point came when she was travelling by train to Wardha, singing softly to herself in the compartment. In that same compartment was Asha Devi Aryanayakam, who ran the Nai Talim school in Sevagram Ashram. Asha Devi, charmed by Nalini’s singing, invited her to Sevagram. There, at the end of the school’s evening prayer, Nalini was asked to sing a bhajan, an experience that gave her confidence and strengthened her bond with music.

After her marriage, Nalini moved to Sevagram. There, she became the warden of the girls’ hostel, where she actively participated in daily all-religion prayers and led bhajans. Sevagram was, in many ways, an extension of Sabarmati Ashram: a place where everyone shared in the mundane tasks of daily life without hesitation. She learned multiple languages, pursued arts, earned her BA, and received nursing training to serve in the Kasturba Hospital.

In the hospital, she did not hesitate to wash patients or clean wards, believing deeply that cleanliness was next to godliness—a virtue Sevagram reinforced in her. Whether it was caring for patients, leading prayers, or participating in community activities, Nalini Ranade embodied the spirit of silent, selfless service, nurturing countless young women under her care and carrying forward the Gandhian ideals she had imbibed as a child.

<p>1920 — Born in Jamkhandi, Karnataka<br />

1942 — Imprisoned in Quit India movement<br />

1943 — Worked during Bengal famine<br />

1946 — Joined Kasturba Hospital Sevagram<br />

1955 — Health insurance scheme formalised<br />

1964 — Kasturba Health Society founded<br />

1969 — MGIMS established<br />

1982 — Left Sevagram<br />

2019 — Died in Nagpur</p>

First Principal of MGIMS · Professor of Physiology · Soldier · Scientist · The Man Who Gave MGIMS Its Academic Spine

On September 1, 1969, a man in a neatly tied turban stepped onto the sun-baked platform at Wardha station. He had traveled a thousand kilometres from Punjab on a slow-moving train. He carried the quiet composure of someone who had already lived several demanding lives — soldier, researcher, teacher — and was now being asked to live another: the first principal of a medical college that did not yet fully exist.

Dr. Ishar Dayal Singh was not what people expected when they pictured a Punjabi. There was no bluster, no large presence filling the room. He was measured, deliberate, soft-spoken. He listened more than he spoke, and when he did speak, his words arrived with the particular weight of someone who had chosen them carefully. Dr. Sushila Nayar had asked the Punjab government to depute him for one year. He stayed for five. In those five years, he gave MGIMS its academic skeleton and something harder to name — a tone, a culture, a way of being an institution.

He was born on June 11, 1913, in Dharamsala, in the cool hills of Himachal Pradesh. His lineage carried a remarkable distinction: he was descended from Bhai Nand Lal Goya, the seventeenth-century Persian poet and devoted disciple of Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru. Bhai Nand Lal had migrated from Persia some three hundred years earlier and settled in Multan. After Partition, the family settled in Patiala.

Singh completed his BSc with honours in Biology from Christian College, Lahore, and his MBBS from King Edward Medical College, Lahore, in 1937 — standing first in Medicine, Ophthalmology, and Surgery. His MD in Physiology came in 1952, delayed by the interruptions of history. A PhD from the University of Birmingham followed in 1955.

Between his MBBS and his MD, the world had gone to war. Singh served in the British Indian Army Medical Corps, rising to the rank of Major. The war shaped him — his discipline, his steadiness under pressure, his ability to function in conditions of uncertainty and scarcity. These were precisely the qualities that Sevagram would demand of him.

After the war, he returned to academia. An ICMR-funded research project. A Colombo Plan Fellowship that took him to Birmingham. A Wellcome Trust Fellowship in 1961 that carried him across the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, Singapore, and the United States, building the international network of a serious scientist. He guided more than twenty postgraduate students. He published thirty-four original papers. His work on hepatic coma, published in The Lancet in 1954, established him as a researcher of international standing. He served on the editorial board of the Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology.

By 1969, he was a man of considerable academic achievement, settled in Punjab, with no obvious reason to uproot himself for a half-built medical college in a Vidarbha village. Dr. Sushila Nayar asked anyway. He said yes.

What he found when he arrived bore little resemblance to the institutions he had known. There were no grand lecture halls. Laboratories were rudimentary. The first batch of fifty students had arrived, eager and uncertain. Faculty members recruited from across the country were still adjusting to life in a village — to the dust and heat, to the absence of urban conveniences, to the particular demands of an ashram-influenced campus where khadi was worn and evening prayers were attended.

The hospital was finding its rhythm. Patients arrived from surrounding villages with conditions that reflected the full weight of rural poverty and neglect. Courses needed to be structured, hostels set up, university affiliations secured, a culture of learning built from almost nothing.

Singh met each challenge without drama. He walked through half-built corridors, checked classrooms still smelling of fresh paint, sat with young faculty under neem trees to discuss syllabi. He drafted letters to government officials and university administrators, navigated the bureaucratic requirements of affiliation, and ensured the academic calendar ran on time. He was simultaneously Head of the Department of Physiology — teaching, guiding students, maintaining the research standards he had spent a career establishing — and the administrative anchor of the entire institution.

His most significant academic contribution was structural: he championed and helped design a two-year postgraduate programme in Community Medicine, ensuring that MGIMS graduated doctors who understood healthcare not merely as clinical treatment but as service to communities. It was a vision entirely consonant with Dr. Nayar's founding philosophy, and Singh gave it academic rigour and institutional form.

His salary was ₹1,710 per month, with a principal's allowance of ₹50. He never mentioned it.

There was another dimension to Dr. Singh that those who knew him in Sevagram remember with particular warmth.

He had been trained in Indian classical music since childhood. His instrument was the harmonium. In the evenings, when the day's clinical and academic work was done, students and faculty gathered in the ashram-style campus. Voices rose in bhajans — the devotional songs that had been part of ashram life since Gandhi's time.

In their midst, seated cross-legged on the floor, turban neat, fingers moving effortlessly across the keys, was the Principal. He led them in Vaishnav Jan To — Gandhi's favourite hymn, the one that describes the truly virtuous person as one who feels others' pain as their own. It was a sight that stayed with every student who witnessed it. A senior scientist, a man of international academic standing, a former army officer — sitting on the floor, playing music with his students, in a village in Vidarbha.

It said something essential about the institution he was helping to build, and about the man himself.

The campus in those early years was, as one who was there described it, a mosaic of many Indias. Banias and Brahmins, Dalits and Thakurs, Sikhs, Punjabis, Bengalis, and Marathas walked its shaded paths. Language, caste, and region — the usual fault lines of Indian institutional life — gave way here to the quiet solidarity of shared purpose. Harmony was not an aspiration. It was daily lived experience. Singh embodied it and quietly enforced it, not through policy but through his own person.

He retired as Principal in August 1974, handing over an institution that had found its footing. In 1975, his scholarly restlessness took him to Nigeria, where he joined A.B.U. Zaria as a visiting professor. When he applied for a professorship at the University of Ilorin, Dr. Sushila Nayar wrote him a letter of recommendation. It is worth reading in full for what it reveals — not just about Singh, but about how she assessed the people who had built something with her:

"Dr. I.D. Singh is an upright man of honesty, integrity, and ability. His conduct was always above board. He is an outstanding teacher whose research has received international recognition. He played a crucial role in establishing this institution, ensuring the primacy of community medicine and rural services. He is an able administrator and a fine human being."

She was not given to effusive praise. That letter, in its restraint and precision, was the highest endorsement she offered.

His wife came from Jhelum, now in Pakistan. His son settled in the United Kingdom as a physician. His younger daughter was admitted to MGIMS and later moved to Srinagar, where she completed her MBBS.

Dr. Ishar Dayal Singh came to Sevagram as a man of science — a decorated researcher, an experienced teacher, a former soldier. He left as something the institution needed more urgently than any of those things: its first steady hand, the person who had held the building together while it was still deciding what it wanted to be.The students who gathered around him in the evenings, listening to the harmonium fill the Vidarbha night with Vaishnav Jan To, were learning medicine. They were also, without quite knowing it, learning what kind of doctors they were meant to become.

Professor & Head of Pharmacology · Principal · Forty Years at Sevagram · The Man Who Found the Place Where He Belonged

Twenty-five years after teaching their first pharmacology class, the 1970 batch of MGIMS invited Dr. M.L. Sharma to teach them again. He accepted. He was in his late seventies. His scalp hair was meticulously dyed, as it always had been. He stepped into the familiar classroom, now filled with former students and their families — the same people who had sat in those seats as nervous first-years, now doctors themselves, some of them senior enough to have students of their own. It was as if no time had intervened. The applause, as always, was thunderous.

This is a small story, but it contains the essential facts. A man who taught pharmacology at MGIMS for four decades was remembered well enough, and loved enough, that his former students wanted — decades later, with their own children present — to be in his classroom one more time. Not to honour him from a distance, not to give him a plaque, but to sit in the seats and hear him teach again. The invitation was itself a form of tribute: the highest one available, the one that said we want more of what you gave us.

"My class is an orchestra," he used to say, "and I just make sure everyone plays their part."

Mohan Lal Sharma was born on July 12, 1929, in Barwani, a town in Madhya Pradesh on the banks of the Narmada. His father was an Ayurveda physician — a household immersed in the logic of remedies and their relationship to the body's functioning, an early apprenticeship in thinking about how substances change the human condition. He graduated from Victoria High School in Barwani in 1947, distinguished in Mathematics and Chemistry.

In 1949, India had twenty-eight medical colleges. GMC Nagpur was the only one in central India, and he entered it at a time when Indian medical training was still finding its modern shape. He earned his MBBS in 1954, and it was during these years that Pharmacology asserted its claim on him — the discipline that examined not what was wrong with the body but what could be done about it, the science of mechanism and intervention, of how drugs acted at the cellular level and what they produced at the clinical level. He completed his MD in Pharmacology in 1958 under senior faculty at GMC, learning a discipline that was itself still developing its research identity.

His teaching career began during his postgraduate years and continued through a lectureship and then a Readership at GMC Nagpur. By 1970, he was forty-one years old, experienced, well-regarded, and formed in his understanding of what pharmacology education could be. That year, the Government of Maharashtra deputed him to Sevagram.

He arrived at MGIMS on December 24, 1970 — Christmas Eve — joining a founding group of faculty who were building an institution that was barely twelve months old. Around him were Dr. I.D. Singh in Physiology, Dr. B.V. Deshkar, Dr. K.N. Ingley, Dr. R.V. Agrawal, Dr. B.C. Harinath, and others — a collection of people who had agreed, for various reasons, to trade the established corridors of Nagpur for the dust and ambition of a Gandhian village. His departmental colleague Dr. M.D. Khapre would become the partnership that built Pharmacology at MGIMS. Their immediate task was teaching sixty first-year students — half from Maharashtra, the classroom a mix of Marathi, Hindi, and Punjabi speakers, all encountering medical pharmacology for the first time. Dr. Sharma and Dr. Khapre were the department's all-rounders: batting, bowling, fielding at every position, no task too small, no undertaking too large.

Dr. V.K. Gupta, who studied Pharmacology under him, tried to explain what it was like: "He made it stick. It wasn't just lectures. It was a show — funny, sharp, and always practical. A joke here, a story there, and suddenly, you understood. 'Forget memorizing,' he'd say, 'think practical.' He believed in showing us, not just telling us. Dogs, frogs — he brought the lab to life."

He did bring the lab to life. He conducted experiments with dogs and frogs — the standard animal pharmacology of that era — and made the mechanisms visible rather than merely describable. He published research in the British Journal of Pharmacology on adrenaline receptors and in studies involving pigeons — doing genuine science in a rural medical college, contributing to a literature that extended beyond MGIMS's walls.

His teaching method was deliberate. He understood that fear of a difficult subject was the first obstacle and that humour was not a distraction from learning but a dissolvent of the anxiety that prevented it. "People ask me how I teach," he said. "Honestly, it's as much about me learning as about them. You can't take yourself too seriously. Don't put yourself on a pedestal. A few jokes, even if they're on me, loosen things up. Shows them you're human, not some perfect figure with your own little quirks."

This was not false modesty. It was a considered pedagogy, applied for four decades without variation. The mock seriousness, the sudden infectious laughter, the shift between gravity and playfulness — these were how he kept sixty students in the same room with a difficult subject and left them understanding it. He held special sessions before examinations not to cover additional material but to address anxiety — to sit with frightened students and rebuild their confidence before the moment of testing.

Holi in Sevagram in the 1970s and 1980s carried a particular meaning: Dr. Sharma's jokes. He sat cross-legged on the ground while students drenched him in colour and spun stories that had the entire campus roaring. The teacher and the festival merged into a single composite memory that former students still carry decades later — the colours, his voice, the quality of the laughter, which was the laughter of people in the presence of someone who made them feel fully at ease.

From 1970 to 1974, he served as Vice Principal. From 1974 to 1984, he was Principal — taking over from Dr. I.D. Singh and leading MGIMS through a decade of consolidation, when the institution was moving from its improvised founding energy into a more established shape. He was also Founder Principal of Amravati Medical College. As Principal, his office was a place where grievances were received with humour and empathy. He understood when mischief needed to be checked, when leeway could be extended, when something was better left to resolve itself. He put people at ease without abandoning authority — a combination that is rarer than it sounds and that he exercised without apparent effort across a decade of leadership.

His relationship with Dr. Sushila Nayar was one of deep mutual respect expressed in the daily, physical language of conduct rather than declaration. He never walked beside her — always a step behind, arms folded behind his back, matching her pace with deliberate slowness. An unspoken acknowledgement of her stature, sustained not as ceremony but as genuine feeling, repeated every time they walked together across the campus for decades. She called on him to recite the Sunderkand — the chapter of the Ramayana celebrating Hanuman's devotion and strength — and he performed all the rituals with the meticulousness of a seasoned Brahmin: the pooja, the havan, the distribution of prasad.

He spent forty years on the MGIMS campus in rented housing. He never purchased a flat, built a bungalow, bought a scooter, owned a car, or boarded a plane. He said this not with the performance of virtue but with a quiet pride in the consistency between his stated values and his actual conduct. "My students are my true wealth," he said. "I've taught generations, and they're my biggest contribution to the college and to the world. I didn't practice medicine for money or obligation, but because I loved it."

He wore simple khadi bush shirts, trousers, and sandals. His hair was carefully dyed — a vanity he never apologised for and which the campus found charming rather than incongruous, the one concession to appearance in an otherwise entirely unadorned life. His eyes were described by those who knew him as the most expressive feature: compassionate, warm, the part of him that communicated before he spoke.

In 2009, he suffered a severe heart attack requiring bypass surgery in Hyderabad. The recovery was difficult. He returned to MGIMS and continued contributing. Then his wife died in 2012. Her loss was the heavier blow. Loneliness came, and health steadily declined. He chose to spend his final years at home in Sevagram, surrounded by what was familiar — the campus, the lanes he had walked for four decades, the institution he had helped build.

He died on August 10, 2015, in his Sevagram home. He is predeceased by his wife and by his son Dinesh, who had been in the MGIMS 1972 batch. He is survived by his son Satish, Professor of Pathology at MGIMS, and grandsons Pavan and Vijay, both MGIMS alumni — the pharmacologist's family embedded in the institution across three generations.

He had never left Sevagram in any meaningful sense. That was, perhaps, the truest thing that could be said about him: he had found the place where he belonged and stayed in it, completely, for forty years.

First Dean of MGIMS · Principal · Professor of Physiology · The Man Who Gave the Institution Its Administrative Spine

Anyone who walked into Dr. Kharak Singh Sachdeva's office at MGIMS for the first time learned quickly that the first thirty seconds were the most important. He was a tall man, traditionally turbaned, salt-and-pepper beard, thick glasses behind which sat eyes that were large, piercing, and entirely without social lubrication. He would scan the visitor from head to toe, unhurried, before asking in a quiet but entirely firm voice: "Why have you come?"

It was not hostility. It was discipline expressed as a greeting — the manner of a man who had spent four decades in institutions and had no patience for time wasted or purposes unstated. Those who knew what they wanted got what they came for. Those who didn't generally left without it.

He was fifty-eight years old when he arrived in Sevagram in 1983. He had already retired as Director of Medical Education and Research for Punjab. He had founded a medical college, led departments, shaped curricula, and received a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to Vanderbilt University in Nashville for postdoctoral research. He had, by any reckoning, done enough. He came anyway.

Sachdeva received his early medical education at the Sikh National College in Lahore and his MBBS from Glancy Medical College — now Government Medical College — in Amritsar. He joined the faculty there in 1950, the same year he married Bhupinder Kaur, a woman outside the medical profession who would stand steadily beside him through every transition his restless career would bring.

He spent eighteen years as Professor and Head of Physiology in Amritsar — a tenure that established his reputation as both an academician and an administrator. He ran the Boys' Hostel for five years, served as principal of the medical college for three, and by the time the Punjab government appointed him Director of Research and Medical Education, he had touched nearly every aspect of institutional life that a medical college contained.

In 1962, the Rockefeller Foundation scholarship took him to Vanderbilt University, where he spent two years in postdoctoral research. It was the kind of exposure that sharpened what was already sharp — bringing back not just new knowledge but the broader perspective of someone who had seen how medical education was conceived and delivered elsewhere. He returned to Punjab and continued building.

His most significant act of institution-building before Sevagram was the founding of Faridkot Medical College, where he served as principal and helped construct a new institution from the ground up. It was a role he would replicate, in a different register, at MGIMS.

He came to Sevagram in 1983 not as a candidate for leadership but as an emeritus professor of Physiology and warden of the Boys' Hostel — a quiet advisory role, appropriate for a man of his age and standing who had earned the right to work at a gentler pace. Dr. Sushila Nayar had other ideas.

On August 1, 1983, he was appointed Additional Professor of Physiology and Principal of MGIMS, stepping into the role previously held by Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao. How the transition from hostel warden to principal occurred remained, to those around him, somewhat mysterious — one of those institutional evolutions that seems inevitable only in retrospect. He accepted the responsibility as he accepted everything: without drama, with steady resolve.

For nearly fifteen years, MGIMS had functioned without a Dean — only a Principal. The absence of the post was an unusual gap in the institutional structure of a medical college. In 1984, the management committee resolved to fill it. On February 8, Dr. Sachdeva appeared before a selection board that included Dr. Sushila Nayar, Dr. L.P. Agarwal of AIIMS, the Vice Chancellor of Nagpur University, the Director of Medical Education and Research, and the Director General of Health Services, New Delhi. He was the sole candidate. Six days later, on February 14, 1984, he became the first Dean of MGIMS.

He led the institution until April 3, 1990 — six years during which MGIMS consolidated what the founding decade had built and began preparing for what would come next. Despite his background in Physiology, he did not teach during this period. He gave himself entirely to administration, which was perhaps the truest expression of where his gifts lay.

His style of leadership was nothing like his predecessor Dr. M.L. Sharma's — whose warmth and humor made his office a place of easy conversation, where students came not just with problems but for company. Sachdeva maintained a strict, almost military-like distance. He was reserved, spoke rarely, kept professional boundaries firm. He never gossiped. He never sought camaraderie. He was often perceived as a loner by those who did not know him well, and as someone of formidable authority by those who did.

What he upheld, rigorously, were the founding principles of the institution. Khadi was worn on campus — by students, faculty, staff — and he led by example. Alcohol and non-vegetarian food remained absent from the premises. He attended the Friday all-religion prayer without fail, sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening intently as verses from Guru Nanak's teachings were recited alongside passages from other traditions. For Sachdeva, Dr. Sushila Nayar's requests were not requests. They were orders. His official circulars invariably opened with the phrase: As ordered by the competent authority. It was not obsequiousness — it was the expression of a man who had decided, upon arriving, that the institution's vision was worth his complete fidelity.

He lived in MLK Colony, a short walk from his office, and rarely used official vehicles. He moved slowly, always alone, acknowledging those he passed with a graceful nod. His life outside the office was marked by the same simplicity that governed it.

He was not an easy man to know, and did not particularly wish to be. Students found his office intimidating and his manner impenetrable. Faculty respected him without always finding him accessible. He was not the kind of dean who remembered birthdays or asked after families or created the warmth that makes institutional life feel like community.

What he created instead was something rarer and in its own way more valuable: an absolute consistency. Everyone knew where they stood. The rules were clear. The expectations were stated once. He did not need to repeat himself.

Those who came to him knowing what they wanted — a decision, a resource, a resolution — found him efficient, fair, and entirely free of the political maneuvering that bedevils institutional administration. He had no personal agenda beyond the institution's functioning. He wanted it to run well, to uphold its principles, and to be ready for whatever came next. By the time he handed the reins to Dr. M.L. Sharma on April 3, 1990, it was.

He and Bhupinder Kaur moved to the United States after leaving MGIMS — first Philadelphia, then Long Island, where a quieter chapter of life opened. Gardening. Travel. Family. The grandsons that six decades of institutional work had been conducted alongside, invisibly, as they grew.

He died at his home in the United States on November 11, 2012, surrounded by his family. Bhupinder Kaur survived him. Their three daughters — Navjeet, Manjeet, and Kulveen — and their families were his inheritance.

He had come to Sevagram at fifty-eight, when most men in his position were managing their decline, and spent six years building the administrative foundation that a young institution needed to stand securely. He asked for nothing in return except that the work be done properly. In an institution built by people who gave more than was asked of them, Kharak Singh Sachdeva was entirely characteristic — and entirely himself.

Professor & Head of Anatomy · Literary Critic · Playwright · Painter · The Anatomist Who Wrote About the Gita at 3am

At three in the morning, when Sevagram was entirely still, Dr. Govind Manohar Indurkar would sit at his desk and write about the Bhagavad Gita.

The house was quiet, the grandchildren asleep, the campus outside dark and unhurried. In those hours — before the dissection hall, before the students, before the day's demands assembled themselves — he found the stillness he needed for reflection. He had been waking this early for years, long before the Gita writing began. It was simply how he was constituted: a man who needed the predawn hours to think, to read, to be alone with what mattered to him most.

What mattered to him, it turned out, was a great deal. Human anatomy, certainly — he had spent a lifetime in its precise service. But also Kalidasa's poetry, Sanskrit scholarship, Marathi theatre, classical music, the flute, painting, anatomical illustration, and the philosophical teachings of the Gita which he eventually rendered into three books in Marathi, one written especially for young readers. He was an anatomist who could write literary criticism. A scientist who directed plays. A professor who painted murals.

He wore none of it for effect. He wore it all as naturally as he wore his simple white khadi kurta.

Govind Manohar Indurkar was born on June 12, 1928, in Nagpur, into an orthodox middle-class Brahmin family. His father worked for the Indian Railways and was posted to Adra, a railway colony in the Purulia district of West Bengal, where young Govind spent his early childhood. When financial pressures and the desire to give him a traditionally Maharashtrian upbringing converged, he was sent back to Nagpur to live with his grandfather and step-uncle. He completed his schooling at New English High School, passing matriculation with distinction.

His maternal grandfather — a schoolteacher of quiet discipline and intellectual rigour — was the formative influence of his childhood. The values he absorbed from that relationship — the steady daily routine, the primacy of learning, the idea that teaching was a form of service — stayed with him for eighty-three years.

He began medical studies at Mayo Hospital, then Robertson Medical College, now Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, in Nagpur, earning his LMP in 1949. Eager to advance and support his family, he joined the first batch of the shorter MBBS course at Government Medical College, Nagpur, completing his MBBS in 1955. He worked as an MMS Class II officer at a primary health centre in Amravati district, as a Medical Officer at Nagpur Central Jail, and ran a private clinic — accumulating the early-career variety that characterised his generation before he found his true direction.

That direction was anatomy. He returned to GMC Nagpur and in 1963, under the guidance of Dr. D.K. Kadasne, completed his MS in Anatomy. His thesis examined the spatial arrangement of the hepatic artery, bile duct, and portal vein within the liver — meticulous, structural, characteristically precise. He began teaching as a Lecturer in Anatomy at GMC Nagpur in 1961, was transferred to the newly opened GMC Aurangabad in 1963–64, and became a Reader in 1968.

In 1969, the Government of Maharashtra deputed Dr. Indurkar to the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram — one of several faculty members sent to help establish what was to become India's first rural medical college. He arrived as a Reader in Anatomy in July 1969, two months before the first batch of medical students, and helped build the department from the ground up.

The colleague he worked alongside most closely in those early years was Dr. M.G. Kane, the first Professor and Head of Anatomy. They could not have been more different. Dr. Kane was strict, disciplined, and exacting — a man who wore his standards on his sleeve and did not suffer fools. Dr. Indurkar was quiet, humble, and gentle — a warm presence who made students feel safe enough to be confused without shame. Their temperamental contrast almost certainly served the department well: the rigour and the warmth, in combination, producing the balance that a new institution needs to take root.

What Dr. Indurkar brought that no other faculty member could replicate was an artist's eye applied to a scientist's subject. He created an impressive collection of surgically carved specimens and worked with the local artist Gajanan Ambulkar to produce anatomical murals based on Gray's Anatomy for the walls of the dissection hall. These murals — large, detailed, technically accurate, aesthetically considered — transformed a functional space into something more. Students memorising the brachial plexus or the branches of the aorta did so under the gaze of illustrations that had been made with care, not merely reproduced from a textbook. It was Dr. Indurkar's way of saying that the human body was worth looking at beautifully, not just correctly.

He left MGIMS when his deputation ended in August 1973 and returned to government service — posted through GMC Aurangabad, then Pune, Ambajogai, and Solapur, finally serving his last government appointment at GMC Nagpur before retiring in June 1986.

He was fifty-eight when he retired from government service. Within a month, he was back in Sevagram.

In July 1986, he joined MGIMS as Professor and Head of the Anatomy Department — his second tenure at the institution, seventeen years after his first. Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao was still present as Emeritus Professor, Mr. J. Anbalagan served as Reader, and Mrs. R.R. Fulzele as Lecturer. He led the department for two years, steadily transferring responsibility to the younger generation before passing the headship to Mr. Anbalagan in June 1988.

He was quieter this time, more observer than driver. He had supervised PhD scholars including Dr. Palikundwar and Dr. Khanzode, contributed to doctoral work across institutions, and now watched his students take the reins. The department he had helped found in 1969 was now eighteen years old and producing its own researchers. He had seen it grow from nothing to this. It was enough.

In 1972, during his first tenure at MGIMS, he contributed an eight-page essay to Sushruta, the college's annual magazine. The essay was titled Meghadutatil Kavya-Saundarya — The Poetic Beauty of Meghaduta. It was a sustained literary-critical engagement with Kalidasa's poem, quoting extensively from the Sanskrit, offering translations and interpretations that read not like an academic exercise but like the work of someone who had lived with the text for years and found in it a genuine emotional home.

It surprised his colleagues. How could a professor of anatomy — a man who spent his days in the dissection hall, working with cadavers and memorisation charts and blackboard diagrams — write with this literary grace?

The answer, in retrospect, was simple: he had always been both things. He wrote essays for college publications throughout his career, including a memorable contribution to the MGIMS batch of 1969–70 souvenir. He wrote a critical appreciation of Shanta Shelke's Varsha Nayika. He contributed to a government project producing medical anatomy textbooks in Marathi. He translated Ratnakar Matkari's play Eka Olya Raatri into Hindi as Ek Bhigi Bhigi Si Raat. He directed Marathi plays for college and public events. He was a classical singer and a flute player.

He was fluent in Marathi, Sanskrit, Hindi, English, and Bengali. Marathi remained closest to his heart — the language in which he wrote his three books on the Gita, the language of his literary essays, the tongue of his maternal grandfather's household. The Gita books occupied his predawn hours for years, the third written specifically to make the text accessible to young readers.

There is a particular kind of person who moves with equal fluency between the rigour of science and the beauty of verse, between dissection and devotion, between structure and soul. They are rare. Dr. Indurkar was one of them, and the combination made him a richer teacher than either faculty alone could have produced.

After his second departure from MGIMS in 1988, he taught at Bijapur Medical College in Karnataka for about a year, then at Panjabrao Deshmukh Medical College in Amravati for two years, then at NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences in Nagpur. He stepped back from formal teaching around 1994–95, when the college shifted to a distant campus and his deteriorating vision and hearing made the travel unmanageable alone.

He did not stop teaching. He offered informal lessons at home to a few chosen students, free of charge, well into his later years. The last classroom was his own house. The students sat where his grandchildren sat. The textbooks were the same ones he had carried for forty years.

In June 2011, he was diagnosed with advanced metastatic cancer. He chose not to pursue aggressive treatment — a decision entirely consistent with the values that had guided his life. He died peacefully on August 31, 2011, the day before Ganesh Chaturthi. He was eighty-three.

He is survived by his wife Sushila, whom he married in 1952, their five children — three daughters, Sunanda, Vasanti, and the late Smita, and two sons — and his younger son Shrikant, who studied at MGIMS in the 1983 batch, sitting in the department his father had helped found fourteen years before he arrived.

Professor & Head of Anatomy · Discoverer of the Rao & Rao Artery · The Professor Who Asked If You Had Eaten Breakfast

He addressed every student as Babu.

It was a Telugu term of affection — warm, familial, entirely at odds with the chilly formality that anatomy departments typically maintained. Before an examination, Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao would move through the hall asking each student individually whether they had eaten breakfast. He was short and slim, benign in manner, approachable despite his seniority. Students who had braced themselves for the severity of an anatomy professor found instead someone who seemed genuinely interested in whether they had slept, eaten, and arrived without too much anxiety.

He was not what they expected. He was considerably better.

Gopalakrishna Raghavendra Krishna Hari Rao was born on September 24, 1920. He earned his MBBS in 1949 and an MSc from Madras University in 1960 — at a time when a formal MS in Anatomy did not yet exist, which meant he found the nearest available qualification and worked within its constraints. He began teaching as a Demonstrator at Guntur Medical College in October 1950, and rose steadily — Tutor in 1953, Lecturer in 1958, Professor and Head in January 1962. Each promotion added a little more reserve to his manner, a little more measured weight to his words, as though responsibility had to be carried with the precision of the discipline he taught.

He did not merely teach anatomy. Alongside his colleague Dr. Vissa Ramachandra Rao at Rangaraya Medical College in Kakinada, he discovered a previously unrecorded blood vessel in the human body. The vessel was named the Rao & Rao Artery. Their paper — Dorso-Epithrochlearis Brachii — was published in the Journal of the Anatomical Society of India in 1956 and earned an invitation from the Royal College. It was the kind of contribution that settles a career's reputation in a discipline: quiet, precise, enduring.

By the time he retired from government service in Andhra Pradesh on September 30, 1975, he had published twenty-two research papers, served as Vice President of the Anatomical Society of India from 1971 to 1972, and in 1963 had been sent to the United States as a visiting professor on a USAID fellowship. He had supervised postgraduate theses, shaped a department for thirteen years, and earned a standing in Indian anatomical science that few of his contemporaries matched.

Retirement did not suit him. He took up a temporary post at Rangaraya Medical College in Kakinada. Then, in December 1976, he saw an advertisement in The Indian Express for a Professor of Anatomy at MGIMS, Sevagram. He was fifty-six years old. He applied.

The interview was held in Sevagram on January 12, 1977. Dr. M.L. Sharma, the Principal, informed him — almost apologetically — that the selection committee had recommended another candidate, placing Dr. Hari Rao on the waiting list. The chosen candidate declined the offer for personal reasons. The opportunity circled back. He was offered the post at ₹1,600 per month. His telegram of acceptance was characteristically brief: Will join the first week of July. On July 7, 1977, he arrived in Sevagram — steady, dependable, and at fifty-eight, just getting started.

The department he joined was seven years old. It had been shaped successively by Dr. M.G. Kane, the first professor and head, followed by Dr. D.T. Kolte, Dr. M.S. Parthasarathy, and Dr. G.M. Indurkar. The teaching staff included Mrs. P.R. Agarwal and Mrs. Belsare. It was a small department serving a medical college still in its first decade, with all the resource constraints that implied — persistent shortage of cadavers, no radiological imaging, no modern teaching technology. Anatomy education meant the dissection hall, the blackboard, and the text: Gray's, Sahana, Kadasne, Cunningham. Origins, insertions, nerve supplies, memorised with the thoroughness that the examination required.

In this environment, Dr. Hari Rao's teaching style stood apart from his predecessors. Where Dr. Parthasarathy had been strict and exacting — a man of discipline who kept the department in a state of brisk attentiveness — Dr. Hari Rao was something different. He brought anatomy to life not through authority but through genuine enthusiasm for the subject, illustrated teaching, and a quality of human warmth that made the dissection hall less forbidding. He guided his students through the body's intricacies with the patience of someone who had been doing this for thirty years and found it no less interesting than when he began.

He guided the PhD research of Mr. J. Anbalagan on the comparative anatomy of the pituitary gland — a study of structural variations across species, focusing on the onset of foetal pituitary function through the appearance of secretory granules in pituitary cells. It was the kind of research that requires a supervisor with both specialist depth and genuine investment in a student's development. Dr. Hari Rao provided both.

Under Nagpur University regulations and Kasturba Health Society rules, faculty retired at sixty. Dr. Hari Rao reached that age in September 1980. The university and society recognised what they had, and granted annual extensions. He continued as Emeritus Professor, receiving a nominal honorarium of ₹1,000 per year, teaching and supervising with the same engagement he had brought on his first day. MGIMS retained him until he was sixty-seven — a seven-year extension that reflected both institutional flexibility and the simple fact that good teachers are not easily replaced.

In July 1985, he found himself no longer Head of Department and unsettled by the requirement that all his correspondence to the Dean be routed through the new head. It was not, he reasoned carefully, a question of pride. It was a question of seniority — thirty-four years in service, twenty-four as a department head. The arrangement seemed impractical. He expressed a wish to be relieved.

Then Dr. Sushil Kumar Saxena, who had briefly joined the department, left in February 1986 — and Dr. Hari Rao found himself back in charge, as though the department could not quite release him and he could not quite release it.

By July 4, 1987, he knew the chapter was ending. He was sixty-seven, and the time had come to return to Guntur, where he had already built a home. On July 22, he wrote to Manimala Chaudhary — not an official resignation letter but something more personal, the letter of a man whose professional life and emotional life had become inseparable.

"We feel very sad. We miss you, dear Mithu and Behenji. Not a day passed in Sevagram without meeting and greeting each other. Such love, bond, and affection — we always enjoyed it. We also miss our good neighbors and friends."

Dr. Sushila Nayar wrote back on July 20 — a letter warm with the understanding of inevitable transitions, expressing wishes that he would bring his children to visit Sevagram, asking after his daughter Asha, passing on greetings from P. Nayar Behenji and Manimala Behenji.

These letters tell you something important about what MGIMS was, in those years, for the people who worked there. It was not merely an institution they were employed by. It was a community they belonged to — one that generated the kind of friendships, the daily encounters and small rituals of collegial life, that leave a real absence when they end. Dr. Hari Rao's sadness on leaving was not sentiment. It was the accurate recognition of what he was giving up.

He had lived in Guru Nanak Colony, next door to Dr. Anant Ranade and near others who had been his neighbours for a decade. He had walked the same lanes, attended the same prayers, shared the same modest institutional life that Sevagram offered. For ten years, it had been home.

He returned to Guntur, settled into the house he had prepared for this chapter, and lived the quieter life that retirement in one's hometown allows. He died in 2002. The Rao & Rao Artery — the blood vessel he and Dr. Ramachandra Rao had identified and named nearly fifty years earlier — remains in the anatomical literature, the most durable of his many contributions to a discipline he served with precision, dedication, and the particular warmth of a man who always asked his students whether they had eaten breakfast.

Reader in of Anatomy · MGIMS · The Teacher Who Made the Subject Navigable

Twice in her life, a man decided what she would do with it.

The first time, her father — an architect who believed engineering was unsuitable for women — pointed her toward medicine. She complied without protest. The second time, her husband — a surgeon who felt clinical work would be too demanding for a woman — steered her away from anaesthesia toward anatomy. She complied again.

What is remarkable is not the compliance. That was the world she lived in, the one most women of her generation navigated without the vocabulary to name what was happening. What is remarkable is what she built inside the boundaries others drew. She arrived at MGIMS in 1975 with only an MBBS, no postgraduate qualification, no prior experience in anatomy. She left in 1983 as a Reader, with an MS earned mid-career while still teaching, having shaped seven batches of medical students — nearly 450 young doctors — in a discipline she had not chosen but had made entirely her own.

Meena Mhatre was born on September 24, 1941, in Murud Janjira, a coastal town in Maharashtra known for its formidable island fort rising from the sea. Her early years were spent in Palghar, then Mumbai, where she attended Parle Tilak Vidyalaya — known for its strict discipline — and studied Inter Science at Parle College under Bombay University.

She was a bright student who prepared simultaneously for the Group A mathematics path and the Group B biology path, keeping her options open. Her father closed one of them. She took the other and in 1962 secured admission to Topiwala National Medical College in Bombay, graduating in April 1967. A six-month house job at National Hospital followed, then rotations at G.T. Hospital, then three years as a Medical Officer with the Bombay Municipal Corporation's Health Department — the steady, unglamorous work of urban public health in a city that never slowed down.

In 1971, she married Dr. Ramdas Belsare. When he joined the Surgery Department at MGIMS, she followed him to Sevagram — a world away from Bombay in every respect that mattered. She took up a house job in anaesthesia, found her footing in the operation theatre, and seemed to be settling into clinical work when her husband suggested otherwise. She transitioned to Anatomy.

She joined the Anatomy department on July 5, 1975, appointed Lecturer on the strength of an MBBS alone — an appointment that required both Dr. Sushila Nayar's willingness to see potential where credentials were thin, and Meena Belsare's willingness to prove it warranted.

The department she entered was a formidable place. Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao, Dr. Kolte, Dr. Kane, Dr. Parthasarathy — these were academics of strong personalities and strong opinions, who ran the dissection hall with an exacting discipline. No student entered without a proper dissection kit and a copy of Cunningham's anatomy text. Hair neatly trimmed, faces clean-shaven, white khadi aprons spotless, shoes polished. The atmosphere was one of rigorous, almost military, academic precision.

Among these more flamboyant figures — teachers who commanded attention through oratory, theatrics, and sheer force of presence — Meena Belsare found a different register entirely. She was quiet, unobtrusive, methodical. She did not perform anatomy. She taught it. Where her colleagues swept students along on the current of a powerful personality, she made the subject itself navigable — a map that could be read without fear, bone by bone, pathway by pathway, in the steady company of someone who would not make them feel foolish for not yet knowing their way.

"The students back then were a different breed," she recalled years later. "Disciplined, diligent, utterly focused. We lived and breathed anatomy — Gray's, Sahana, Kadasne, Cunningham. Page by page, we etched its intricacies into young minds."

She pursued her MS in Anatomy while teaching, completing it in 1979 under the guidance of Dr. Hari Rao. Her thesis examined the morphology of motor plates in fast and slow muscle fibres across several species — a quietly meticulous piece of research entirely characteristic of the woman. On November 5, 1981, she was promoted to Reader. She had arrived without a postgraduate degree and climbed the academic ladder through teaching, research, and persistent competence.

Those who were her students remember not just what she taught but how she looked teaching it. A prominent bindi on her forehead. A simple khadi sari. A mangalsutra. A single bangle. Modest chappals. She was the embodiment of the Sevagram aesthetic — simplicity worn without ideology, as a natural expression of who she was.

She lived in MLK Colony, a short walk from the department. She was so thoroughly embedded in the rhythms of the campus that to encounter her anywhere felt like encountering the institution itself — unhurried, purposeful, entirely without pretension.

Her husband Dr. Ramdas Belsare presented a striking contrast: broad-shouldered, confident, carrying the unmistakable authority of a senior surgeon. She was petite, soft-spoken, effortlessly self-effacing. They were not opposites so much as different expressions of the same dedicated impulse — one outward and declarative, the other inward and steady.

Arrogance never found a home in her. She sought no recognition, held no interest in institutional power, did not aspire to be larger than what the work required. Her world was the dissection hall, the first-year student standing before a cadaver for the first time, the particular combination of anxiety and curiosity that anatomy produces in young doctors who have not yet made peace with the fact of mortality. She met them there, in that combination, and helped them through it.

When Dr. Ramdas Belsare decided to leave MGIMS and open a private practice in Amravati, she followed him. On February 20, 1983, she submitted her resignation. Three months later, she left Sevagram.

It was the third time the shape of her professional life was determined by someone else's decision. She accepted it with the same grace she had brought to the previous two. She had, by then, learned that the geography of a career matters less than the quality of work done within it. She had taught nearly 450 students in eight years. She had earned her postgraduate degree mid-career. She had risen from Lecturer to Reader. Whatever Amravati held, she had established what she was capable of.

The transition was not smooth. At Panjabrao Deshmukh Medical College in Amravati, she began again as a Lecturer — a step backward in title, a wound that any academic would feel. The recognition came eventually. She was reinstated as Reader, then became Professor, then Head of Department, then Dean — retiring in 1999 having reached, through a longer and more circuitous route, the seniority she had earned.

Dr. Ramdas Belsare developed Parkinson's disease and dementia in his later years. She cared for him through the long decline until his death on May 26, 2019. Their three children took different paths: their elder daughter Sharmishtha became an ENT specialist in Amravati; their son Chaitanya earned a PhD in fruit science; and their younger daughter Sukanya, born in Sevagram, trained as a computer engineer before finding her calling as a spiritual teacher in San Francisco. Something of the quiet inward quality her mother embodied seemed to pass, in a different form, to the youngest.

In the memory of the students she taught — the batches of 1975 through 1982, now middle-aged doctors spread across the country — Dr. Meena Belsare occupies a particular kind of space. Not the legendary teacher whose lectures electrify a lecture hall. The other kind: the one whose patient, unhurried presence in the dissection hall made the subject feel manageable, whose quiet confidence in the student's ability was itself a form of teaching, and whose lessons — spoken in gentle tones, over cadavers and textbooks, in a dusty department in a village in Vidarbha — linger long after the words have faded.

One evening around half past nine, the phone rang in Dr. S.K. Ghosh's quarters. The boys' hostel mess had run out of aloo sabzi. Without deliberation, he pulled on his kurta and dhoti and walked over. He cooked a fresh batch for twenty or thirty students himself, right there in the hostel kitchen. They stood watching, wide-eyed — this commanding professor, the man whose dissection hall presence made first-years straighten their spines involuntarily, standing over a pot of potatoes at ten in the evening because the boys needed to eat.

He told the story later with a smile. It was not, for him, a remarkable thing. It was simply what the situation required.

This quality — the complete absence of a gap between his public authority and his private generosity — was what those who knew Dr. Samit Kumar Ghosh most consistently described. He was fiery and exacting in the classroom, outspoken to the point of bluntness in meetings, capable of a temper that students found memorable. He was also the man who cooked for the hostel, adopted the stray dogs, watched the birds on Sunday mornings, and treated orderlies and artists and fellow professors as members of the same family. Both things were equally true. Neither cancelled the other.

Samit Kumar Ghosh was born on April 20, 1942, in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, moving to Kolkata as a boy when his father's medical career required it. He grew up in a small fishing village — an upbringing that gave him a naturalist's attentiveness to the world around him and a self-reliance that came from having to find his own way. His relationship with his father was strained, a chasm he described as difficult to span. He decided early that he would be a self-made man.

His academic record was not distinguished. Third division in HSC, second division in Inter Science. In 1960, he joined Calcutta National Medical College — India's oldest, founded in 1848 — and struggled there too, failing his Medicine practicals on the first attempt. He graduated, completed two years of house jobs in General Surgery, Orthopaedics, and Cardiac Surgery in Kolkata, and harboured ambitions of going to Britain for further training. The plan did not materialise. He pivoted.

In 1968, he enrolled in the MS Anatomy programme at Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi — a decision that would define the rest of his working life. He completed the degree in 1971, began as a Demonstrator, and moved to the University College of Medical Sciences in December 1976 as Lecturer. By 1986, he was a Reader. He had spent nearly two decades building a solid academic reputation, and the professorship he had earned by any measure of merit remained out of reach — institutional politics at UCMS held more sway than qualification. Year after year, the promotion slipped past him.

By 1990, Delhi had begun to feel suffocating.

Then a colleague — a Professor of Gynaecology who sensed his restlessness — sent him a postcard. The message was brief: You might think of shifting to Sevagram. It's a place you might like. The following day, as if in orchestrated confirmation, he saw an advertisement on the UCMS Dean's notice board. MGIMS was looking for a Professor of Anatomy.

He met Dr. Sushila Nayar at her Connaught Place office in Delhi. She listened, assessed, and urged him to apply. He interviewed in Sevagram against one other candidate. His name alone appeared on the appointment list.

He stepped off the train at Sevagram station into a quiet so complete it startled him. No rush, no exhaust, no urban noise. The air smelled of earth. Nights were dark, broken only by owls. Mornings brought birdsong. As he walked the ashram's dusty lanes and took in the hospital's whitewashed walls, he felt — unexpectedly, immediately — at home.

It was not the life he had been living. It was the life that suited him.

The Anatomy department he inherited in September 1990 was small: Dr. Anbalagan, who had been serving as acting head, Mrs. R.R. Fulzele, and Mrs. K. Padmawathy, who joined shortly after. The department had a modest research culture, some teaching infrastructure, and the accumulated foundation laid by Dr. Hari Rao and others who had preceded him. Dr. Ghosh set about transforming it with the focused energy of someone who had spent nineteen years waiting for a department to lead.

He brought teaching, research, and academic ambition to the forefront simultaneously. He worked with Gajanan Ambulkar — the artist who had collaborated with Dr. Indurkar on the dissection hall murals — to develop histological resources and museum specimens. He worked with Khan, the orderly who handled cadavers, with the same directness and respect he gave his academic colleagues. He guided Dr. Anbalagan through the completion of his PhD a year after arriving. Within three years, postgraduate seats in the department — previously unfilled — were occupied, largely by Bengali students whom he had personally contacted and encouraged to apply. Dissection tables that had sat idle were now in use. Research on animal models was underway.

His teaching was precise, demanding, and memorable. He preferred chalk and blackboard to PowerPoint — not from technophobia but from conviction that the act of drawing structures in real time, visible to students as they emerged, was pedagogically superior to the finished image on a slide. His Bengali-accented English became, for generations of MGIMS students, the voice in which they first understood the brachial plexus or the anatomy of the posterior triangle.

He was strict. Punctuality was non-negotiable. Standards in the dissection hall were absolute. Students stood up straighter when they heard his footsteps in the corridor. And yet — as those who moved past initial apprehension consistently discovered — beneath the demanding exterior was a teacher who genuinely wanted them to succeed and a person capable of unexpected warmth.

From 2000 to 2007, he served as Warden of the Boys' Hostel — a seven-year tenure, the longest of any warden in the institution's history. Unaware that a furnished warden's quarters existed within the hostel, he continued living in his own home and came to the hostel each evening for two hours: reviewing documents, checking mess accounts, meeting parents, addressing student complaints, and maintaining the kind of steady, engaged oversight that a residential institution requires from those nominally responsible for it. The aloo sabzi episode was characteristic.

His major organisational achievements included the 1994 national conference of the Anatomical Society of India — hosted in Sevagram with minimal resources, successful enough that the delegates remembered the rural hospitality long after they had forgotten the academic proceedings — and the 2002 All India Cytogenetic Conference, which helped establish the genetics laboratory that would become a lasting feature of the institution. He guided Dr. Indra Ingole through her MD and PhD degrees, established postgraduate programmes, and built a departmental culture that outlasted his own tenure.

He was also responsible, in a quieter way, for the institution of Durga Puja celebrations in Sevagram — helping organise the annual festival for the Bengali community that had grown around the medical college, clad always in his signature white kurta and dhoti, as much a cultural anchor as an academic one.

On Sunday mornings, he sat in his backyard and watched birds. He had a trained ear for them — knew species by their calls as readily as by their appearance, could hear the presence of birds that remained invisible in the canopy. He grew plants and kept fish. When two street dogs appeared near his quarters, he and his wife Laxmi took them in — Kali and Lali — feeding them, giving them freedom, eventually bringing them on a train journey from Sevagram to Kolkata. They stayed with the family until 2015.

His wife Laxmi, from Barasat in the Ganges delta, had taught Bangla at Union Academy Senior Secondary School in New Delhi for twenty-eight years before retiring in 1998. She spent her retirement years in Sevagram, where she became a beloved figure — warm, generous, devoted to the dogs and to the community around her. She battled diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease with the same grace she brought to everything. When the family left Sevagram in 2007, she carried Sevagram with her. She died in Kolkata on January 13, 2009.

In 1999, drawn by a fascination with Tagore's writings and their connection to Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, he traveled there and found in its pine forests and tea plantations a landscape that gave him a peace he described as permanent. He returned to it in memory.

He retired from MGIMS on December 22, 2007 — the same year Dr. Anbalagan left, the two departures marking the end of an era in the department they had built together. He moved to Kathmandu, joining Nepal Medical College as Professor and Head of Anatomy, where he taught for another twelve years. His career in anatomical science spanned five decades, from 1969 to 2019 — beginning in a Delhi demonstration room and ending in Nepal, with seventeen years in a Gandhian village at its centre.

His son Saurav — MBBS from Maulana Azad Medical College, MS and MCh in Oncosurgery from Tata Memorial Hospital — briefly lectured at MGIMS before becoming Professor and Head of Surgery at Kolkata Medical College. The son of an anatomy professor who had to leave Delhi to find a professorship became, in his own right, a professor in Kolkata. The arc had straightened.

Dr. Ghosh was, as those who worked alongside him said, impossible to overlook and impossible to summarise easily. The old oak tree metaphor — towering and commanding above, rooted deep in kindness below — captures something true. What it does not capture is the Sunday morning stillness in the backyard, the ear cocked for a bird call, the man who had spent a week making sure a national conference ran properly in a village without infrastructure, now entirely quiet, watching the trees.

When the 1985 batch of MGIMS alumni planned their twenty-fifth reunion, there was no debate about who should be brought back to Sevagram. They flew him in from Puducherry. Not a founding trustee, not a dean, not a hospital administrator — an anatomy teacher. The gesture said everything about what Dr. Jayaram Anbalagan had been to the people who sat in his classes.

He was not what the role traditionally produced. The anatomy professor of institutional legend is a figure of severity — exacting, intimidating, the keeper of a discipline that first-year students find overwhelming and often fear. Anbalagan was something different. He was quiet, unhurried, possessed of a calm authority that never needed raising its voice. In the dissection hall, his chalk moved across the blackboard with a precision that turned complex structures into clear visual stories. Students who arrived anxious and confused left his classes with the specific relief of having understood something they thought was beyond them.

"Some people don't just leave impressions behind," a former student, Sadhana Bose, said of him. "They are the impression."

Jayaram Anbalagan was born on August 6, 1948, in Pondicherry — now Puducherry — to Jayaram and Duraikannu Ammal. He did not set out to be a doctor. In the 1960s, AIIMS, PGI, and JIPMER launched MSc programmes in Anatomy, Physiology, and other basic sciences to address India's acute shortage of medical teachers. The programmes offered a generous stipend — ₹500 a month — to attract bright science graduates. Anbalagan joined JIPMER's Anatomy programme, initially drawn by practical considerations, and stayed for reasons that had nothing to do with them.

He completed his MSc in Anatomy from JIPMER in 1974. In 1975, he left Puducherry and traveled 2,500 kilometres north to Faridkot, Punjab, to join the newly established Guru Gobind Singh Medical College as a Demonstrator. The first batch of MBBS students was arriving, the Anatomy department needed to be built from nothing, and Anbalagan threw himself into both — teaching by day, helping construct a department by incremental institutional effort, learning that building something from scratch required a different kind of stamina than inheriting something already standing.

He was promoted to Lecturer in 1980. By then, Punjab was changing. Militant violence and government crackdowns had made daily life unpredictable for those from outside the state. The unrest came closer. Safety could no longer be assumed. He made the difficult decision to leave — moving south to Vijayawada, where he joined Siddhartha Medical College as Assistant Professor of Anatomy.

He was still settling into the new city when a telegram arrived. It was from Dr. K.S. Sachdeva — his former principal at Guru Gobind Singh Medical College, now Dean of MGIMS in Sevagram. The message was brief: Come to Sevagram.

He was puzzled. How had Dr. Sachdeva found his address in Vijayawada?

When his train arrived at Sevagram station, he found Dr. Sachdeva on the platform, waiting to receive him. That personal gesture — a Dean coming to the station — told him something about the institution before anyone had explained it in words. Over the next few days, he met Dr. Sushila Nayar, Manimala Chaudhary, and Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao. He felt, as he later described it, a sense of purpose in the place — a rhythm of life that settled something in him. He accepted the post.

In December 1983, he arrived at MGIMS as Reader in Anatomy. He would stay for twenty-one years.

He stepped into a department led by Dr. G.R.K. Hari Rao, with Mrs. R.R. Fulzele as Tutor and Mrs. Belsare as faculty. The department was small, the resources limited, the cadaver shortage a chronic constraint that made every dissection a carefully rationed learning opportunity. Anatomy education at MGIMS in the 1980s was traditional and rigorous — blackboard, chalk, Gray's Anatomy, Cunningham, and the expectation that students would memorise origins, insertions, and nerve supplies with thoroughness.

Within this environment, Anbalagan's teaching style found its fullest expression. His blackboard diagrams were exceptional — drawn freehand with a precision that made them more useful than most illustrations in textbooks, emerging structure by structure as he narrated what the body was doing and why it mattered. He knew when to push students deeper and when to ease back. He understood the specific anxiety of first-year students confronting a cadaver for the first time and calibrated his manner accordingly — never soft enough to allow complacency, never severe enough to produce the paralysis that prevents learning.

He was fluent in Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, and Telugu when he arrived. He added Marathi at Sevagram — a language learned not from necessity but from the desire to belong more completely to the community he had joined.

In 1984, he began his PhD under Dr. Hari Rao's supervision, studying the histology of the pituitary gland — specifically the structural variations in its cells across species and the onset of foetal pituitary function through secretory granule appearance. When Dr. Hari Rao left MGIMS in 1987, Anbalagan found a new guide in Dr. S.S. Navgiri, Professor and Head of Anatomy at Government Medical College, Nagpur. He completed his doctorate in 1992 — eight years of part-time research conducted alongside full-time teaching, a demonstration of the particular persistence required to build an academic career without institutional support.

One of his most consequential contributions was establishing a PhD programme in Anatomy at MGIMS — a process that proved far harder than anyone anticipated. When the department first applied to Nagpur University for research recognition, the inspection committee rejected the proposal, citing inadequate facilities and the absence of a recognised guide. It was a significant setback.

Anbalagan did not accept it as permanent. Working with Dr. Narendra Samal, Head of Pathology, and Dr. Ved Prakash Mishra, he systematically addressed every deficiency the university had identified — upgrading the laboratory, strengthening the academic framework, satisfying each specific requirement. The approval came. The department produced its first PhD scholars, and the research culture Anbalagan had fought to establish became a lasting feature of the department's identity.

His partnership with Dr. S.K. Ghosh — who led the department from the late 1980s until 2007 — was the central professional relationship of his MGIMS years. They were temperamentally opposite: Ghosh was a passionate Bengali, outspoken and quick to express himself; Anbalagan was a soft-spoken Tamilian who preferred silence to confrontation. What they shared was an unshakable commitment to the discipline and an identical standard of expectation for their students. Their complementarity gave the department a stability and coherence that carried it through nearly two decades.

When Dr. Ghosh decided to host the 43rd National Conference of the Anatomical Society of India in Sevagram in 1994 — a national event in a small village with minimal infrastructure — he entrusted the organisation entirely to Anbalagan. As organising secretary, Anbalagan managed delegate registration, guest speakers, fundraising, accommodation, food, train bookings, and the logistics of hosting hundreds of academics in a place that was not built for conferences. The event was a success. Every delegate was treated, as those who attended remembered, like family.

He served as Vice President of the Anatomical Society of India in 1998–99, co-led symposia at the All India Congress of Cytology and Genetics held at MGIMS in 1996 and 2001, and attended the International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology in Delhi in 1994. His research contributions in microdissection and stereological methodology extended his influence beyond the institution.

In 2005, he made the decision to leave. His mother was frail and needed care. His sons, Vinod Kumar and Karthik Kumar, were preparing for college. The balance of obligation had shifted. He submitted his resignation and left Sevagram on March 9, 2005 — not to retire, but to continue teaching at Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute in Puducherry, where Mahatma Gandhi's name, as he noted with quiet humour, followed him from Sevagram back to his birthplace.

Dr. Ghosh left MGIMS himself in December 2007, just months after Anbalagan. The two departures, so closely spaced, marked the end of the department's longest sustained period of academic coherence. The lecture halls they had filled for two decades stood quiet in a different way.

At MGMCRI Puducherry, Anbalagan became Professor, then Vice Principal, then Professor Emeritus after retiring in 2019 — continuing to guide students and doctoral scholars well past formal retirement. The medical faculty of the institution nominated him for the Dronacharya Award, the recognition for exceptional teaching. It was, characteristically, his colleagues who put his name forward. He would not have done it himself.

He still wears khadi. Asked about his years in Sevagram, he does not speak of research output or departmental achievements. He speaks of the community. "MGIMS was more than a workplace — it was a family," he has said. "Life in Sevagram was simple yet deeply fulfilling, with shared moments binding us together. It taught me that true contentment comes not from what we have, but from the purpose we serve."

Twenty-four batches of MGIMS medical students learned anatomy from him. Many of them are now doctors approaching the end of their own careers, their bodies carrying the knowledge he gave them in their bones and hands — knowledge acquired in a dissection hall in a village in Vidarbha, from a Tamil man who came to Sevagram on a telegram and stayed for twenty-one years.

Professor & Head of Physiology · Founding Faculty Member · The Man Who Made Students Feel What They Were Learning

In his final hours, his children placed earphones in his ears. Bhimsen Joshi's voice rose in a soulful abhang — Teertha Vitthala, kshetra Vitthala — and they were certain, as those who have loved someone long and well become certain of such things, that he could still hear it. They brewed his favourite tea and let a warm spoonful rest on his lips. No monitors, no machines. Just the sounds and scents of a life fully lived, brought to a man who had spent ninety-three years paying attention to beauty in all its forms.

He had chosen, at twenty-nine, not to operate on the human body but to explain it. His father was a surgeon of steady hands and calm words, known across Vidarbha. Young Keshao had stood in the corner of that clinic, watching pain soften and dignity restored, and felt something stir. But the scalpel was not his instrument. The chalk was. What called to him was the why behind the how — the hidden logic of the living body, the poetry of a heartbeat, the elegance of a reflex arc. He became a physiologist and a teacher, and for twenty years at MGIMS Sevagram, beginning on the very first day the institution existed, he was both with a completeness rarely seen.

Keshao Narayan Ingley was born on December 9, 1931, in Buldhana, the eldest of five siblings in a joint family that moved with his father's government postings across Vidarbha. New towns, new schools, new neighbours — a childhood of constant relocation that gave him adaptability and a particular attentiveness to people and places.

He entered Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1953, joining the sixth batch of students. The course was long and demanding — anatomy and physiology, then pathology and pharmacology, then the clinical years. His batch was the first to undergo an eighteen-month internship that included nine months in district hospital wards and nine in primary health centres. Rural India, with its raw demands and limited resources, was built into his training from the beginning.

When the time came to choose a specialty, he followed the counsel of Dr. Shukla, the venerable Professor of Physiology and Biochemistry: if you want to build an academic life, get an MD. He chose Physiology. He began teaching at GMC Nagpur on February 1, 1960.

Then a bureaucrat's pen sent him to an Ayurveda college. The posting made no sense — a trained physiologist in a department where his qualification had no application. He declined, respectfully and firmly. "I'll wait," he said, "even if I must wait long." He waited nine years.

In 1969, the call came from Dr. P.S. Vaishwanar, his mentor, who had been asked to assemble faculty for India's first rural medical college. Dr. Sushila Nayar's MGIMS in Sevagram was still a vision on paper — no buildings, no laboratories, just dust and fields and a stirring idea. Dr. Ingley hesitated. Starting from scratch required more than resolve. But something in the rawness of it called to him. He agreed to go on deputation.

On the morning of Thursday, July 10, 1969, he arrived in Sevagram alongside Dr. B.V. Deshkar, Dr. M.G. Kane, and Dr. G.M. Indurkar. There were no gates to walk through, no lecture halls to enter. They were not stepping into a college. They were building one.

The Physiology department began not in marble halls but in modest rooms where chalk dust mixed with the black soil of Sevagram. There were borrowed benches, second-hand instruments, and a resolve that compensated for everything the place lacked in equipment. Jagdish and Sahebrao, two lab attendants from those early years, remembered how Dr. Ingley stayed behind long after others had left — unpacking crates, arranging instruments, setting up the lab piece by piece. Every pipette, every kymograph, every stimulator found its proper place. By the time students stepped in, the lab was not merely functional. It was waiting for them.

Lectures in those first months were held wherever a blackboard could be propped up — the Gandhi Ashram, the Adhyayan Mandir. Chalk was precious and blackboards makeshift, but the learning was real. The foundation was being laid by hand, day by day, in the heat of Vidarbha.

He stayed. The deputation became a calling. Over twenty years, from 1969 to 1989, he taught Physiology to twenty batches of MGIMS students — the first encounter each of them had with the body's hidden rhythms and rules.

He entered the lecture hall briskly, a paan tucked in his cheek, and went straight to the board — no notes, no slides, only chalk and certainty. His fingers moved with precision, drawing the nervous system stroke by stroke: the brainstem curved into view, spinal tracts unfurled like railway lines, synapses sparked to life in arcs and arrows. Watching him draw was like watching the body being born on a blackboard.

His power lay not only in what he knew but in how he made students feel it. When he taught Parkinson's disease, his face stilled, his limbs trembled, his feet dragged with tragic precision. Stroke: he slumped to one side, arm limp, gait halting. Cerebellar ataxia: he wobbled across the floor, arms outstretched, missteps exaggerated, drawing chuckles that turned into quiet admiration. He did not ask students to remember. He made them feel. They never forgot.

His tools were simple — Samson Wright, Guyton, Ganong, chalk, a pointer — but the experience was unforgettable. To him, Physiology was not a subject but a living force.

The laboratory was his other sanctuary. Every shelf spoke of order: electrodes coiled neatly, kymographs aligned, frogs anaesthetised and handled with respect. First-year students — nervous, tentative — found themselves pithing frogs without trembling, clipping electrodes with exactitude, watching the faint twitch of a muscle dance across a soot-blackened drum. Those inky waves told stories, and under his quiet tutelage, they learned to read them.

In an era when private tuitions flourished and some teachers in Nagpur traded lessons for cash and favours, Dr. Ingley never charged a rupee outside his salary. He never turned away a student who needed help. He believed teaching was a service, not a commodity. By holding that line, he protected the nobility of his craft.

At eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon, the Physiology department paused. Teacups appeared, cardamom scented the air, and Dr. Ingley arrived with his signature paan and a sparkle in his eye. Professors Sharma, Khapre, Patel, and Naik pulled up chairs. The talk ranged freely — examinations, politics, cricket, campus murmurs. Debates flared and dissolved into shared laughter. These tea breaks held no hierarchy and no agenda. They were the heartbeat of the department finding its rhythm.

He established a reproductive biology laboratory, mentoring Dr. Pradeep Sambarey and Dr. K.S. Bhat to investigate the causes of male infertility in Vidarbha — research that earned both men their doctorates. He built pulmonary function and basal metabolic rate laboratories. He guided postgraduate students including Dr. Deshpande and Dr. Ajay Chaudhari, who would later lead Physiology departments at JNMC Sawangi and MGIMS Sevagram respectively.

He helped nurture Sargam — MGIMS's annual cultural celebration — watching from the front row with pride, clapping hardest. He and Mr. Tupkar created the institute's sports department. He attended every football and volleyball match by the Brotherhood Club of Wardha, living each game rather than merely watching it.

Music was the deepest constant. A devotee of Bhimsen Joshi and Jitendra Abhisheki, he never missed a concert and always brought his children, insisting they sit up front. When Bhimsen Joshi sang an abhang, Dr. Ingley would sit upright, eyes closed, fingers tapping gently — not a physiologist, not an administrator, but simply a rasik, a lover of melody. Even in his nineties, each evening he settled into his chair, closed his eyes, and let Marathi classical sangeet wash over him.

On July 11, 1959, he married Sindhu Solao from Amravati district. She later served as warden of the MGIMS girls' hostel from 1981 to 1988. Their three children — Anjali, Sanjay, and Sonali — all graduated from MGIMS, specialising in Anaesthesiology, Orthopaedics, and Pathology respectively. Their daughter-in-law Aradhana and son-in-law Muthu Kumar were also MGIMS alumni. The family's roots in the institution ran four generations deep.

After retiring in December 1989, he joined the nascent medical college at Sawangi as Dean, then Director, building its faculty with the same quiet persuasion he had always used — making calls, paying visits, remembering names, following up with care. He served the university's examination and evaluation department until 2006, concluding his formal career at eighty-six.

In his mid-nineties, he retained a mental sharpness that surprised those who rang him expecting a brief exchange. On June 5, 2023, I called him as part of my efforts to document MGIMS's early teachers. What followed was an hour and a half of effortless, engaged conversation — stories told with precision, memory sharp, affection for the past unmistakable. He painted scenes rather than merely reported them. When the call ended, I found myself quietly moved. He was not recalling the past. He was still teaching.

Each morning in Nagpur, he descended from his sixth-floor apartment and took his place on a worn wooden bench beside the electrician, the auto-rickshaw driver, the plumber, and the shopkeeper. He chuckled at their jokes, passed the kettle without fuss, and never once spoke of the institutions he had built or the positions he had held. To them, he was simply Doctor Saab — a neighbour, a listener, a friend.

In October 2024, he was admitted to hospital after a series of seizures. I visited him there, surrounded by Sanjay, Sonali, Anjali, and his granddaughter Shreya. He looked tired, his voice faint. But when I stepped in, he opened his eyes, recognised me, and smiled. He asked about my health in sentences that came slowly, each word carefully coaxed. We exchanged pleasantries. Then his eyes grew heavy and he drifted into sleep. It was a quiet hour I will always hold dear.

His children brought him home to die. No monitors, no machines. They brewed his tea and placed Bhimsen Joshi's abhang in his ears. He passed on April 13, 2025, as he had lived — surrounded by devotion, dignity, and the music he had loved all his life.

Professor & Head of Physiology · Thirty-Five Years at Sevagram · The Teacher Who Believed in Students Before They Believed in Themselves

He drove at twenty kilometres an hour on Sevagram's still streets. Whenever residents heard the unmistakably loud horn of his second-hand Maruti and saw him pull up with his courteous offer — "Can I give you a lift?" — the standard reply, delivered with a smile, was: "No thank you, Sir. I'm in a hurry today."

The joke, gentle and affectionate, captured something true about Dr. Sutikshna Pande. He was unhurried in everything — in speech, in movement, in the measured way he delivered a concept in the lecture hall, waiting for students to catch up before moving forward. In a world that rewarded speed and output — papers published, conferences attended, grants secured — he was a quiet heretic. He published little. He attended few conferences. He taught for thirty-five years with chalk and a blackboard and the conviction that a well-explained idea, delivered simply and patiently, was worth more than any other academic currency.

The students he shaped are now senior doctors across the country. They remember his thick-framed glasses, the striking moustache, the crisp white coat buttoned to the top, the deliberate pauses in his lectures that made them lean forward to catch what came next. They remember that he explained physiology in Hindi when students struggled with English, that he stayed after class with those who were lost, that he treated first-year anxiety as a problem worth solving rather than a weakness to be dismissed. They remember that he believed in them before they believed in themselves.

That was his research output. It did not fit in a publication list.

Sutikshna Pande was born on March 23, 1939, in Singhpur, a small village in Narsinghpur district of Madhya Pradesh. His father was an agricultural officer whose postings moved the family continuously — Narsinghpur, Khandwa, Damoh, Raipur, Jabalpur. Young Sutikshna grew up acquiring the adaptability of someone who must always start again in a new place.

His name came from the Ramayana: Sutikshna was a devoted disciple of the sage Agastya, so dedicated that when he offered Guru Dakshina, his teacher refused it, saying the honour of teaching such a student was reward enough. It was a name that would turn out to be prophetic, though nobody could have guessed it from his early years.

Medicine was not his dream. He entered Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Medical College in Jabalpur in 1958 to fulfil his mother's wish, not his own. It did not suit him. English was difficult, the subject did not excite him, and before his first MBBS examination he resolved to quit. The cost of withdrawal — ₹5,000, beyond his mother's means — kept him enrolled. He found another way out, taking a position teaching at a military school for boys. He kept his medical past a secret.

He loved it immediately.

He showed his students how to dissect frogs. He explained how the heart beats. They were fascinated. Six months into this work, a conversation with one of his students produced a quiet revelation: this was what he wanted to do. He returned to medical school, this time with a clear purpose. He turned morning tea breaks into impromptu tutorials for his batchmates, making optics and physiology accessible through informal explanation. A senior professor, Dr. N.K. Mishra — who would later head the Medicine department at Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal — noticed this unusual sight of a student teaching students and saw in it the markings of someone exceptional.

He graduated in 1967. The years that followed were uncertain — family planning posts in Damoh and Chandipur, district hospital work that brought ethical difficulties he navigated uncomfortably. It took six years to find his place. At Shyam Shah Medical College in Rewa, under the mentorship of Dr. D.N.S. Chowdhary, a wise anatomy professor who recognised his talent and directed him toward Physiology, he finally arrived. He became a demonstrator, then completed his MD in Physiology in 1975. At thirty-six, he had found his calling. He had known it was teaching since he was in a military school explaining how the heart beats. The road there had simply taken longer than it should have.

He arrived at MGIMS in November 1975. The institution was barely six years old. The Physiology Department had two senior faculty on government deputation — Dr. B.V. Deshkar and Dr. K.N. Ingley — and a recent vacancy left by Dr. I.D. Singh's departure. Dr. Pande joined as Lecturer, beginning the long steady climb that would take him to Professor and Head by 1999.

His classroom style was neither dramatic nor flamboyant, but it held students in a particular kind of attention — the attention produced by clarity rather than performance. He broke complex physiological principles into simple, digestible truths. He made the frog's beating heart a gateway into the mysteries of human physiology. He demanded that students grapple with concepts rather than memorise them, asking them to explain rather than recite. His sharp eyes behind thick-framed glasses swept the room; when a student's attention drifted, a quick "Focus!" followed. He did not shout. He did not need to.

He explained physiology in Hindi for students who struggled with English — a practical accommodation that other faculty rarely made and that students from Hindi-medium backgrounds never forgot. He was strict in the lecture hall and consistently available outside it, in the way that matters most to those who are struggling.

For six years, he served as warden of the boys' hostel, fostering a disciplined but caring atmosphere, helping new students adjust through orientation camps. For more than three decades, he led the Friday evening all-religion prayers at five o'clock — playing the harmonium, drawing on the Bhagavad Gita for guidance. He had led a Geeta Samiti during his Shyam Shah years, hosting annual eloquence competitions and philosophical debates. The Gita was not a performance of piety. It was the animating philosophy of his life.

Dr. Sushila Nayar recognised this. She frequently acknowledged his spiritual leadership at the institution — the contribution of a man who maintained the Gandhian devotional practice of the campus long after many faculty treated it as a formality.

He was a regular on the early-morning walks — out at four in the morning with Professor O.P. Gupta, or taking evening strolls with Professor Narang. He built his friendships through consistency of presence rather than expressiveness of personality. He was quiet among peers, slightly hesitant with seniors, yet deeply trusted by both. He was the professor who listened, the senior who defended his juniors, the mentor who gave without requiring return.

Among the thirteen Physiology MDs who trained at MGIMS between 1969 and 2003, and the many more MBBS graduates whose foundation he built, one name captures what Dr. Pande was to his students with particular vividness.

Devender Sachdeva arrived at MGIMS in 1994, lost and doubting himself. Medical school felt, as he described it, like a mountain he could not climb.

"Dr. Pande saw something in me," Sachdeva recalled. "He took me under his wing. He didn't just teach physiology — he taught me how to believe in myself. He talked to me about the Gita, about finding inner strength. It wasn't just academic advice. It was spiritual guidance, life advice. He never gave up on me, even when I had given up on myself."

Sachdeva completed his MBBS, specialised in Pharmacology, and now heads the department at Tomo Riba Institute in Arunachal Pradesh. He attributes it entirely to Dr. Pande.

There were others like Sachdeva — students who came to MGIMS uncertain and left with direction, whose trajectories changed because one professor had the patience to see them clearly and the commitment to stay alongside them until they found their footing. This was the research Dr. Pande conducted across thirty-five years. Its results walked into hospitals and departments and lives across the country.

In 1999, he stepped down as department head, passing leadership to Dr. Ramji Singh. He continued as Emeritus Professor for another decade before leaving Sevagram in 2010 for Ujjain, where he taught at Ruxmaniben Deepchand Gardi Medical College for fifteen more years.

When I spoke with him on May 19, 2023, his voice carried a sadness he did not try to conceal. "Sevagram lost its light after Behenji's passing," he said. "I felt detached. Students moved on after their Physiology studies. Frustration and disappointment led me to leave." It was the honest admission of a man who had given a place his best years and found that institutions, unlike devoted students, do not always register what they have received.

He continued teaching into his mid-eighties, donating much of his salary to help patients and those in need — a practice consistent with everything else he had ever done with resources that came to him.

In January 2025, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and stepped down from teaching at Ujjain. Tremors came, then a walker. He remained active on Facebook, keeping himself informed about Sevagram, connected to the institution that had been the centre of his life for so long.

He married Anusuya Vyas from Gwalior in 1970. They chose not to have children. His students were his family — the slow accumulation of young doctors he had believed in, argued with, explained things to in two languages, and sent out into the world carrying something of his steadiness.

His story, as he himself seemed to understand, was not one of spectacular triumph. It was the story of a man who found his calling in teaching, who invested more than he extracted, and whose legacy lives in the doctors he shaped rather than the papers he published. It is, in the context of this book, one of the most important stories of all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He meant it literally. During his postgraduate years at King George's Medical College in Lucknow, his research on the central action of Angiotensin II in dogs had begun with disaster — animal after animal dying under anaesthesia, an expensive imported reagent wasted, a supervising professor waiting for results that were not coming. The failure had driven him across the corridor to the Pharmacology department, where he spent long hours learning drug administration techniques, unearthed a buried head holder and mechanical drill from the department's dusty stores, designed specialised cannulas, and rebuilt his entire experimental technique from scratch. When he resumed the experiments, his hands were steady, the animals survived, and the research moved forward. The faculty who had quietly doubted the outsider — he was not a KGMC alumnus — saw what he was made of.

That capacity to fail, analyse the failure, and return with improved hands would become the defining characteristic of a career that took him from a village 100 kilometres west of Gorakhpur to the Executive Directorship of AIIMS Kalyani.

Ramji Singh was born in 1957 in Bansgaon, Gorakhpur district, Uttar Pradesh. His father Keshav Prasad Singh began as an assistant development officer and rose to block development officer, and with each posting the family moved — Maharajganj, Saunghat, Menhdawal, Bhatpar Rani — Ramji adapting to new teachers, unfamiliar accents, and different syllabi with every transfer. The disruption that would have defeated some students sharpened him instead. He learned to find his footing quickly.

His father's plan for him was modest and clear: become a doctor, return to Ballia, run a small private practice. There was nothing wrong with this plan. Ramji followed it without particular resistance, entering Sri Krishna Medical College in Muzaffarpur with the 1974 batch. Bihar's academic calendar was chaotic in those years — class suspensions, exam postponements, the institutional disorder that had worsened in the Emergency's aftermath — and what should have taken five years stretched considerably. He completed his MBBS in 1980.

He remembered one examiner from those years with particular warmth: Dr. S.P. Nigam, a distinguished Professor of Medicine from Sevagram, who tested him on a case of mitral stenosis during the First MBBS examinations. Years later, when Ramji joined MGIMS, he met Dr. Nigam again. The circle had closed quietly, as circles in the MGIMS story tend to do.

In June 1979, a few months before his Second MBBS examinations, he married Lalitaji. Their first son arrived in 1981. He was twenty-two, still in medical school, already a husband and father — the kind of domestic responsibility that concentrates a young man's ambitions.

He had intended private practice. A friend filling out postgraduate applications at King George's Medical College included Ramji's name on the form, ticking boxes for every subject including physiology and community medicine, unaware of the cutoff marks. Ramji was accepted into the Physiology programme. He reasoned that an MD would improve his prospects. He went.

What happened next surprised him. Under Professor S.D. Nishith, head of the Physiology department at KGMC, he found himself genuinely engaged by research for the first time. The Angiotensin II project had high stakes — ₹5,000 of the department's research grant spent on Swiss-imported reagent, a significant sum. When the initial experiments failed and the animals died, Nishith did not rescue him from the consequences. Ramji rescued himself: the corridor visits to Pharmacology, the excavated equipment, the redesigned cannulas, the rebuilt technique. The research recovered. He had learned something about himself that private practice in Ballia could not have taught him.

He did not receive a stipend during his postgraduate years — an unusual hardship for a married man with a child. His second son Ashok was born in October 1984. He worked as a demonstrator from September 1983 onward, the modest salary providing basic stability. He completed his MD in 1985, defended his thesis, and began scanning for lecturer posts.

His department head saw the advertisement for a post at MGIMS before Ramji did. He summoned Ramji, dictated the biodata to his secretary, wrote a recommendation letter in his own hand, and told them to airmail it the same day. It was the kind of mentorship that changes careers by acting before the student has organised himself to act.

The interview was scheduled for August 4, 1986. It was Ramji's first journey outside Uttar Pradesh — a 1,000-kilometre trip over twenty-eight hours. He stepped off at Wardha East station to find every cycle rickshaw taken. A man with two Lucknow students saw his predicament and gestured to a space in his rickshaw: "Come along, young man." Ramji arrived at his hotel opposite the station carried by a stranger's generosity.

The next morning, he walked onto the MGIMS campus — gravel underfoot, neem-scented air, the distant sound of ashram prayers. In the Physiology department, Dr. K.N. Ingley greeted him. Dr. M.D. Khapre nodded. Dr. Sutikshna Pande and Dr. K.S. Bhat welcomed him with warm smiles. The easy camaraderie of a small department that knew itself well settled his nerves before the interview began.

Dr. Sushila Nayar opened the proceedings: "Dr. Singh, if selected, how soon can you join MGIMS?"

"Immediately, ma'am," he said without hesitation.

She outlined the code of conduct: khadi, vegetarian diet, the Gandhian ethos that was not merely institutional decoration but daily practice. He listened and agreed. He had not known, arriving at Wardha station the previous evening, that this was the place he would spend the next twenty-six years. He knew it by the time he walked out of the interview room.

When he joined in September 1986, his life fit into a room at Kabir Niwas. Over the next decade, his footprint in Sevagram grew—first to the Type-2 quarters, then to a larger house in MLK Colony. Finally, in 2003, he moved a mile from the hospital to a home he had built himself. It was no longer just institutional housing; it was a house with his own gate and his own garden. By the time he turned the key in that front door, the village of Sevagram had officially ceased to be a workplace and had become his hometown.

He rose through the department steadily — Lecturer in 1986, Reader in 1991, Associate Professor in 1995, Professor and Head in 1998 — leading it for thirteen years. His teaching earned him the Professor K.P. Puthuraya Best Teacher Award in Physiology in 2008. He did not seek the award; his students and colleagues had made the case for it.

He registered for a PhD under Dr. K.N. Ingley in 1988, intending to continue the department's reproductive physiology research. The subject did not ignite him. He did not complete it. He was honest about this — a man who understood the difference between obligatory academic credential and genuine intellectual engagement, and who chose not to pretend the two were the same. What he did instead was become a PhD guide himself, mentoring Jyoti Jain, Sachin Pawar, Vinod Shende, Amit Kant, and Bharati Mahindrakar through their doctorates. He supervised postgraduate students from 2002 to 2012 — eight in total, from Alka Rawekar to Vikash Udan — and oversaw MD theses in the Surgery department as well, including work by Tapti Saha on post-meal urinary alkaline changes in duodenal ulcer management and by B.S. Bakane on TENS and surgical wound flap survival.

In December 1999, Ramji and Dr. S. John Premendran brought the 45th Annual National Conference of Physiologists and Pharmacologists to Sevagram. The theme was hypertension in the new millennium, but the true test was the terrain. To host 200 delegates in a village, Ramji had to revert to the scrappiness of his Lucknow lab days. He spent months navigating the bureaucracies of the ICMR and the Medical Council of India for grants, eventually bridging the gaps by leaning on family resources to ensure no guest went without a comfortable bed or a hot meal.

The logistics were an exercise in improvisation—transforming rural spaces into academic halls that rivaled urban centers. By the final day, the skepticism of the city delegates had been replaced by the quiet hum of a successful gathering. Dr. Sushila Nayar, then eighty-five, rose to deliver the presidential address. She moved slowly, her frame diminished by age, but as she stood at the podium and looked out at the assembly Ramji had built from nothing, she didn't need a formal commendation. She simply caught his eye, and in that steady, sharp gaze was the silent recognition of a mission fulfilled.

From 1998 to 2003, Ramji lived the double life of a professor and the Warden of the Jawaharlal Nehru Boys' Hostel. While the role was often viewed by faculty as a burdensome detour from academic work, Ramji turned the warden’s office into a space where the door stayed unlatched. He wasn't just checking room assignments; he was a constant presence in the corridors, listening to the anxieties of students far from home.

The "hostel boy" who sat in his office or shared a meal with him during that period eventually became the cardiologist in London, the oncologist in Mumbai, or the neurosurgeon in New York. These men didn't just remember him as an administrator; they continued to call him "Sir" with a tone that suggested family rather than faculty. Decades later, when these specialists reached back to Sevagram, it wasn't out of institutional duty, but because the warden of the Nehru Hostel had once treated their personal struggles with as much gravity as their physiology lessons.

When Dr. Ramji Singh left MGIMS in 2012, he wasn't looking for a quiet exit; he was seeking a larger canvas. He moved into the AIIMS system, first as Professor and Head of Physiology at AIIMS Patna, and eventually as the Executive Director of AIIMS Kalyani—perhaps the furthest point imaginable from the quiet clinic in Gorakhpur his father had once envisioned. Along the way, he held additional charges at AIIMS Deoghar and Guwahati, becoming a pillar of the burgeoning AIIMS network.

Yet, his influence wasn't merely administrative. His move opened doors for nearly two dozen MGIMS faculty members, a quiet testament to an institutional loyalty that followed him across state lines. Over four decades in the classroom and two decades in high-level administration, he balanced the rigors of national-level governance—serving as General Secretary of the APPI and as a Fellow of GSMC-FAIMER—with the patient work of a mentor, guiding Ph.D. students and chairing university boards.

His career has been defined by a refusal to stay static. After years in the Gandhian ecosystem of Sevagram and the structured world of the AIIMS institutions, he took on a new challenge as the Dean of a private medical college in Durg, Chhattisgarh. It was a move driven by a characteristic curiosity: a desire to understand the mechanics of private medical education in India.

He remains quiet about these transitions, carrying the steady confidence of a man whose self-worth doesn't rely on the titles on his door. He had arrived in Sevagram a stranger, shaped by a series of fortunate accidents—a friend’s application form, a timely recommendation, a chance rickshaw ride. He spent twenty-six years turning that stranger into a fixture of the community, proving through consistent work that most obstacles are not matters of destiny, but simply problems of technique.

Read Dr. Sushila Nayar's full profile in Architects of MGIMS

Professor & Head of Physiology · Thirty-Five Years at Sevagram · The Man Who Arrived at Two O'Clock, Every Day, for Thirty-Five Years

At exactly two in the afternoon, he would stride into the Physiology lecture hall, chalk in hand. Not at two minutes past. Not at one fifty-eight. At two. Students who had been in his classes long enough knew to be seated and ready before the hour turned.

His lectures were built the same way — meticulous, structured, delivered with the precision of someone who had thought carefully about what came first and what came next. He drew diagrams on the blackboard rather than projecting them on slides, sketched flowcharts rather than handing out printed notes, and required students to construct their understanding rather than consume his. "The chalk and blackboard force a teacher to think and students to engage," he said. It was not nostalgia for old methods. It was a considered pedagogical conviction, held and practised for thirty-five years.

He was not a showman. Dr. K.N. Ingley had performed Parkinson's disease in the lecture hall, wobbling and trembling to make students feel what they were memorising. Ajay Chaudhari did not perform. He explained — carefully, thoroughly, in a low husky voice — and trusted that clarity was its own form of engagement. For the many students who filled the Physiology lecture hall across three and a half decades, it was.

Ajay Rameshwar Chaudhari was born on July 11, 1959, in Wardha — the fourth of five siblings, with four brothers and a sister. His father Rajeshwar Chaudhari worked as a railway accountant; his mother Kamalabai ran the household with the quiet efficiency that holds a family together without drawing attention to itself.

The formative influence was his elder brother U.R. Chaudhari, a chemistry professor, whose home in Ramnagar was organised around learning. It was his brother who taught Ajay how to study, how to write, how to structure preparation for examinations. The lessons were absorbed early and stayed permanent. By the time Ajay moved through Buniyadi Bal Mandir, New English High School in Wardha, and J.B. Science College, the habits of disciplined academic work were already second nature.

In 1978, he secured admission to Government Medical College, Nagpur — twenty-fourth rank on the state merit list. He earned his MBBS in 1983, completed his internship, and found himself at the familiar crossroads of a newly graduated doctor: which direction now?

The answer came from Dr. C.B. Taori, a biochemistry faculty member at MGIMS and a close friend of his elder brother. "Why chase a clinical career?" Taori said. "Specialisations take years, and there's no certainty of getting your desired branch. Physiology has a vacancy — take it." It was practical advice delivered plainly. Ajay took it. He joined MGIMS as a Demonstrator in Physiology and enrolled in postgraduate studies under Dr. K.N. Ingley.

He had not chosen Physiology out of passion. Passion came later, in the way it often does in academic medicine — through the specific questions a subject opened rather than the subject itself. In Dr. Ingley's infertility laboratory, peering through a simple microscope at Neubauer chamber counts, something caught his attention and held it. Male infertility: its causes, its mechanisms, and the possibility of doing something about it. He completed his MD in 1987 and joined the department as Lecturer in 1988.

He entered a department of seasoned teachers: Dr. Ingley as head, Dr. Sutikshna Pande as Reader, Dr. K.S. Bhat, and Dr. Ramji Singh — a team with strong individual characters and an established culture of twice-daily tea gatherings at eleven and three. Dr. K.S. Sachdeva, who had been Professor of Physiology and Dean, joined those Saturday morning tea sessions and offered a consistent message to young faculty: "You must publish, or you'll remain an assistant professor for life." The nudge — "sometimes a shove," as Chaudhari recalled — pushed him and his colleagues to write and research beyond their lecture notes.

His own research settled on oxidative stress in male infertility — a subject understudied in India at the time. He examined antioxidant impacts on sperm count and motility, blood group antigens, secretor status and their correlation with sperm antibodies. He built a research culture in the department around the infertility theme, directing his postgraduate students into its many subsidiary questions: varicocele as a cause of infertility, immune responses, the edge cases where sperm counts reached near zero. The sperm quality analyser arrived in 2000, replacing the manual Neubauer chamber counts that had characterised the lab's first three decades. Precision improved; the underlying questions remained as pressing as they had always been.

His books entered the reading lives of MBBS students across the country. Viva in Physiology, published in 1988 — the year he joined as Lecturer — and Textbook of Practical Physiology in 2000 went through four editions each. They became staple reads because they did what he did in his lectures: simplified without falsifying, explained without condescending, gave students what they needed to understand rather than merely what they needed to pass. The combination of blackboard teaching and written texts that reinforced each other was characteristic of a man who thought about learning systematically.

He took over as Head of Department in 2012, following Dr. Ramji Singh and Dr. Sutikshna Pande. All three had served exactly eleven years as head — a numerical coincidence that became part of departmental folklore. He would serve eleven years himself.

Dr. Pande had been a strict disciplinarian, precise and demanding. Chaudhari carried that structural rigour forward but applied it with a gentler touch — less military in manner, equally serious in standard. Under his leadership, the department modernised its teaching methodologies and established a sports physiology laboratory, expanding the department's research scope beyond its long focus on reproductive physiology.

He was a fair leader. Residents, colleagues, lab technicians, and nurses found in him someone who did not make them feel their contributions were invisible. He was not given to grand gestures — the small, consistent acknowledgements of a man who noticed what people did and said so — but those around him understood that they were valued. His office, a small paper-filled room, became a place where people came not only for departmental business but for the quiet counsel of someone who listened carefully before speaking.

If he exceeded his lecture slot — spilling occasionally into the Community Medicine hour that followed — Dr. B.S. Garg's disapproving glare from the doorway was enough to wrap things up. He accepted this with the equanimity of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and why, and who also knew that institutional life requires occasional compromise with the clock.

His elder daughter Madura topped the state board examinations in 2007 — repeating, in a different generation, the discipline her father had inherited from his own elder brother. His younger daughter Rasika secured third rank in the Nagpur board, entered MGIMS in 2012, and went on to complete her MD in Radiology at GMC Nagpur. Two daughters, two medical careers, both shaped by the household habits of a family where learning was simply what one did.

He retired on July 31, 2023, passing the department to Dr. Shobha Paj, leaving behind a faculty that included Dr. Sachin Pawar, Dr. Nishant Bansod, Dr. Ruchi Kothari, and Dr. Vinod Shende. The department he handed over was larger, better equipped, and more research-active than the one he had joined as Demonstrator in 1983. The continuity was not accidental — it was the accumulated effect of a man who had spent thirty-five years making small, consistent investments in the department's future rather than his own prominence.

His real legacy was not in the books, though the books were good. It was not in the laboratories, though the laboratories were built with care. It was in the diagrams on the blackboard — drawn at exactly two o'clock, in a low husky voice, with a piece of chalk that forced both teacher and student to think — that would resurface in the memory of MGIMS students decades later, at a moment of clinical difficulty, when the physiology they had learned in Wardha turned out to be exactly what they needed.

Director-Professor of Biochemistry · Director JBTMRC · Forty-Four Years at Sevagram · The Man Who Named His Diagnostic Test After the Village

His friends teased him in his later years: "You've come full circle — from Bio-chemi-stry to Tree."

He laughed. He knew it was true.

The man who had spent four decades studying the molecular biology of parasites, building diagnostic kits, running immunodiagnostic workshops for medical schools across the country, and mentoring nineteen PhD students in the biochemistry of filariasis and tuberculosis — this man, in the last chapter of his Sevagram years, was planting amla trees on a fifteen-acre farm behind the boys' hostel. He had named the project Arogyadham. The Jain group from Jalgaon had helped him establish it. He tended the saplings himself. The carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules he had studied for decades now appeared in the flowering shrubs and fruit-bearing trees he was cultivating by hand.

The campus was amused and a little fascinated. It was not a contradiction, exactly — it was a completion. A hard-nosed scientist from a small village in Andhra Pradesh had arrived in a small village in Maharashtra in 1970, spent forty-four years building something significant, and then, in the fullness of it, found his way back to the soil.

***

Bhaskar Chenappa Harinath was born on September 4, 1937, in Kallur, a village in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, sixty kilometres from Tirupati. He completed his BSc at the University of Madras in 1954, his MSc in Biochemistry at Nagpur University in 1961, and then — in the movement that would define the arc of his professional life — went to the United States, completing his PhD at Oklahoma State University and postdoctoral fellowships at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis from 1968 to 1969.

He arrived at MGIMS on April 24, 1970, one year after the institution admitted its first students. He came with a PhD from America, postdoctoral training at one of the world's leading medical research institutions, and the particular energy of someone who has been preparing for something important and has finally found the place to do it.

The department he was joining did not yet exist as a separate entity. Biochemistry and Physiology shared a combined department. In 1974, they split — Dr. Harinath taking charge of Biochemistry, Dr. Deshkar leading Physiology. What Dr. Harinath inherited was, in terms of equipment, faculty, and research infrastructure, almost nothing. What he brought was the training to build it from scratch and the temperament to insist that it be built well.

***

The research direction he chose was not obvious. Filariasis — the mosquito-borne parasitic infection that causes lymphatic damage and, in advanced cases, the disfiguring swelling of limbs — was a serious public health problem in rural India but not a prestige research area. It was the kind of disease that afflicts poor communities and receives attention proportional to their political influence, which is to say: insufficient. Harinath saw it as an opportunity precisely because it was underworked.

He built his department's research identity around it. He studied the immunology of filariasis, developed diagnostic methods, and created a diagnostic test he named SEVAFILACHEK — after Sevagram, the village where he had made his home and his laboratory. It was a deliberate act of naming: this diagnostic tool carried the village's identity into the scientific literature.

He recruited Dr. M.V.R. Reddy and Dr. G.B.K.S. Prasad from Sri Venkateswara University in Telangana, and together they published groundbreaking work on filariasis. His PhD students — P. Kaliraj, P. Rama Prasad, Kumud Parkhe, I. Kharat, Ashok Malhotra, V. Chenthamarakshan, K. Cheirmaraj, L. Jena, and others — formed what he explicitly cultivated as a family of filarial biologists. He guided nineteen PhD students between 1980 and 2011. He published over two hundred papers in international journals, operated from a village with no urban research infrastructure, and earned a reputation among immunodiagnostics researchers worldwide that had nothing to do with the prestige of his institution's address.

He ran popular workshops on immunodiagnostics in Biochemistry that drew medical schools across the country to Sevagram. He convinced Dr. Sushila Nayar to invest in equipment the department needed, arguing his case with the persistence of someone who understood that good research requires tools and that tools require institutional will to acquire them.

The Dr. B.C. Roy Award came in December 1993, recognising his contributions to the development of a specialty at MGIMS. He joined the company of Dr. Sushila Nayar, Dr. J.S. Mathur, Dr. P. Nayar, and Dr. Prakash Behere as MGIMS recipients of the Medical Council of India's most prestigious honour for specialty development. He served as President of the Indian Immunology Society from 1990 to 1992 and President of the Association of Clinical Biochemists of India from 1994 to 1995. He later patented the Mycobacterial ES-31 serine protease for tuberculosis diagnostics and established the MycoProtein-DB, a database for mycobacterial proteases.

***

Later in his career, he extended his diagnostic work from filariasis to tuberculosis — developing serological tests he believed would be effective tools for TB diagnosis. He invested significantly in this direction: time, effort, his department's research focus.

The Indian government eventually banned serological tests for TB diagnosis in favour of sputum smear microscopy and molecular tests, which had demonstrated evidence of superiority. His tests were effectively set aside.

It was hard for him. He had spent years on this work, believed in it, built around it. The frustration and disillusionment were real, and those who knew him could see it. Science requires the willingness to be wrong, but that willingness is easier to profess than to embody when a decade of effort is what is being set aside. His filariasis work remained a genuine and lasting contribution. The TB diagnostic work was a lesson in how even gifted and productive scientists can develop biases toward their own methods. He carried both parts of the record honestly.

***

He was outwardly impatient — known for occasional bursts of temper, a strict taskmaster who held his students and himself to high standards and was not gentle when those standards were not met. He spoke English with a distinct Telugu accent and never became fluent in Marathi or Hindi, which in Sevagram's linguistic community was a permanent marker of his outsider origin. He did not compensate for this with social effort — he was a man of few words outside the laboratory, not given to gossip or small talk, often more absorbed in mosquito-borne disease than human conversation.

Yet he earned genuine respect — from colleagues, from staff, from the influential figures in Sevagram's Gandhian world — through the quality of his work and the integrity of his conduct. In a village where simplicity was both an ethic and a daily reality, a biochemist from Andhra Pradesh who had trained in Oklahoma and St. Louis and then chose to spend forty-four years in Sevagram building a research department was understood to be doing something unusual. The choice itself commanded a certain regard.

As a mentor, he was demanding and inspiring in equal measure. His perfectionism was not mere exactingness — it came from a genuine belief that research done carelessly was not worth doing, and that students were capable of more than they typically asked of themselves. The research family he built, and the publication record that emerged from it, vindicated the belief.

***

He retired from MGIMS in 2014 and moved to Tirupati with his wife Vimla. The amla farm — Arogyadham — was behind him, but the impulse it represented followed him: an interest in Yoga, Naturopathy, and herbal medicine that deepened in his final years. He dreamed of creating a holistic health retreat and senior citizen homes in a nature-friendly environment. He donated nine acres of land near IIT Tirupati for the establishment of an orphanage — a late act of generosity from a man whose working life had been organised around building institutions that outlasted him.

His son Ashok, a 1984 MGIMS alumnus who had earned both his MBBS and MD at the institution, married his classmate Renuka Kulkarni, who completed her MD in Pathology at MGIMS. Both eventually settled in the United States. His son Anil, an engineer, also went abroad.

Dr. Harinath died on October 22, 2022, survived by Vimla and his two sons. He had arrived in Sevagram in 1970 as a young man freshly returned from America, full of ambition and research plans. He left in 2014 as someone who had built more than he had planned, in a place that had given him more than he had expected.

The amla trees at Arogyadham are still there. From Bio-chemi-stry to Tree: the journey, in the end, made its own kind of sense.

Lecturer & Reader, Biochemistry · Thirty-Six Years at Sevagram · The Man Who Built the Laboratory No One Noticed Until It Was Gone

On November 5, 2009, Gopal Taori handed his parents the keys to a house.

He had bought it in Nagpur — large, beautifully furnished, a real home for their retirement, the kind of gift that takes years of planning and love to give. He also handed his father the keys to a new Maruti Swift Dzire. Mr. Taori wept. His wife Veena wept. Their son had given them everything he wanted to give them, and they knew it, and the afternoon was saturated with that particular happiness that comes when gratitude and love and the passage of time all arrive together at once.

The following afternoon, brimming with joy, Mr. and Mrs. Taori set off for Sevagram. Mr. Taori was behind the wheel. A little ahead of Khadki village, their car collided with a truck. Both of them were gone.

It is rare to journey through life together and depart together. Mr. and Mrs. Chaturbhuj Taori were among those few.

***

Chaturbhuj Taori was born on January 20, 1945, to Kausalya Devi and Bansilalji, the second of five children in a Marwari-speaking family in Pulgaon, Wardha district. His name — Chaturbhuj, meaning one with four arms, an epithet of Lord Vishnu — was auspicious and weighty. He went by C.B. Taori throughout his life, the initials a modest reduction of a name that might otherwise have seemed to promise more than any one person could deliver.

He was a capable student. He matriculated from R.K. High School in 1960, completed his BSc in 1965, and earned his MSc in Biochemistry from Nagpur University in March 1968, securing the second rank on the merit list. Between 1967 and 1970, he worked as a Demonstrator in Biochemistry and Physiology and lectured in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Nagpur University, under Professor A.K. Dorle. He had built a solid early academic record and found, in teaching, something that suited him genuinely rather than merely adequately.

In September 1972, he joined MGIMS as Lecturer in Biochemistry under Dr. B.C. Harinath. His predecessor Mr. M.G. Nathani had just left. The department at that point consisted of exactly two people: Dr. Harinath, freshly returned from postdoctoral training in the United States, and Taori. The first MBBS batch had been admitted that year, and Biochemistry was still folded into Physiology. Taori took charge of teaching all the Biochemistry classes — with chalk and blackboard, because that was what Sevagram had in 1972 — explaining the Krebs cycle, protein metabolism, vitamins, minerals, the intricate chemistry of the living body, to students who were encountering it for the first time.

He had not expected to discover, on arriving, that his salary at MGIMS was ₹495 per month — lower than the ₹725 he had earned at Nagpur University. He asked for fair pay. His requests were ignored. He stayed anyway, and kept teaching.

***

The division that developed between C.B. Taori and Dr. B.C. Harinath was not one of hostility so much as irreconcilable professional temperament. Harinath was a researcher — single-minded, driven by the immunology of filariasis, building his department's identity around laboratory discovery and publication. Taori was a teacher — his satisfaction came from the classroom, from making biochemistry accessible to first-year MBBS students, from running the clinical laboratory with meticulous precision and ensuring that the results it produced were reliable.

Neither calling was inferior to the other. But in a department where the head's priorities were research-centred, a man whose deepest satisfaction came from teaching occupied a structurally frustrating position. The intricacies of microfilarial immunology never captured Taori's imagination. The department's identity — which became increasingly synonymous with Harinath's research programme — left him peripheral to the work that defined it.

He tried to find a research path of his own. His interest lay in diabetes, not filariasis. He sought training, explored registration for a PhD through a former university professor. Dr. Sushila Nayar, who noticed his frustration and wanted to address it, contacted Dr. V. Ramalingaswamy at AIIMS in March 1975 to arrange a training programme in parasite immunology for him, then followed up two months later with the Director General of Health Sciences. Despite her efforts, Taori was denied access to the workshop.

The PhD never materialised. He could not register within MGIMS without working on filariasis. External routes fell through. Mr. Taori would never become Dr. Taori. He carried this with a specific kind of professional sadness — not bitterness exactly, but the settled awareness of a door that had closed and would not reopen.

In 1980, he completed a six-week endocrinology training programme at the National Institute of Nutrition, which sharpened his clinical biochemistry work and enabled him to mentor postgraduate students — guiding Chakrabarti through an MD on diabetes in 1994 and Pati through another in 1997. These were the research contributions available to him within his constraints, and he made them carefully.

***

What he built, and maintained for thirty-six years, was the clinical biochemistry laboratory at MGIMS — a service that generated blood chemistry results for the hospital's patients, on whose accuracy clinical decisions depended. He took ownership of it from his first year and never relinquished it. He standardised techniques, enforced quality controls, and ran it with an exactingness that had nothing to do with ambition or recognition. "Quality," he told his team, "is doing it right even when no one's watching."

This is the work that disappears from institutional memory most quickly — not because it was unimportant but because it produced no papers, no awards, and no visible monuments. Accurate laboratory results are experienced only in their absence: when they are wrong, when a treatment decision goes awry, when a patient is harmed. When they are right, they are invisible, absorbed into the ordinary functioning of a hospital as though they required no effort. Taori made them right, every day, for three and a half decades. The patients whose diagnoses were accurate because the biochemistry results were accurate will not know his name.

He also led the development of a paramedical course for eleventh and twelfth standard students at J.B. Science College, Wardha — a collaborative programme involving Biochemistry, Pathology, and Microbiology, funded by the Government of Maharashtra's Vocational Department. He understood that the laboratory sciences needed trained technicians as much as they needed professors, and he invested in the pipeline accordingly.

He retired as Reader in January 2005, having never reached the rank of Professor — the PhD requirement for promotion remained an obstacle he had never been able to clear. He remained in the classroom for three more years, teaching through November 2008 because the work itself still gave him something that retirement could not easily replace.

***

Nearly 2,300 medical students passed through his Biochemistry classes between 1972 and 2008. They learned the Krebs cycle and protein metabolism from a man with chalk on his hands and an MSc rather than a PhD, who had been denied the training he sought and had made peace, not entirely cheerfully, with the career he had rather than the one he had imagined. He taught them well regardless.

His son Gopal entered MGIMS with the class of 1990, earned his MD in Medicine from GMC Nagpur, specialised in critical care, and eventually settled in Australia. His daughter Anuradha followed in 1992, earning her DGO and MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Both children had watched their father teach in the same institution for the entirety of their childhood, and both had chosen medicine.

After retirement, Mr. and Mrs. Taori divided their time between India and Australia, present for the grandchildren that their children were raising on the far side of the world. Their modest house in Dhanwantary Colony — built in the early 1990s, as MGIMS faculty of that generation typically did when they decided to stay permanently — was the home they had made. Gopal's gift was a different kind of home: the one that said, in the language of houses and car keys and a son's tears, that the sacrifice had been seen and the sacrifice had mattered.

They did not live in it. They drove toward Sevagram the next afternoon, full of joy, and the road took everything.

Professor & Head of Biochemistry · Thirty-Seven Years at Sevagram · The Gentlest Man Three Hundred Students Ever Met

The night before he died, he shared warmth and laughter with his family. By morning, he had slipped away — without struggle, without burdening anyone. He was fifty-nine years old, and he had not been ill. Death arrived quietly, as if it knew that any other manner of arriving would have been wrong for this particular man.

Three hundred students wrote tributes. Nearly every one of them used the same word: gentle.

***

Maryada Venkata Rama Reddy was born on July 1, 1957, in Karivemula, a village in Andhra Pradesh sixty-two kilometres west of Kurnool. His father Narsimha Reddy and mother Narsamma were the quiet strong foundation of a family in which he was the eldest of four children. He completed his schooling at IPH School in Kodumur in 1972, his intermediate studies at Osmania College, Kurnool, and his BSc and MSc from Sri Venkateswara University by 1980.

He arrived at MGIMS in November 1980 as a Junior Research Fellow, twenty-three years old, stepping into a world that was foreign in almost every dimension. Hindi and Marathi were unknown to him. English had entered his life only after childhood. He had never set foot in a medical school. The department around him was full of physicians and surgeons. He had an MSc in Biochemistry. The question that formed quietly inside him — did he belong here? — was one he did not answer by leaving. He answered it by staying, and working, and slowly becoming indispensable.

Dr. B.C. Harinath, a fellow Telugu-speaking academic from Tirupati, had brought him to MGIMS. The department at that time was a crucible of early research energy — Harinath at its centre, supported by Mr. C.B. Taori, J.N. Naidu, and doctoral scholars including Dr. A.K. Malhotra, I. Kharat, and G.B.K.S. Prasad. For Reddy, Prasad's presence offered particular comfort — a familiar face in an unfamiliar place. Together they navigated the biochemistry laboratory and the research culture Harinath was building around filariasis. The lab became his refuge. From Patel Hostel to Kabir Colony, and eventually to MLK Colony, he moved through different quarters, each a witness to his growing confidence.

In December 1980, just a month after joining, he married Lakshmi Reddy, who came from Nagarur in the Kurnool district. She was also an MSc graduate, would later earn a BEd, and would eventually become Principal of Kasturba Vidya Mandir — a professional life built entirely in Sevagram. She joined him in 1982. They spent the next thirty-five years in this village together, raising two sons who would both study medicine at MGIMS and marry classmates who would also study medicine at MGIMS. The institution ran through their family like a thread.

***

He had not imagined, arriving in Sevagram, that he would one day sit in a laboratory at Harvard. But in August 1983, he secured a place in a WHO training programme at Harvard University's Department of Tropical Public Health, working with Dr. W.F. Piessens on hybridoma techniques — a vital tool in biomedical research that was then at the frontier of immunological investigation.

Four months in Massachusetts. The contrast with Sevagram could not have been more complete — the scale of the institution, the resources available, the density of expertise in every corridor. He immersed himself, learned what he had come to learn, and took careful note of the standard against which his own work would need to be measured.

He returned to Sevagram in December 1983 noticeably different — more assured, more focused, carrying the specific confidence of someone who has seen the wider world of their discipline and found that they can hold their own in it. The question of whether he belonged had been answered, definitively, somewhere between Cambridge and the Wardha plains. He never asked it again.

He completed his PhD in immunodiagnostics — filariasis — from Nagpur University in 1987. He rose from Lecturer to Reader in 1989, Associate Professor in 1996, Additional Professor in 1999. When Dr. Harinath retired in 2000, Reddy took charge of the department — and of responsibilities that extended well beyond it, including oversight of the library and the central store, management of research grants, and the full range of administrative work that a department head in a rural medical college absorbs without the institutional support available in larger universities. He handled it with what everyone who worked with him described as quiet efficiency — never appearing burdened, never seeking recognition for the load he was carrying.

***

The question he was sometimes asked — how could he win major research grants from international agencies while working from a small village like Sevagram? — had a straightforward answer: he had chosen to work on filariasis, an area that was critically important for public health in rural India and almost entirely neglected by biochemistry researchers in medical schools. The combination of genuine need, minimal competition, and serious scientific work produced exactly the recognition that those conditions reliably produce.

His research expanded from filariasis diagnostics into applied immunology and molecular biology, autoimmune diseases, and potential vaccine candidates — developing diagnostic tools and identifying targets that earned recognition from agencies operating far beyond Wardha district. He published more than 150 papers in indexed journals and mentored over a dozen PhD and MD students. He received further research training at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Rockford, accumulating expertise across hybridoma techniques, IRMS, and molecular biology.

He served as General Secretary of the Association of Clinical Biochemists of India from 2003 to 2009 and as Executive Council member of the Asian Pacific Federation of Clinical Biochemists from 2004 to 2010. He represented ACBI at the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry, served as Managing Editor of the Indian Journal of Clinical Biochemistry, and chaired the board of studies at Maharashtra University of Health Sciences. In 2011, MUHS awarded him its Best Teacher Award — making him the third MGIMS faculty member to receive the honour. He deflected the recognition with characteristic ease, crediting mentors, colleagues, and chance. Those who knew him understood that this was not false modesty. He genuinely did not experience his achievements as primarily his own.

His annual two-week workshops on immunodiagnostics drew thirty participants from across India, providing intensive hands-on training in diagnostic techniques for infectious diseases. They became nationally recognised, attracting more applicants than they could accommodate. He also brought third-year MBBS students into the research process through the ICMR Short-Term Studentship Programme — teaching them to collect data, analyse results, and write manuscripts — because he believed that early exposure to research changed how doctors thought about evidence for the rest of their careers. Many of those students found themselves drawn deeper into academic medicine because of those months in his laboratory.

***

"Don't guess," he would say, eyebrows slightly raised, when a student reached for a shortcut. "Think. Then answer."

He had no patience for memorisation without understanding, but he expressed this impatience without creating fear. His classroom manner was of a piece with everything else about him: precise in expectation, warm in delivery, genuinely interested in whether the person in front of him understood. Science, to him, was not about rote learning but about inquiry — the courage to question, the discipline to test, and the humility to accept when one was wrong.

First-year MBBS students — often overwhelmed, sometimes in genuine danger of failing — found in him someone who noticed their difficulty and addressed it without making them feel ashamed of it. He had a particular attentiveness to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, those who carried extra uncertainty about whether they belonged. He had known that uncertainty himself, arriving in Sevagram in 1980, and he had never forgotten what it felt like. He believed perseverance mattered as much as knowledge, and he communicated this belief in the specific way that is most persuasive: by behaving consistently as if it were true.

Many who came to him at the edge of failing found their footing because of him. He opened doors that he held open with one hand while continuing his other work with the other, because that is how generous people do it — without making the door-opening the main event. Ashalata Srinivasan, from the MGIMS class of 1989, put it simply: "A teacher takes a hand, opens a mind, and touches a heart." He lived by this without ever having articulated it.

The word his colleagues used for him was Ajatshatru — one who has no enemies. He bore no grudges, held no envy, sought no power. There was a childlike quality to his affection — free from malice, free from calculation. In a department where the research culture could be competitive and the administrative pressures were substantial, this quality was rarer than it sounds.

***

A photograph taken months before his death — set against the Bali sea — shows him serene and composed, modest and unassuming, radiating the particular grace of someone at peace with how they have spent their time. He had been to Bali with his family. He had come home to Sevagram. The following night, he was with his family in warmth and laughter. By morning, he was gone.

Dr. Manu Kothari once wrote that those who cannot live well cannot die well — that a good death is the crowning glory of a good, happy life. When Dr. Reddy's time came, he was spared the torment of prolonged illness, the indignity of slow decline, the suffering of toxic treatment. He departed as he had lived: without fuss, without burden, with quiet dignity.

His wife Lakshmi, Principal of Kasturba Vidya Mandir, was the steady partner of thirty-six years. Their sons Srikanth — MGIMS 2001, MD in Psychiatry — and Sridhar — MGIMS 2008, MS in Orthopaedics — both married classmates from the same institution: Pooja, MD in Pharmacology, and Sakshi, MD in Radiology. Both couples were formed at the institution their father had given his working life to. After his death, the family relocated to Indore.

He was fifty-nine. It was not enough years. But the years he had were used with such care, and such consistent generosity, that three generations of students mourned him simultaneously. Dr. Anshu, Professor of Pathology, wrote: "You would not have known a gentler soul. You would not have encountered a more meticulous, silent, and hardworking person."

Three hundred students said something similar, each in their own words, unprompted.

Professor & Head of Pathology · Founding Faculty · The Man Who Built a Department with Determination and Sweat

One Sunday morning, Dr. Satish Sharma received his weekly assignment: travel to GMC Nagpur, collect pathology specimens and slides from Mrs. Shobha Grover, and bring them back to Sevagram. The specimens came packed in two heavy cotton sacks, their seams straining under the weight of preserved tissues and glass slides. When no transport was available from Wardha East station, Sharma would sling the sacks over his shoulders and walk back through the dry dust.

This is how Dr. Ramvishal Agrawal built a pathology department. Specimen by specimen, Sunday by Sunday, carried on a postgraduate student's back from Nagpur because Sevagram's cupboards were bare and its shelves needed filling. He was building something in a place that had nothing to build with except determination and sweat — and he made determination and sweat sufficient.

Ramvishal Agrawal was born on March 15, 1934, in Raipur, and completed his schooling and premedical studies there before joining Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1952. He earned his MBBS in 1957 and completed his MD in Pathology and Bacteriology in 1963, trained under Dr. J.B. Srivastava — who would later become India's Director General of Health Services — and worked alongside Dr. B.K. Aikat at PGIMER Chandigarh, Dr. K.D. Sharma at Haffkine Institute, and Dr. Shobha Grover in ICMR's cytopathology programme. He also led forensic medicine services, developing postmortem and autopsy protocols that sharpened a diagnostic precision he would later carry into a teaching role.

In December 1970, he arrived in Sevagram to establish the Department of Pathology at MGIMS. His wife Dr. Padma Agrawal joined as Reader in Anatomy the same day. They came from GMC Nagpur, deputed by the Government of Maharashtra, stepping into an institution that was barely a year old and still solving the most basic problems of existence — what rooms to use, what equipment to acquire, how to make a medical school function in a village with rural simplicity and no urban infrastructure.

He was, for the first period, the entire department.

The pathology museum he created was characteristic of his approach: meticulous, purposeful, and made from whatever was available. He collected mounted specimens, photographs, and illustrations framed between X-ray plates — using X-ray film as mounting material because that is what was to hand. He introduced side-room laboratories — small diagnostic units within hospital wards where house officers could perform essential tests: white cell counts, haemoglobin measurements, malaria detection, urine glucose analysis — bringing the diagnostic function closer to the patient and reducing the delay between clinical suspicion and laboratory confirmation. By the time he left MGIMS in 1976, ten such side-room laboratories were operational.

He pioneered mobile diagnostic services, taking pathology to outreach camps in Deoli and Pulgaon — rural patients receiving accurate diagnoses at locations accessible to them, integrating pathology with public health in exactly the way the Gandhian ethos of the institution demanded.

He developed histopathology services specifically calibrated to the diseases that defined rural India in that era: leprosy, tuberculosis, and filariasis. Working closely with Dr. K.V. Desikan on leprosy and Dr. A.R. Shukla on ophthalmology, he refined diagnostic techniques for leprosy ocular involvement — work that helped preserve the eyesight of leprosy patients who might otherwise have gone blind. Pathology, to him, was not confined to the laboratory. It was a clinical tool, and its purpose was the patient.

Faculty joined him gradually: Dr. G.S. Gehlot in 1973, then Dr. Narang, Dr. Lele, Dr. Nasiruddin Khan, and Dr. S.M. Sharma — several of them MBBS graduates who later obtained their MDs and returned to lead the department they had first entered as junior faculty. The succession he created was as much about the people he formed as the systems he established.

When the Pathology department relocated to the new college building in 1973, the move happened on a Sunday, organised entirely by Dr. Agrawal and the 1970 batch — microscopes, slides, specimen jars, microtomes, staining equipment, records, and furniture, packed and transported by students and their professor together. By evening, he had brought the entire batch to his home and fed them. It was the kind of day that a batch remembers fifty years later.

The MGIMS library in 1969 was a small room beside the Biochemistry and Pathology laboratories: a table, two chairs, an almirah, and thirty-five books. Dr. Agrawal looked at it and saw what it could become.

He persuaded Dr. Sushila Nayar to allocate larger space and funds. He brought books from his own collection. He reached out to colleagues and encouraged donations. Dr. I.D. Singh, the first principal, donated his personal collection. The shelves filled. At one point, half the books on display were donated. The small room became two large halls.

He called it his child. This was not rhetorical. When the monsoon rains came through open windows and books began to soak, he rushed home, returned with old clothes — including one of his own shirts — and mopped the floor himself until the last puddle had dried. A pathologist in old clothes, mopping a library floor in the rain, because the books mattered.

Dr. Santosh Gupta, from the 1970 batch, remembered what it was like to be Dr. Agrawal's postgraduate student approaching their qualifying examinations. Knowing that Sevagram's limited patient volume could not provide the exposure needed, Agrawal sent his students to BJ Medical College, Pune, for intensive immersion in haematology and histopathology months before the exams. Pune offered a flood of slides and specimens and seasoned pathologists. When they returned to Sevagram, Gupta said, they no longer hesitated. When an examiner placed a slide under the microscope, they diagnosed with confidence. "Dr. Agrawal hadn't just trained us," Gupta recalled. "He had prepared us for the real world."

This habit of mind — thinking not about what was convenient for the institution but about what his students needed — extended beyond Sevagram. When Dr. Agrawal moved to BJ Medical College in Pune as Dean after leaving MGIMS in 1976, he used his position to open the door for MGIMS students who needed postgraduate places that Sevagram, which did not yet offer postgraduate courses, could not provide. Students from the 1969 through 1972 batches found their way to Pune through his deliberate intervention: Rajendra Deodhar and Bhakti Dastane from 1969; Pramod Gupta, Rajiv Hivre, Anilkumar Jain, and others from 1970; Govind Bang, Surinder Bajwa, Dilip Gode, and others from 1971; Krishan Dutt Bharadwaj and others from 1972. He had left Sevagram. He had not left his students.

At BJ Medical College, he introduced what became known as his "ting-ting" seminars — named for the sound of the slide box — requiring postgraduate students to make real-time diagnoses from unknown slides. The department he led there conducted over a thousand clinical post-mortems. He subsequently served as Dean at GMC Aurangabad and VMGMC Solapur before returning to BJMC Pune, and spent a decade after retirement shaping the pathology department at Bharati Vidyapeeth, Pune, building another museum. He published fifty research papers and led national pathology conferences. His students called him Bhishmacharya — the elder teacher whose guidance shaped their careers and instilled in them a sense of purpose that outlasted the curriculum.

His wife Padma, Professor of Anatomy, died before him. Their daughter Naina, who had grown up watching her parents build a medical institution in a Gandhian village, died a year before her father after a courageous struggle with breast cancer. Dr. Agrawal died on March 25, 2022, aged eighty-eight. Their son Neeraj, an oncologist at Duke Raleigh, and daughter Nita, a radiologist, both practice in the United States.

He had built a pathology department in a place that had nothing. He had built a library from thirty-five books. He had sent his students, on his own initiative, to Nagpur and Pune to get what Sevagram could not yet give them. He had built a museum in his retirement. He was always building something — spaces, systems, futures, the careers of people who would carry forward what he had started in the dry dust of Sevagram in 1970.

"His dedication was infectious," Satish Sharma said. "In a place with few resources, he built a department with sheer willpower and sweat."

The sacks came from Nagpur every Sunday. The shelves filled. The library survived the monsoon.

Professor & Head of Pathology · Five Years of Steady Service · The Sthitpragya of the Pathology Corridor

The word for him, those who worked alongside him agreed, was Sthitpragya — the Gita's term for one who possesses wisdom beyond knowledge, serenity beyond success. It was not a metaphor applied after the fact. It described, with unusual precision, how he actually was.

He moved through the Pathology corridors in his crisp white shirt and khadi trousers, unhurried, saying little. His hair had gone grey and he had not troubled to dye it — an indifference to vanity that seemed consistent with everything else about him. His thick spectacles framed eyes that observed more than they revealed. When he did speak, it was in Marathi, measured and calm, and it was sufficient. He had nothing to prove. He had ceased, long before arriving in Sevagram, to be surprised by life's arrangements.

K.V. Moghe was born in 1931, the same year as the third batch of Government Medical College, Nagpur — which he would later join in 1949, alongside Dr. M.L. Sharma, who would go on to become GMC's principal. He earned his MBBS in 1954 and his MD in Pathology in 1963, both from the institution where he had trained and where he would spend most of his career. He began as a Lecturer in Pathology in 1956, rising steadily to Reader and then Professor by April 1969.

There was, whispered about with a trace of irony by those who knew him, a brief posting to an Ayurvedic college — an episode he absorbed with the same equanimity he brought to everything else, filing it under life's occasionally absurd arrangements and moving on.

In 1976, the Government of Maharashtra sent five professors from Nagpur to Sevagram in one consignment, a deliberate effort to fortify the still-young MGIMS. Dr. Moghe was among them. He took charge of the Pathology department, inheriting it from Dr. G.S. Gehlot, who had held it briefly after Dr. Agrawal's departure. His salary was ₹2,344 per month — modest, unpretentious, entirely sufficient, much like himself.

The Pathology department of that era was a particular kind of place: the sharp smell of formalin, the quiet hum of microscopes, mounted specimens and hand-drawn charts crafted by Sitaram, the department's resident artist, who produced visual teaching aids with a devotion that made the walls a kind of illustrated textbook. Students pored over slides in rooms lit by laboratory lamps, deciphering the architecture of cells and tissues under the patient guidance of a department head who carried his knowledge without display.

Dr. Moghe's teaching was an extension of his personality — direct, uncluttered, practical. He had no patience for academic posturing. What mattered was whether students understood the essentials. As pathology's canonical texts evolved — Anderson, then Robbins coming into wider use — he remained focused on the fundamentals, distilling rather than embellishing, ensuring clarity rather than exhaustiveness. He taught mostly through practical sessions rather than large lectures, and mostly in Marathi, because that was the language in which the concepts would settle most securely in his students' minds.

He had a deep fondness for Clinical Pathological Conferences — the monthly sessions where a case was presented and the assembled clinicians and pathologists worked through it together like a medical detective story. He presided over these with quiet authority and a particular kind of intellectual pleasure: the enjoyment of a man who genuinely likes puzzles and has spent a career developing the tools to solve them. He led students through the maze of symptoms and findings without flamboyance, nudging rather than directing, leaving them with the satisfaction of having found the answer rather than been given it.

He supervised four MD theses: Santosh Gupta on G6PD deficiency, S.M. Sharma on blood groups and breast cancer, V.R. Bhongade on the epidemiology and pathology of laryngeal cancer, and N.S. Ingole on frozen section analysis. These were the research projects available in an era when formal methodology training was scarce even for supervisors, when research questions were broad rather than sharp, and when the MD thesis was more often a passport to graduation than a genuine contribution to knowledge. Dr. Moghe supervised conscientiously within those constraints, as did his contemporaries across the country. The limitations were systemic; the effort was real.

The department's reach extended well beyond the college walls. Pathology technicians and residents traveled to villages for social service camps, collecting blood samples in the night for filariasis and malaria screening — torches in hand, moving through fields and alleys, doing the work that rural public health required of people willing to do it.

The camp at Sirpur Kagaznagar — a town so far south that its people spoke Telugu — was particularly memorable. The response was large enough and the need evident enough that the hospital had to produce signage in Telugu, a quiet testament to how far MGIMS's reach had extended and how seriously the department took its public health function. No grand announcements followed. The work was done and the camp moved on.

Dr. Moghe presided over this department with the same steady efficiency he brought to his microscope work: not spectacular, but reliable in the way that matters most in medicine, where the consequences of unreliability fall on patients.

Two things gave him particular solace outside the laboratory. One was Marathi classical music, which filled his solitary hours and which he returned to with the consistency of someone who finds in a beloved art form a register of experience that work cannot provide. The other was the Bhagavad Gita — not as performance or ideology but as a philosophical companion, a text whose concept of the steadily wise person he seemed, without apparent effort, to embody.

He never lost his temper. He never sought recognition. He functioned without aggression and without the jostle for institutional position that marks less settled personalities. He was, as one assessment of him put it, a gentleman to the core — the rare kind of department head untouched by ambition. In a world where success often inflates the ego in proportion to its arrival, he had arrived at a settled place decades earlier and stayed there.

In February 1981, Dr. M.M. Arora joined the department, and a fortnight later Dr. Moghe relinquished his position and returned to GMC Nagpur, where he led the Pathology department until retirement in May 1985, handing the post to Dr. Shobha Grover. He had spent five years in Sevagram, arriving from Nagpur as a quietly authoritative figure and departing the same way, having given the department and its students exactly what he had to give — which was, in each case, more than it looked like at the time.

His tenure was one of basic haematology and histopathology, formalin and microscopes, monthly CPCs and midnight blood collection camps. It was not a period of dramatic institutional transformation. It was a period of steady, competent service in a department that served patients who had no other option. That is its own form of distinction.

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Professor & Head of Pathology · Six and a Half Years at Sevagram · The Man Who Found a Discovery on a Bicycle and Taught Medicine Where It Lived

During a practical examination, Dr. Gehlot noticed a student from the 1976 batch who had come from flood-stricken Allahabad. "Where from?" he asked. "Allahabad," the student replied. Without further preamble, Dr. Gehlot proceeded to question him entirely on the epidemiology and microbiology of diarrhoeal disease — transforming a routine examination into a lesson directly relevant to what the student had just lived through.

This was his pedagogy in miniature: no patience for performance, no interest in jargon, complete insistence that medicine remain connected to the world it existed to serve. He had little regard for students who dazzled with terminology but lacked depth. What mattered was whether the knowledge could be applied — in a flood, in a village, in the specific situation in front of you.

Gopal Sharan Nainaji Gehlot was born on June 15, 1939, in Talwada, a village in Nalchha Tehsil in Dhar district, Madhya Pradesh. He completed his schooling there and moved thirty kilometres to Badwani for his intermediate education, finishing in 1956. Medicine drew him early. He entered Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal, in 1959 and earned his MBBS in July 1964.

Between his MBBS and the MD he would complete in 1972, he spent years in general practice — establishing a thriving clinic that gave him a clinical breadth unusual in a future pathologist, a grounding in the full spectrum of patient presentation that would later inform how he taught and examined.

His MD thesis at MGM Medical College, Indore, took him into the Adivasi heartland of Madhya Pradesh to study leucocyte variations among tribal communities. Research, for him, meant long journeys on foot and bicycle to villages where modern medicine rarely arrived — the same mode of fieldwork that had characterised the Gandhian leprosy workers in the region and that MGIMS would later build into its institutional DNA. From this work, he identified what would later be recognised as the Pelger-Huët anomaly — a morphological abnormality in neutrophil nuclei that carries diagnostic significance. It was a genuine discovery, made in the field rather than in a well-equipped laboratory, and it earned him lasting recognition in the discipline.

He spent seven and a half years as resident pathologist at MGM Medical College, building expertise across clinical and chemical pathology, bacteriology, serology, morbid anatomy, histopathology, and blood banking. Dr. J.N. Monga, the formidable Professor and Head of Pathology, validated his abilities — a stamp of approval that carried weight in academic circles.

By the early 1970s, MGIMS had a Reader in Pathology post that had sat vacant for over two and a half years. Dr. R.V. Agrawal, then Head of Pathology, spotted Gehlot's potential and personally recommended him to Dr. Sushila Nayar. The interview was a quiet affair. Dr. I.D. Singh, the Principal, found in Gehlot a man of few words and firm resolve, and offered him the position.

On June 14, 1973 — one day before his thirty-fourth birthday — Dr. Gehlot arrived in Sevagram. His salary was ₹1,042 per month. The department he joined was still in its early years, shaped by Dr. Agrawal's founding energy but still thin on staff and infrastructure. He worked with quiet diligence, building his expertise in the specific disease profile of rural Vidarbha — leprosy, tuberculosis, filariasis, the parasitic and infectious conditions that defined the pathology workload of a hospital serving an underserved population.

When Dr. Agrawal left in 1976, Gehlot took over as Head of Pathology on January 11, adding responsibility for Forensic Medicine — a discipline Dr. Agrawal had previously managed — to his existing portfolio. He was not the most conspicuous figure on the MGIMS campus. He did not seek limelight. He ran a department, taught students, supervised postgraduate work, and came back the next day and did it again.

At 8 MLK Colony, Dr. Gehlot lived alone for most of his Sevagram years. His wife Jaswant — whom he had married on May 25, 1963 — ran a nursing home in Indore, delivering babies and treating patients with her RMP qualification and diploma in Homeopathy. Their three children, two daughters and a son, stayed in Indore for school. For four years, Sevagram was his home in name; his family was elsewhere.

His kitchen was a kerosene stove and a few pots. Vidarbha summers were merciless — the heat clinging through the nights, the air barely moving. His son Sunil, who visited during summer holidays, remembered the only solution available: soak the mosquito nets in water, stretch them over the beds, and hope the night breeze dried them slowly enough to cool the air beneath. Such were the material conditions in which a senior pathologist and department head lived while building an institution that would eventually serve hundreds of thousands of patients.

The isolation accumulated. In July 1977, he submitted a resignation. He later withdrew it. In September 1979, he applied through UPSC for a post at Goa Medical College. This time the departure was final. On January 15, 1980, he was relieved of his duties. His Sevagram chapter had lasted six and a half years.

He returned to Indore and set up general practice in Tilak Nagar. The pathologist became, by incremental community demand, a trusted neighbourhood doctor — mornings spent in a bustling clinic diagnosing fevers, anaemias, and infections, two hours in the pathology laboratory, and the rest of the day available to the steady stream of villagers who had learned to trust him. For nearly two decades, until 2011, he worked in both modes simultaneously, the clinical and the diagnostic.

He subsequently taught at Aurobindo Medical College in Indore, then at a medical college in Ujjain, and finally at a dental college in Indore — teaching until his final years with the consistency of someone for whom the activity itself remained worthwhile independent of institutional affiliation or professional status.

His son Dr. Sunil Gehlot, who had entered MGIMS with the class of 1988 — fifteen years after his father arrived in Sevagram — runs a private surgical practice in Indore. The father had come to build a department; the son had come to be educated in it. Between the two arrivals, MGIMS had become something worth choosing rather than merely something that needed people willing to go.

Dr. Gehlot died on November 18, 2016, aged seventy-seven, of cardiac arrest after a long struggle with colon and prostate cancer. He had found the Pelger-Huët anomaly in an Adivasi village on a bicycle, built a pathology department in a Gandhian medical college on a kerosene stove, and spent the rest of his working life in the service of patients who came to him because they trusted him.

The flood student from Allahabad, questioned on diarrhoeal disease in a Sevagram examination hall, would have carried that lesson for a long time. The best teaching tends to find the student where the student actually is

Leprologist · Chairman, LEPRA India · The Man Who Examined Thirty Thousand People in Thirty-Five Villages and Took Notes at the Journal Club Until His Eighties

On Friday mornings, a slight elderly man would appear at the Department of Medicine's journal club. He was not on the faculty list for the session. He had not been invited as a discussant. He came because he wanted to learn, and because he saw no reason why a man of his age and standing should stop wanting to learn.

He was the only one who took notes.

When the presenting resident finished, questions would come from the floor — the usual ones, testing knowledge, probing gaps. Then Dr. K.V. Desikan would raise his hand. His questions were the kind that leave a presenter momentarily speechless: precise, unexpectedly deep, emerging from a lifetime of accumulated knowledge that the twenty-eight-year-old at the front of the room could not have anticipated. The mischievous smile that followed was legendary. He knew exactly what he was doing.

He was in his seventies and eighties during those Friday mornings. He had received the Damien-Dutton Award — the highest international recognition in leprosy work. He had over 150 publications. He had designed and implemented the world's first Survey, Education and Treatment programme for leprosy, a method the Government of India adopted nationally in 1955 and the WHO subsequently endorsed globally. He took notes at the journal club.

***

Krishnaswami Venkataraman Desikan was born in 1926 as the eleventh of twelve children in a poor family. He entered Mysore Medical College with the MBBS batch of 1944 and distinguished himself by reaching his third year without failing a single subject in any year — a genuine outlier by the standards of an era when medical school attrition was high. He qualified as a doctor in 1949, already shaped by Gandhian ideals that would govern every subsequent decision he made about where to work and why.

Before he reached his final year, he had been diagnosed with leprosy himself.

This is not a minor biographical detail. To be a medical student in the 1940s and contract the disease that most frightened and stigmatised patients — to experience from inside what the diagnosis meant, what it did to the person who received it, how doctors and society responded — was the crucible of his entire career. His treatment brought him into contact with Dr. Cochrane and Dr. Paul Brand at the Christian Medical College, Vellore. Their influence planted the interest. Dr. Ramanujam, a leprologist in Madras, nurtured it. Professor Jagadeeshan of the Hind Kusht Nivaran Sangh connected him to Dr. Sushila Nayar.

The connection to Sevagram had been made. It would take decades to complete.

***

In the early 1950s, Dr. Sushila Nayar was secretary of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi Kushtha Nivaran Samiti at Wardha, working to integrate leprosy control into Gandhi's constructive work programme. She directed Desikan to undergo formal training at the Ackworth Leprosy Hospital in Wadala, Bombay, before joining her. By the time he completed the training, she had left Wardha to become Health Minister of Delhi State.

Dr. Wardekar, a pathologist who had taken over the Samiti, welcomed him instead. The organisation became the Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation, and Desikan joined it in 1952. Wardekar had identified thirty-five villages around Sevagram for a leprosy control initiative. What followed was the work that would define Desikan's reputation and, through him, the management of leprosy across India and the world.

He visited all thirty-five villages — on foot, by bicycle, by bullock cart, on horseback, wading across rivulets. He went door to door, examining every man, woman, and child for signs of leprosy. Over five years, he and his team repeatedly examined more than 30,000 individuals and diagnosed 550 with leprosy. He established clinics in three villages and began treating patients with Dapsone. He generated awareness, conducted epidemiological surveys, and motivated patients to seek treatment — changing the relationship between the disease and the community from one of concealment and fear to one of engagement with healthcare.

This was the world's first Survey, Education and Treatment programme for leprosy diagnosis and management. The Government of India used it as the model for the National Leprosy Control Programme in 1955. The WHO endorsed and globalised it. The strategic logic — systematic survey, community education, accessible treatment — has shaped leprosy control worldwide for seventy years. It was designed and tested in thirty-five villages around Sevagram by a man in his mid-twenties who walked to reach them.

***

In 1957, he was transferred to the GMLF's Leprosy Control Unit at Chilakalapalli in Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh — a semi-tribal area where he was treating nearly 15,000 leprosy patients. He extended his services beyond the unit's mandated boundaries into tribal villages where no other doctor was present, providing emergency medical care for any condition that presented itself.

In 1962, at thirty-six, he enrolled at Christian Medical College, Vellore — the institution where he had been treated as a student — for a postgraduate degree in Pathology. His MD thesis involved autopsy studies on leprosy patients. He completed it in 1966. It was the beginning of the histopathological work for which he would become internationally recognised.

From Chingleput, where he served as Senior Research Officer at the Central Leprosy Teaching and Research Centre, he conducted a WHO fellowship year at institutions in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan — training in mouse footpad experiments and other advances in leprosy research. Back in India, he pioneered studies that used mouse footpad techniques to understand the pathogenesis of the disease.

In 1976, Union Health Minister Karan Singh asked him to take charge as Director of JALMA — the Japanese Leprosy Mission for Asia institute in Agra, recently taken over by ICMR. Within a year, JALMA had established itself as a centre of both outstanding clinical work and serious publication. National and international workshops, symposia, and conferences followed. His co-authorships with colleagues Ramu and Girdhar produced a sustained body of leprosy research across its entire clinical, histopathological, and immunological spectrum. He published over 150 papers in his career, covering descriptive epidemiology, diagnostics, histology, immunology, physiology, therapy, and clinical observation. His bibliography was the map of a discipline he had helped create.

***

He retired from JALMA in 1987 and came back to Sevagram — full circle, thirty-five years after Gandhi's constructive work programme had first drawn him to this village and its surrounding district. With support from LEPRA, the British Leprosy Relief Association, he established a leprosy histopathology laboratory at MGIMS and took charge as the first Chairman of LEPRA India, a position he held until 2003. From Secunderabad, LEPRA India conducted leprosy control activities in Andhra Pradesh and the tribal areas of Koraput, Orissa.

He continued research from a small office, writing notes on the backs of envelopes, because that was what was at hand and because the idea mattered more than the medium. He attended the Friday journal club in the Medicine department because he wanted to know what was current and because he saw no reason to stop learning. He asked questions that left residents speechless because he had been thinking about infectious disease for forty years and the depth of that thinking was not something that retirement could diminish.

In 2001, he received the Damien-Dutton Award — the highest international recognition in leprosy. The director of the Damien-Dutton Society spoke of his untiring efforts to bring treatment to the poorest of the poor, to restore self-worth to people whose disease had stripped it from them. His response was characteristically precise: "I feel honoured, but I have to remind myself that I am no greater than several others who have worked, struggled, sacrificed, and remained unknown."

He meant it. Authorship questions can damage the best professional relationships; Desikan never agreed to put his name to a paper he had not worked on, and never gifted authorship. He gave his juniors the first-author position routinely. He co-authored exactly one paper with his daughter, Dr. Prabha Desikan — a microbiologist, later at MGIMS — who had grown up watching her father walk to villages and examine tens of thousands of people for a disease that others feared to approach. The single shared paper between them is its own kind of testament.

***

He lived to ninety-six. In his final years, the maladies of old age kept indoors a man whose nature was to be in motion — in villages, in laboratories, in conference halls, in the journal clubs of departments where he was not on the roster. The body stilled. The mind, by all accounts, did not.

His daughter Dr. Prabha Desikan compiled his biography — K.V. Desikan: An Extraordinary Life — launched at the International Leprosy Congress in Hyderabad in early November 2022, days after his death on October 23. The congress was a gathering of the international leprosy research community. His biography was launched among the people who understood best what his work had meant.

He had been diagnosed with the disease as a medical student and spent sixty years trying to understand it, treat it, and remove the fear and stigma that made it worse than its pathology required. He examined 30,000 people in thirty-five villages near Sevagram in the early 1950s. He returned to Sevagram in 1987. He attended the Friday journal club and took notes.

"I have to remind myself that I am no greater than several others who have worked, struggled, sacrificed, and remained unknown."

He said this. He did not believe it was false modesty. He believed it was true. It was also, by the evidence of everything else, not entirely accurate.

Professor & Head of Pathology · Twenty Years at Sevagram · The Rarest Kind of Life

Three months after Dr. Narendra Samal died, on February 26, 2024, Swarnlata died too — at home, as if she could not bear to leave him alone on his final journey.

They had spent fifty years proving, in the specific language of action rather than declaration, that love was a practice and not a sentiment. He had waited years to pursue his own postgraduate degree so that she could complete hers first. He had resigned as Professor and Head of Pathology — a position of genuine standing, built over two decades — so that she could accept a department headship at a new institution. He had converted from Islam to Hinduism and changed his name, officially documented in the Maharashtra Gazette in February 1985, so that there would be no ambiguity about where he stood. When she suffered a severe brain injury in a scooter accident in the early 1990s, he became her doctor, her nurse, and her steady presence until her recovery. When a stroke left him profoundly disabled in his final years, she became his caregiver, tending to him without complaint until his death. Then she followed him, three months later.

Some bonds are too strong to be broken even by time. Theirs was one of them.

Naziruddin Khan was born on April 2, 1947, in Charinangala, a village in Badchana tehsil of Odisha, just months before Indian independence. He was orphaned early. Poverty was a constant companion through his childhood and education — through Bhadrak College, through Utkal University, through Sriram Chandra Bhanj Medical College in Cuttack, where he completed his MBBS in 1970. Each institution he passed through was a step taken with the single-mindedness of someone who understood that education was the only available path.

What brought him to MGIMS was a Gandhian freedom-struggle veteran named Bihari Lal, who had a keen eye for potential and wrote a letter to Dr. Sushila Nayar recommending the young Dr. Khan. When he arrived at MGIMS in the summer of 1972, the only available position was house officer in Medicine. He took it without hesitation.

In August 1972, he transitioned to Pathology as a Lecturer — the department where he would spend the next two decades building both his career and the field itself. The following year he married Swarnlata Samal, an Odia woman from a Hindu family, and together they committed to a life in Sevagram — one thousand kilometres from Odisha, in a place whose language, culture, and rhythms were entirely unfamiliar. They were both without postgraduate degrees when they arrived. Neither had the resources to enrol in a three-year programme away from MGIMS. They would have to be patient, and they were patient — but he was patient for her first.

Students from the 1975 to 1992 batches called him Khan Chacha. They said this with a particular warmth that coexisted, uneasily to outsiders but naturally to those who had been taught by him, with the memory of flying chalk and flying dusters.

"He used to strike terror in the hearts of students," recalled Monika Ahuja of the 1982 batch. Abhay Kelkar from 1987 put it differently: "Despite the occasional turbulence, we were blessed to have been taught, scolded, and rebuked by this teacher in his inimitable style."

His intensity was not cruelty. It was the particular severity of a man who believed pathology was serious, that medical students were capable of mastering it seriously, and that anything less than full engagement was a failure of respect — toward the subject, toward the patients who needed doctors to understand it, and toward the students themselves. He was easily recognisable in the corridors: white khadi trousers, an off-white silk shirt, paan almost always in his mouth, a distinct Odia accent that gave his presence a quality unlike anyone else on campus. He supervised seventeen postgraduate students through their MD theses, including V.C. Gupta, Aruna Mutha, Kiran Swarup, Milind Jagtap, Nitin Gangane, Girish Muzumdar, and Renuka Kulkarni. Dr. Nitin Gangane went on to become Dean of MGIMS and later Vice-Chancellor of KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research, Belagavi.

Beyond teaching, he took on the editorship of the MGIMS Annual Reports in the mid-1980s, working with Dr. S. John Premendran, Mr. Shankar Bhat, Dr. Pradeep Joel, and Mr. C.D. Gokulachandran. In September 1988, Dr. Sushila Nayar appointed him Warden of the Boys' Hostel alongside Dr. A.P. Jain — tasked with improving discipline and conditions in a hostel that had become difficult to manage. He approached it with the same rigour he brought to the classroom. Dr. Nayar wrote him a personal letter of commendation, acknowledging his conscientiousness and the trust he had justified through his service.

The conversion and the name change — from Naziruddin Khan to Narendra Samal — happened in February 1985 and were officially recorded in the Maharashtra Gazette. He had already been Swarnlata's husband for twelve years. The conversion was not a precondition she had set. It was a statement he chose to make, about belonging, about commitment, about the kind of man he intended to be.

Their home in Sevagram became a tradition for students during Saraswati Puja — the Muslim-turned-Hindu professor and his Hindu wife welcoming students with sweets and warmth, across whatever religious boundaries the calendar recognised. Dr. V.K. Gupta, a pathologist from the 1976 batch who remembered both of them well, spoke of the love they shared as something that transcended the narrow categories the world tried to impose on it.

In May 1992, he resigned as Professor and Head of Pathology at MGIMS.

The reason was straightforward: Swarnlata had been offered the position of Head of the Department at the newly established JN Medical College in Sawangi, Wardha. She had been a Lecturer at MGIMS since 1976, had risen through Reader and Associate Professor, and had reached Professor in 1990. But the path to department head at MGIMS was blocked by the existing structure. Dr. Nayar, who valued them both, had created an additional professorship specifically to ensure Swarnlata's promotion could proceed. It was not enough.

He resigned from the position he had built over twenty years. He walked away from it so that she could walk toward something she deserved.

Dr. Nayar wrote him a personal note expressing her disappointment — not anger, but the sadness of someone who had invested in a person and wished the conversation had happened earlier. She respected his decision. She wished him well.

At Sawangi, he developed clinical laboratories and continued teaching pathology. In November 2017, he suffered a severe stroke that required intensive care and mechanical ventilation for three weeks. He survived but was left profoundly disabled — dependent, confined, the active and forceful figure of the classroom reduced to the stillness of a man who could no longer do for himself. For six years, Swarnlata cared for him at home, without complaint, with the matter-of-fact devotion that had characterised everything she had done in their life together.

He died on December 3, 2023. She died on February 26, 2024.

Their elder son Nitin is an MGIMS alumnus from the class of 1995 who completed his MS in Orthopaedics at his father's institution. Their younger son is a physiotherapist. The boys grew up in the house where Saraswati Puja was celebrated and paan was always present and students came for sweets, where their father wore white khadi and spoke with an Odia accent and threw chalk when he needed to and loved their mother in a manner that left no room for ambiguity.

The seventeen pathologists he trained are practising across the country. The institution he helped build across two decades in Sevagram, and the one he helped launch in Wardha, carry the imprint of a man who understood that rigour and love were not opposites — that both demanded the same quality of commitment, the same refusal to do things halfway.

He gave everything to his work and everything to his wife, and somehow both were given fully, not divided. This is the rarest kind of life.

Professor & Head of Pathology · Forty-One Years at Sevagram · The Legacy That Is Quiet, Unresolved, and Real

His father, Dr. M.L. Sharma, was one of the most commanding figures in MGIMS history — charismatic, dynamic, deeply admired, the kind of person around whom institutional memory organises itself. Satish Sharma arrived in Sevagram on July 18, 1974, his father's forty-fifth birthday, and spent the next four decades working in the same institution, in the department just down the corridor.

He was not his father. He knew it. He did not try to be.

He was a reserved man, almost a loner — soft-spoken, rarely socialising, often seen pacing the corridors in the particular manner of someone whose thinking is done in motion. He was approachable, kind, a good listener. He was not a leader in the way the word usually implies: someone who asserts, directs, and commands. Administration was not his calling. Conflict avoidance was his default. The department, at times, ran itself. Yet he taught pathology at MGIMS for nearly forty years, guided twenty-one postgraduate theses, and understood what a blood smear could tell you better than most people in the country.

His legacy at MGIMS is quiet and unresolved, as his own institution's assessment of him acknowledged. It is also real.

Satish Sharma was born on December 5, 1949, in Barwaha, a town on the Narmada River in West Nimar district of Madhya Pradesh, named for the twelve ghats that once lined its banks. His father was twenty years older than him — still a medical student at Government Medical College, Nagpur, when Satish was born. The family lived in a medical colony opposite Ajni railway station, surrounded by doctors and medical teachers. Medicine was not a career Satish chose so much as a world he had always inhabited.

He attended St. Antony's High School in Ajni, then Patwardhan High School in Sitabuldi, then Mohota Science College. He entered Indira Gandhi Medical College, Nagpur, in the second batch — admitted with 59.8% in his BSc Part I, at a time when 60% was the standard threshold. The margin was thin. In his second MBBS, he found his subject. Pathology — its precision, its detective logic, the way a microscope revealed what the naked eye could not — was what he wanted to spend his life doing.

His father had moved to Sevagram in December 1970, deputed by the Government of Maharashtra to help build MGIMS. On July 18, 1974 — his father's birthday — Satish arrived to join him. The Pathology department was then under Dr. R.V. Agrawal, who had known the Sharma family since their Nagpur colony days. Agrawal recognised Satish's interest and took him on. Alongside Dr. Santosh Gupta from the 1971 batch, he threw himself into histopathology in a department that had few patients, fewer specimens, and faculty who sketched microscopic findings on blackboards because teaching slides were scarce.

His MD thesis under Dr. K.V. Moghe examined breast tumours — their histology, blood group isoantigens, and sex chromatin — precise work requiring patience and careful eyes. Patient load in Sevagram was low in those years, and Dr. Agrawal solved the exposure problem the same way he had solved it for others: he sent Satish and Santosh to B.J. Medical College, Pune, for intensive immersion in slides and specimens before the final examination.

He described the pathology of his training years with the clarity of someone who had thought carefully about what that era demanded: no auto-analysers, haematology relying entirely on morphology, haemoglobin estimated by Sahli's method, cells counted manually with a haemocytometer. Histopathology was labour-intensive — tissues processed by hand, microtomy manual, staining basic haematoxylin and eosin. Frozen sections were rare. Immunohistochemistry was unheard of. Complex cases were sent to Nagpur or Bombay. But both Dr. Agrawal and Dr. Moghe had taught him that a well-trained pathologist could do more with a microscope than any machine.

He took that lesson permanently. Through the decades when electronic cell counters became standard and automation reshaped laboratory medicine, he continued to trust the blood smear. RBC morphology fascinated him throughout his career — the way each red cell's shape and size and colour told a story about what was happening inside a patient's body. He could classify anaemia from a smear with the confidence of someone who had been doing it for thirty years, because he had been.

He became Reader in 1982 and led the department from 1995 to 2004, later continuing as Professor. A technicality in the promotion structure kept him from reaching Director-Professor — a small irony that those who knew him noted without drama.

Between 1987 and 2009, he supervised twenty-one postgraduate theses covering fine needle aspiration cytology, sickle cell anaemia, leukemia, breast cancer, Helicobacter pylori in gastric lesions, placental histology in adverse pregnancy outcomes, mast cell distribution in leprosy, and frozen section diagnostics. It was a substantial body of mentorship across a broad range of the discipline.

His students remembered him pacing the classroom with chalk, sketching histological details with effortless ease, filling lectures with real-world examples rather than abstract descriptions. He made pathology concrete. He revealed the essence of disease rather than merely cataloguing its appearances.

What he could not do — or would not — was the administrative work of leadership. He avoided enforcing decisions, let things run their course, and withdrew from the institutional confrontations that department heads inevitably face. His junior colleagues absorbed the guidance role in thesis supervision when he stepped back from it. The department, at times, continued without his direction because he did not provide direction. These are the facts, and they sit alongside the other facts without cancelling them.

His father's shadow was long. Dr. M.L. Sharma had commanded and people had followed. Satish Sharma had the intellect, the experience, the years — and a temperament that made the commanding mode unavailable to him. He lived in the institution, and in the shadow, and left his mark on both in a register quieter than his father's but not less real.

He retired as Professor and Head at the end of 2015, then remained at MGIMS on annual extensions for another six years before moving to Bhopal. He taught at Mahavir Institute of Medical Sciences and later at Shankaracharya Medical College, Bhilai — stepping away finally on October 1, 2023, after forty-nine years in medical education. He was seventy-three.

For nearly a decade, he had managed the Nagpur PMT Centre alongside his departmental responsibilities, ensuring examination logistics ran cleanly. He had captained his school football team for three consecutive years and retained a genuine love for sports — when Dr. O.P. Gupta needed someone to lead the institute's sports department in the mid-1990s, the choice was immediate.

His sons Pawan and Vijay are both MGIMS alumni — Community Medicine and Anaesthesiology, one settled in Dubai, the other in Hyderabad. He now lives in Dhanvantary Colony, a mile and a half from the medical college where he arrived on his father's birthday in 1974.

Dr. R.V. Agrawal's instruction to his students was to focus on a cell and try to understand what it does in health and disease. Satish Sharma heard this and carried it. Over forty years, he pressed his eye to the microscope and did exactly that — reading cells, finding stories, trusting the preparation of the eye more than the output of the machine. Whatever his limitations as an administrator, as a pathologist he was serious and skilled, and in the end a serious and skilled pathologist who teaches for four decades shapes a great many doctors who will carry what they learned into wards and clinics and operating rooms for the rest of their working lives.

That is its own form of legacy. Quiet, unresolved, and real.

Reader, Pathology · Nine Years at Sevagram · The Man Who Knew Viswanath's Debut Scores

The interview panel included Dr. Sushila Nayar and, to Santosh Gupta's surprise, Pratibha Patil — then Maharashtra's state public health minister, later India's first woman President.

Patil leaned forward. "Are you interested in sports?"

"Yes, Madam. Cricket."

"Do you know how many runs Gundappa Viswanath scored on his debut?"

Without hesitation: "0 and 137. The Kanpur Test against Australia last year."

A newspaper was fetched. The score was verified. Pratibha Patil smiled. "You may go."

He had secured his place at MGIMS.

Santosh Gupta was born on December 5, 1950, in Gondia, the eldest of six siblings in a joint family of modest means. His father Gokul Prasad taught at a middle school; his mother Shyama Devi ran the household. Her atrial fibrillation shaped his childhood more than anything else — her heart racing unpredictably, confining her to the house, requiring Santosh to balance school, household chores, and her care simultaneously. His grandmother had bronchial asthma. Medicine was not an abstract ambition for him. It was a response to specific suffering he had watched from close range and felt powerless to address.

In 1968, he missed admission to Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur, by three marks. He completed a BSc at Dhote Bandhu Science College, Gondia, and waited. In 1970, when BHU conducted the PMT for MGIMS, he appeared. The interview with Dr. Nayar and Pratibha Patil followed. He knew Viswanath's debut scores. He was in.

MGIMS in 1970 was bare and unfinished — buildings scattered across dry land, no orientation camp, no Gandhi Ashram stay, the old hospital housing wards, OPDs, lecture halls, seminar rooms, dissection hall, and operating theatres all together. He was not there for comfort. He was there for a purpose he had clarified beside his mother's bed years earlier.

During his final MBBS viva in November 1975, he was questioned for thirty minutes on a paraparesis patient from Chhattisgarh — neuroanatomy, neuropathology, clinical neurology. He had long abandoned Davidson's Medicine for Cecil's and Rustom Jal Vakil's Clinical Medicine. He held his ground. He loved Medicine and expected to practise it.

Sevagram had no postgraduate programmes in 1975. Further education meant Pune or Bombay, and most courses were unpaid. Santosh's father was in debt. His family depended on him. Earning while studying was not a preference — it was a constraint.

Pathology offered something Medicine did not: a salaried lecturer's post for MBBS graduates, without the usual progression through house officer and registrar roles. His heart was in Medicine. His situation was in Pathology. Survival came first.

He joined MGIMS as Lecturer in Pathology on January 14, 1977, under Dr. K.V. Moghe, on a basic pay of ₹325 plus allowances. Six months later, Dr. Narayan Ingole — a batch junior — became the second MGIMS alumnus to join as faculty. When the MD Pathology programme began in 1978, Santosh and Dr. Satish Sharma were its first two candidates.

His thesis on G6PD deficiency was not proceeding well. A faculty member from Jhansi named Dr. Saxena offered him advice he would remember for the rest of his life: don't take the thesis too seriously — it is a passport for the exam, not a masterpiece. Hundreds have researched the same topic. Get it done. A completed thesis, even if imperfect, is always better than an unfinished one.

He refocused. He completed it. He earned his MD in Pathology in April 1980 — a decade after arriving at MGIMS as a first-year student.

He was appointed Reader in Blood Bank and Haematology in February 1984. The nine years between his arrival in 1977 and his departure in 1986 were not what he had expected academic life to be. Research papers were published without his name. Permission to attend conferences he had contributed to was denied. For the entirety of his time at MGIMS, he was never permitted to guide postgraduate students — while Dr. Moghe mentored four, Dr. Arora one, and Dr. Samal seventeen. Between 1976 and 1986, the department produced thirty-five papers, mostly case reports, typically listing only the department head as author.

He managed to publish three papers of his own: on glycogen's role in endometrial infertility, on alpha-1-antitrypsin and hepatitis B in chronic liver disease, and on blood groups, sickle cell haemoglobin, and G6PD deficiency in the Mahar community of rural Maharashtra. The sickle cell work had genuine promise. Administrative obstacles prevented it from progressing.

He was not a difficult personality. He maintained close relationships with the department's technicians — Gyaneshwar Thackeray, Bhoyar, Mahajan, B.M. Patil, and Babu Dhole — the people who made the laboratory actually function, whose contributions rarely appeared in any record. He understood that departments ran on more than faculty.

But the experience of watching his work appropriated, his mentorship opportunities blocked, and his research impeded accumulated into a growing certainty that Sevagram was not the place where he was going to build the career he had imagined. On April 1, 1986, he resigned. Six weeks later — on May 10, his wedding anniversary — he opened a private practice in Wardha.

For two decades, the practice ran. It was good work, reliable work, necessary work. It was also, eventually, monotonous. The pull of teaching proved stronger than he had anticipated.

In 2006, he closed the practice and returned to academia, teaching across four institutions over fourteen years: Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Wardha; People's Medical College, Bhopal; LN Medical College, Bhopal; KD Medical College, Mathura. He retired at seventy, returned to Wardha, and quietly reopened his practice. The loop that had begun in Gondia, passed through Sevagram, detoured through Wardha and Bhopal and Mathura, had brought him back to the same town — carrying the accumulated experience of five institutions and four decades.

He had married Uma Devi from Jhansi. Their son Sandeep is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon; their daughter Neeta moved from fashion designing to homemaking.

At seventy-five, he looks back without bitterness — which is itself a kind of achievement, given what the MGIMS years contained. The institution had not given him everything it might have. He had found other ways forward. He had taught, practiced, moved, returned, and kept going.

The interview with Pratibha Patil was in 1970. Gundappa Viswanath's debut scores were 0 and 137. He knew them without hesitation. He has always known things carefully, precisely, and in full — including, in the end, how to make peace with a career that did not unfold as planned and was worth having anyway.

In June 2016, visiting his sister in Nagpur, he sat on a swing. It broke. He fell, injuring his neck. Paralysis followed — arms and legs refusing to obey. Four years of physiotherapy. His wife Jyotsna's care, constant and patient. Gradual, partial return.

He never asked why.

"Life unfolds as predestined," he would say. Lord Vishnu, Vitthal, and Rukmini were central to his prayers. He had been a regular visitor to Pandharpur. He carried no regrets and harboured no bitterness — qualities that, after a career which included failing his MD on the first attempt, serving for nearly a decade under a man who had once been his student, and spending thirty-four years building a department in conditions of chronic resource scarcity, had been genuinely earned rather than merely professed.

Narayan Shyam Rao Ingole was born on October 11, 1953, in Nagpur, the second of six children. His father brokered deals in the paan market by day and prepared Ayurvedic herbal remedies by evening. His mother Shashikala Bai managed the household without formal schooling. He walked to primary school in Itwari and attended New English High School in Mahal, harbouring ambitions of chemical engineering.

The turning point came when he saw his grandfather — weak, frail, in Indira Gandhi Medical College — sigh and say: "There should be a doctor in the family." The statement settled in him. He traded his mathematics textbooks for biology and enrolled in a BSc at the Institute of Science, Nagpur.

In 1971, MGIMS called for an interview. The panel included Dr. Sushila Nayar presiding, Maharashtra Health Minister Pratibha Patil among a dozen panellists, and a clerical mix-up that had already approved another candidate using Narayan's selection papers by mistake. Dr. Nayar was furious — at the staff, at the confusion, at the situation — and delegated the interview to the remaining panellists while she recovered her composure.

Mr. Kakade, a lawyer on the panel, asked: "Have you ever smoked?"

"No, sir."

"Your friends must be smoking."

"No, sir. I don't have friends who smoke."

A professor: "Do you know the harms of smoking?"

"Sir, I know it can cause lung cancer."

"What else?"

"I don't know, sir. But if you give me a chance to study medicine, I will find out."

He left uncertain. He enrolled in a B.Tech. course at Laxminarayan Institute of Technology. A week into engineering, a telegram arrived: he had been accepted at MGIMS.

At the admission office, a stranger approached him. "I'll give you ₹5,000. Just let my son take your place." A fortune in those days. He paid his own fees instead, becoming Roll No. 22 of the MGIMS Class of 1971.

The first month was orientation at Gandhi's ashram — prayers at four in the morning, voluntary labour, khadi spinning, shared campus cleaning. His batch was the first to undergo the full month; the following year, faculty complaints about lost classroom time shortened it to two weeks for all subsequent batches.

He lived in Patel Hostel, then Dharmanand Hostel, then C Block of the new boys' hostel. Surgery fascinated him. In his final MBBS examinations, he failed it. Six months later, he passed. He completed house jobs in surgery under Dr. Narang and orthopaedics under Dr. Ahuja, intending to pursue postgraduate surgery.

MGIMS offered no postgraduate seats in surgery. BJ Medical College in Pune had places, but they were unpaid. Three years without income was not possible for him. He stayed at MGIMS and enrolled in Pathology — not by passion, initially, but by circumstance. The circumstance eventually became a calling.

In 1978, he joined the Pathology department as Demonstrator. The department then had six lecturers, all MBBS graduates doing their postgraduations simultaneously: Lele, Narang, Khan, S.M. Sharma, Santosh Gupta, and Bhongade. Small rooms, flickering lights, manual blood smears, histopathology slides stained in glass trays, no automated equipment. Teaching slides were scarce because patients were scarce. Faculty sketched microscopic findings on blackboards and reconstructed classic cases from memory.

For his MD thesis, he needed a hundred photographs. Dr. Ahuja lent him his personal Nikon camera. Dr. Moghe insisted on professional photographs from Retina Studio in Nagpur — an expense exceeding a professor's monthly salary. He found the money.

In April 1981, he sat his MD examination. The external examiner Dr. Shridhar Agrawal from Raipur was a legend for severity — it was said he believed first-attempt passes were not possible, and he proved it across three medical colleges simultaneously, passing only two candidates. Ingole was not one of them.

He returned in October 1981. This time, with different examiners at GMC Nagpur, he passed. His career at MGIMS had begun in earnest.

He rose through the standard academic ladder — Lecturer, Reader, Associate Professor, Professor — over more than two decades of steady, methodical work. Along the way, an unusual institutional arrangement shaped a significant part of his middle career.

When the university advertised a single professorship, Dr. S.M. Sharma — the department head — chose not to apply. Out of deference to his senior, Ingole also refrained. This left Dr. Nitin Gangane, seven years his junior, as the sole candidate. Gangane was appointed Professor. For nearly a decade, Ingole served in a department formally headed below him by his own former student.

He did not allow it to strain either relationship. Dr. Sushila Nayar, recognising the awkwardness immediately, created an independent professorship in haematology for Ingole — preserving his seniority and insulating him from the institutional fallout. His camaraderie with both Sharma and Gangane remained intact before and after his retirement. This was not a small achievement.

He mentored twenty-five postgraduate students across his career. He led histopathology and haematology, modernised diagnostic techniques, replaced slow haemoglobin electrophoresis methods with faster alternatives, and introduced automated cell counters that transformed blood analysis. As head of the blood bank, he built a year-round blood donation calendar that grew the bank's annual collection from a handful of donations to 4,000 bottles by the time he retired.

His working method was the method of his era: patience, scrutiny, methodical cross-checking. Hours over slides, books consulted, Dr. Khedikar at IGMC Nagpur telephoned when a case remained uncertain. No flamboyance, no innovation for its own sake. Accuracy achieved through repetition, judgement sharpened through experience.

He retired in October 2015. Then came the swing in his sister's home in Nagpur, the sudden snap, the fall, the paralysis. Four years of physiotherapy. Jyotsna's care. Gradual, partial recovery — enough to walk with support.

He never once asked why. He is a devout man who believes life unfolds as it is meant to, and this belief, held not as performance but as genuine orientation, carried him through the slow work of recovery with a grace that struck those who knew him as entirely characteristic.

He married Jyotsna Pokale of Wardha on January 12, 1983 — after completing his MD, in keeping with the personal rule he had set himself. Their son Abhishek, an MGIMS alumnus from the class of 1998, completed his MD in Community Medicine at the same institution. The family pattern of MGIMS, continued across generations.

He lives now in his own house on the Wardha-Sevagram road, three minutes from the hospital. His days are peaceful. He carries no regrets. The department he helped build over thirty-four years has automated cell counters, immunohistochemistry, molecular diagnostics, liquid-based cytology, AI-assisted screening — a transformation so complete that the department of the 1980s, with its glass staining trays and borrowed Nikon camera and blackboard drawings, seems like another world.

It was another world. He built the bridge between them, slide by slide, donation by donation, student by student, in the quiet methodical way that was always entirely his.

Sixty years after his birth at Kasturba Hospital, he left Sevagram as Vice-Chancellor of KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research in Belagavi — having served along the way as the first MGIMS alumnus to become Dean of the institution, having earned a PhD from Umeå University in Sweden, having published over 180 papers from a rural teaching hospital in a village, and having built the Population-Based Cancer Registry of Wardha district into a nationally recognised public health instrument.

His colleague Dr. Anshu, who worked alongside him for years in the Pathology department, said when he left: "The shock and tears that flowed were genuine."

Nitin Gangane's father Mrigrajendra came from Gulbarga, had been a freedom fighter in the Hyderabad Liberation Movement, had gone underground at sixteen to escape persecution under the Nizam, had worked alongside Vinoba Bhave and Baba Amte, and had moved to Sevagram in 1960 inspired by Annasaheb Sahastrabuddhe. His mother Prabha, orphaned young and raised by an aunt in Mumbai, worked in MGIMS's Medical Records section until her retirement.

The family lived in Sevagram. The boy attended the government school, then Yeshwant High School, then Swavalambi Vidyalaya in Wardha. These were Marathi-medium institutions, rooted in the ordinary life of a small village. What they gave him, alongside his education, was a fearlessness about confronting systems that behaved badly — a quality his father had modelled at sixteen and that Nitin would find repeatedly necessary in his own career.

On June 26, 1976, the first anniversary of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, he attended a resistance meeting in Wardha with his brother Bipin. Police raided. Nitin and Ashish Wele were arrested. Being minors, they were placed in a remand home under the Juvenile Act, where they remained — completing their schooling by attending college during the day and returning to the facility each night — until October 1977, seven months after the Emergency was revoked and the Janata Party had already taken power. The wheels of justice grind slowly. The experience forged something permanent in him.

He entered MGIMS in 1978 with Roll No. 24, one of the last batches to face essay-style papers on Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Gandhian thought in the entrance examination. He earned his MBBS in 1983.

After internship, he took house jobs in radiology and anaesthesiology and worked briefly as a research officer on a WHO filariasis project. He believed the house job admission process had been unfair to some classmates and took legal action over it — straining his relationship with the MGIMS administrative officer. When the postgraduate radiology course was not offered that year, he turned to Pathology. The turn was pragmatic. Under Dr. S.M. Sharma's mentorship, he studied the histomorphology of malignant soft tissue tumours. He earned his MD in Pathology in December 1987 and his DNB two years later.

Promotion was slow in coming. In December 1991, he left MGIMS for Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, where a newly established institution offered swift advancement. He completed a six-month oncology fellowship at Tata Memorial Hospital under Dr. Anita Borges and Dr. Kikkeri N. Naresh, and built his expertise in cancer pathology.

At JNMC, he uncovered gross irregularities in the examination revaluation process and reported them to the Vice-Chancellor. The friction with administration followed immediately. When MGIMS advertised a professorship in 1996, he applied. Dr. Sushila Nayar intervened to secure his appointment. He returned to his alma mater.

Dr. Anshu's assessment of his leadership as a teacher is precise enough to quote directly: "It is very difficult to teach diagnostic reasoning in Pathology, as it is both an art and a science. He is one of the very few teachers who could slowly lead a student from a wrong diagnosis to the right one, step by step, carefully demolishing one differential after another, until the student felt as if she had made the correct diagnosis herself."

Beyond the seminar room, his pathology reports were models of clinical utility — concise, focused entirely on what the treating physician needed to begin treatment and determine prognosis, nothing more. His questions in teaching sessions were sharp, basic, and logical. He read continuously, regardless of how busy he was. These were not separate qualities but expressions of the same discipline: a mind that had learned to cut to what mattered and stay there.

The second source of respect was his fairness. He treated every person with respect regardless of their position in the hierarchy. He was present in good times and bad. He did not expect everyone to excel; he understood each person's strengths and worked with those. If someone needed help — a university document, a last-minute recommendation, an introduction to a colleague — it was a phone call away. The department's teaching and non-teaching staff were always willing to give more than they had to, because he had earned that willingness.

He kept a low profile. He rarely raised his voice. He spoke little. None of this prevented him from being the person everyone confided in, the person whose departure produced genuine shock and tears.

He led the department from 2004 to 2018, acquiring equipment and technology against persistent administrative resistance. He mentored eleven MD theses on cancers in Central India. He served as Principal Investigator on seven research projects and co-investigator on twelve, funded by IARC, UICC, NIH, ICMR, UGC, and DST. The Yamagiwa-Yoshida Memorial International Cancer Study Grant took him to IARC in Lyon and NIDCR/NIH in Bethesda. He served as President of the Maharashtra chapter of the Indian Association of Pathologists and Microbiologists from 2006 to 2009. And from a village in Vidarbha, without the institutional infrastructure available at urban research centres, he published over 180 papers in high-impact journals.

In September 2011, Dr. Miguel San Sebastian and Dr. Bhoomikumar Jegannathan from Umeå University visited MGIMS. Their meeting with Nitin sparked an interest in the epidemiology of breast cancer that complemented the regional cancer data he was already assembling. Over the next five years, he made several trips to Sweden. He was awarded his PhD from Umeå University in 2018 — adding European doctoral training to a career built entirely in rural India.

Since 2010, he had led the Population-Based Cancer Registry of Wardha district — a systematic tracking of cancer patterns and trends across a rural population that would otherwise go unrecorded. The registry became a nationally recognised instrument for understanding cancer epidemiology in Central India.

In 2018, he became Dean of MGIMS — the first alumnus of the institution to hold the position. He had been born at Kasturba Hospital. He was now responsible for the institution that hospital anchored.

In 2021, he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research in Belagavi. His PhD, his research record, his deanship, his engagement with MUHS governance, his national and international fellowships — all of it had prepared him for an appointment that was the culmination of a career built with consistent purpose across four decades.

In November 2025, he left KLE to become Executive Director of AIIMS Deoghar in Jharkhand. One does not walk away from a Vice-Chancellorship — a position of comfort and authority — without deliberate intention. Gangane is a man who knows his own mind. Having seen his work through in Belagavi, he chose a new frontier.

He has left Sevagram, even parted with his house there. The village shaped him. He did not need to stay in it to carry what it gave him.

Professor of Pathology · Fourteen Years at Sevagram · The Pathologist Who Wrote About Cells the Way a Naturalist Writes About Birds

Before computers arrived at MGIMS, Dr. Arvind Bhake wrote his cytology reports by hand.

Each one was meticulous — the cell described, its cytoplasm detailed, its nucleus examined, the structure and any deformity rendered in prose that was both scientifically precise and, by the account of those who read it, almost lyrical. Old-timers at MGIMS still recall those reports. They remember them with the particular fondness reserved for things that have been lost — noting, without sentimentality but with genuine regret, that the reports generated today with the speed of a WhatsApp message have shed something that his carried.

He was a pathologist who wrote about cells the way a good naturalist writes about birds: with exactness, yes, but also with an evident pleasure in the thing being described. Cytopathology was, to him, the heartbeat of the discipline — the ability to distinguish health from disease in minutes, from a microscopic glance, which he thought was nothing short of magic. He had chosen pathology after watching anxious surgeons pace outside the laboratory waiting for biopsy reports. It struck him that before a single incision was made, it was the pathologist's eye that determined the course of treatment. The power to diagnose, to unravel the unseen — this was the thing.

Arvind Bhake was born on January 12, 1961, in Wardha, the youngest of six children in a household shaped by his father Sridhar Madhav Bhake, principal of the local Government College of Education, and his mother Shalini, who managed the family with warmth and quiet efficiency. He passed through Government Practicing School and then the red-bricked corridors of Craddock High School in Wardha, completing his schooling in 1976, followed by two years at Jankidevi Bajaj College of Science.

Medicine announced itself, as it sometimes does, through a school skit. He played a doctor. His classmates called him "Doctor Saheb" afterward, and the name stuck long enough to become a direction. In 1978, he entered Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur. He earned his MBBS in 1983, completed internship and house jobs in medicine and surgery, and then chose pathology — drawn there by the logic of the waiting surgeons and the microscope's revelatory power.

His mentors were Dr. Khedikar and Dr. Anil Pendsey. Dr. Khedikar — a woman of remarkable simplicity — had a quality rare in teachers: the ability to distil the most complex diagnoses into perfect clarity. His MD thesis examined imprint cytology of lymph nodes, taking him deep into microscopic analysis. During that period, he formed an unlikely camaraderie with Mr. Srivastava, the photographer at Retina Studio in Nagpur — one a doctor, the other an artist, both committed to precision.

He earned his MD in Pathology in 1987 and spent a year sharpening his skills in histochemistry, molecular diagnostics, and haematology techniques. In 1988, MGIMS advertised a vacancy.

MGIMS was not, to Arvind Bhake, merely a job opportunity. It was a place he had heard about since childhood — his brothers had spoken of Dr. Ulhas Jajoo with reverence, and the institution's reputation as one that rivalled AIIMS, JIPMER, and PGI was part of the family's understanding of what serious medicine looked like. He arrived for the interview with ambition and genuine respect for the place.

The selection committee was formidable: Dr. Sushila Nayar, Kamala Desikan, Dean K.S. Sachdeva, Dr. K.V. Desikan, Dr. Shobha Grover, and Dr. Narendra Samal. They examined him on histopathology, cytology, haematology, and staining techniques. He was selected.

He joined on a quiet November morning in 1988, entering a department led by Professor Narendra Samal, with Dr. Satish Sharma, Dr. Narayan Ingole, Dr. Kiran Swarup, Dr. Nitin Gangane, and Dr. Subir Mitra as colleagues. Dr. K.V. Desikan held an Emeritus Professorship. It was a department with depth and character, shaped by over a decade and a half of steady institution-building.

Sevagram became his home for fourteen years. He read widely and seriously — Anderson, Robbins, Wintrobe, Williams, Tietz, Walter, Bancroft, DeVita on molecular pathology, Dacie and Lewis, Christopher Fletcher, Ackerman, Allen Gibbs, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology updates. The MGIMS library was his second home. His cytopathology practice deepened. His reports grew in quality and in the particular quality of attention — precise and almost literary — that made them memorable to the clinicians who received them.

One episode captures the range of what pathology demanded in those years. Dr. Samal asked him to introduce coagulation tests in the department. There was no ready source of thromboplastin. He sourced a dead rabbit from the animal farm, worked with the Microbiology department to extract the rabbit's brain, and obtained the thromboplastin he needed. The prothrombin time and INR tests followed — the department's first step toward advanced coagulation diagnostics, improvised entirely from available materials. This is what building a department in a rural medical college required: not just knowledge, but the willingness to solve problems with whatever was to hand.

He diagnosed a case of pseudomyxoma peritonei alongside Dr. Kalantri in 1997 — a rare finding, published in Indian Practitioner — one of the small triumphs he remembers with particular pleasure.

He mentored MD residents in cytology-based research that advanced the department's diagnostic capabilities: Rajiv Tangri on fine needle aspiration cytology in focal liver lesions, Nitin Shende on nucleolar organizer regions in breast cytology, Gupta on endoscopic brush cytology in upper gastrointestinal abnormalities, Naresh Gurbani on FNAC in prostate lesions, Ranbeer Singh on FNAC in soft tissue tumours, and Suniti Pathak on endometrial aspiration cytology. The common thread was cytology — the tool he loved — applied across the body's systems with clinical questions driving each study.

He rose to Reader by 1992 and Professor by 1998. His teaching reflected his own formation: close attention to the specimen, insistence on the pathologist's eye as the primary instrument, pleasure in the complexity of what cells could reveal. He believed that immortality in medicine lay not in titles or tenure but in publications and shared knowledge — a belief reflected in his consistent research output and editorial work.

He is drawn to Marathi drama and classical music with the same genuine engagement he brings to pathology. He played table tennis and football in his younger years, serving as a steadfast centre-back. He sings — Marathi and Hindi songs — and has considered, with the slightly amused self-awareness of someone who knows his own enthusiasms, starting a YouTube channel. He speaks of writing a book on lymph nodes for fellow "lymphomaniacs" — the self-coined term that captures how he feels about his specialty's corner of the body.

He married Anita Savargaonkar, a physiotherapist from Pune, in 1997. Their son Adhokshaj is pursuing his MD in Medicine at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi — the institution Arvind joined in November 2003 after fourteen years at MGIMS, where he continues to teach and lead and investigate.

About Sevagram, he says with the wry precision of someone who has earned the right to be both affectionate and funny about a place: "Sevagram will always have a special place in my memory — at least until old age brings some neurodegenerative disease and makes me forget it all."

The reports he wrote by hand, detailing cells in prose that read like something worth reading, have not been forgotten by those who received them. In the era of automated outputs and rapid turnaround, they are remembered as a different mode of attention — slower, more thorough, more fully inhabited. He was a pathologist who looked carefully and wrote well about what he saw — a combination rarer than it should be, and more valuable than it is usually credited to be.

Microbiology lectures at MGIMS were scheduled after lunch. Post-lunch drowsiness was a known hazard. Dr. Pratibha Narang's sharp eyes and, as Dr. Prabha Desikan recalled, her impeccable aim were the corrective: a piece of chalk flying through the air with precision, waking the unfortunate student before she had registered what had happened. The chalk landed. The student woke. The lecture continued.

This detail is offered not as an anecdote about discipline but as an introduction to a woman whose entire career was organised around the refusal to accept less than full engagement — from her students, from her institution, from herself. She taught Microbiology for over fifty years at MGIMS, founded its department from nothing, built it into a laboratory of national repute, led the institute as Dean, served as Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society, published 145 scientific papers including 105 original articles on tuberculosis, supervised 34 MD theses and two PhD students, won the Senior Commonwealth Fellowship and the first Dr. P.R. Gangadharam International Travel Award given by the American Lung Association, and — when her institution did not yet offer postgraduate courses — packed up her two daughters, aged two and four, and moved to Delhi to complete her MD herself.

She retired in March 2025. She had been at MGIMS for fifty-one years.

Pratibha Narang was born on September 9, 1947, in Srinagar. Her father was a mathematics teacher of considerable distinction — a gold medallist from Punjab University who taught at DAV College, Hoshiarpur, and then at the Doon School in Dehradun, where he eventually retired as Vice Headmaster. He wrote twenty-five mathematics textbooks, contributed articles on Einstein's theory of relativity to the Times of India and Hindustan Times, was published in the Illustrated London News, and was invited by the BBC to speak on public schools. The household she grew up in was one in which intellectual seriousness was the ambient condition.

At ten, she joined the Doon School as a day student. Her classmates included Sanjay Gandhi, Kamal Nath, Naveen Patnaik, Mani Shankar Iyer, and Karan Thapar. She completed her intermediate at the Allahabad Board and entered Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi in 1965. She earned her MBBS, served as the college's cultural president, and won the Annie McKenzie Prize for being the best all-rounder.

After graduating, she completed two house jobs in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at AIIMS from 1971 to 1972. On January 16, 1971, she married Dr. Ravinder Narang, a surgeon completing his MS in General Surgery from PGI Chandigarh. Gynaecology had been her intended speciality. The pivot to Microbiology was practical and deliberate. Her husband was seeking a faculty position at a teaching hospital; a clinical speciality and the demands of a young family were not, she judged, compatible with the life they were building. Microbiology offered a different rhythm.

Her mentor at Lady Hardinge, Dr. K.B. Sharma, gave her the counsel she would remember for the rest of her career: "Virgin soil yields the best harvest, provided one tills it."

On August 10, 1973, she joined MGIMS as Lecturer in Microbiology — the first Microbiology teacher the institution had appointed. Microbiology was then still part of the Pathology department. MGIMS had no postgraduate programme. In 1976, she took study leave, moved to Delhi with her two daughters aged two and four, completed her MD in Microbiology at Lady Hardinge, and returned to Sevagram in May 1978 as Reader. The soil was virgin. She began to till.

Microbiology became a separate department on August 15, 1980. It had two technicians, no postgraduate students, and Dr. Narang. She became Professor and Head in 1982 and led the department for twenty years.

The intellectual centre of her work was tuberculosis. This was not an abstract speciality choice. Dr. Sushila Nayar had founded the Badshah Khan Hospital in Faridabad as a TB sanatorium in the early 1950s, had watched children and young adults die there, and had never released that specific grief. Her commitment to TB control was personal. When Dr. M.D. Gupte, a professor of Community Medicine at MGIMS, secured ICMR funding for a field trial on TB but left before completing the project, Dr. Nayar turned to Dr. Narang — the co-investigator, without prior field experience — and asked her to lead. She led. The result was the first ICMR field trial on intermittent Short Term Chemotherapy for pulmonary tuberculosis patients in the Wardha district, examining TB prevalence in both tribal and non-tribal populations through smear and culture-positive cases.

This was the work that shaped the rest of her research career. TB became her subject in its full complexity — latent and active infection, drug-sensitive and drug-resistant strains, pulmonary and extrapulmonary disease, typical and atypical presentations. Her Microbiology lectures built Robert Koch's world for students who had never imagined microorganisms could be made vivid and consequential. In the seminar hall, in the laboratory, at the blackboard, she crafted a narrative around Mycobacterium tuberculosis that made the discipline feel like the most important subject in medicine — which, in terms of global burden of disease, it arguably was.

She established the postgraduate programme in Microbiology in the 1980s, and TB research became its central axis. The students she produced — Rajni Gaind, Manjusha Dudhe, Prabha Desikan, Rahul Narang, Ujwala Raut — became leading microbiologists across India. She supervised thirty-four MD theses and two PhD students. She collaborated with TB researcher Madhukar Pai in a study of latent tuberculosis among healthcare workers — research that placed MGIMS on the international TB research map. She published 145 papers between 1974 and 2022, 105 of them original articles on tuberculosis, and received seventeen extramural research grants from national and international agencies.

In 1992, she received the Senior Commonwealth Fellowship to the United Kingdom. In 2000, she became the first recipient of the Dr. P.R. Gangadharam International Travel Award, given by the American Lung Association under the IUATLD. In 2006, the Tuberculosis Association of India gave her the Lupin-TAI Award. In 2012, she became President of the Indian Association of Medical Microbiologists. In 2018, the Vidarbha Association of Medical Microbiologists created the "Dr. Pratibha Narang VAMM Professional Achievement Oration Award" in her honour — given annually to a senior microbiologist from the region for outstanding contributions.

She became Dean of MGIMS in 2002 — the first woman to hold the position — and served until 2007. In October 2007, she became Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society, a role she held until 2014. Those who worked with her in administrative roles described the same qualities that characterised her teaching: calm, attentive, thorough, firm where necessary, never indifferent to the person in front of her.

Dr. Prabha Desikan — who chose Microbiology for her postgraduate training despite being third on the merit list, specifically because of Dr. Narang's example, and who went on to become Director of ICMR-BMHRC, Bhopal — described her as a diagnostician whose approach to clinical samples was exemplary, a researcher whose clarity about hypotheses was remarkable, and a mentor who was deeply invested in each of her students. The firmness, the practical advice, the wealth of knowledge and experience — and behind all of it, a kindness and warmth that Desikan called rare and invaluable.

About her own mentor, Dr. Narang said: "Dr. Sushila Nayar's perfection and attention to detail were evident everywhere — in fieldwork, conference presentations, publications, and grant applications. She seemed to read every word before it went to print." The quality she most admired in her teacher was the quality she spent fifty years embodying in her own practice.

Her family became a small medical school in itself: Dr. Ravinder Narang in surgery, daughter Ritambhara in gynaecology, daughter Dipti in paediatrics, son Udit in internal medicine, sons-in-law and daughter-in-law all in medicine. A household in which medicine was not a profession but an inheritance.

She continued as Emeritus Director-Professor after stepping down from departmental leadership, remaining available to faculty and students with the consistency of someone who does not know how to be otherwise. The chalk, presumably, still had its uses.

"Virgin soil yields the best harvest, provided one tills it."

She tilled it for fifty-one years.

He had spent four years as a medical officer at a primary health centre in Sauja — a village of under a thousand people, seventy-eight kilometres from Chandigarh, poor road connectivity, unreliable electricity, the nearest bus stop reachable only by scooter. Five kilometres of bicycle riding at the far end. This was his daily commute to work. By the time he arrived in Sevagram in November 1986, rural life held no surprises for him. He adapted to village life, as one account put it, as naturally as a duck takes to water.

This is worth establishing early, because it explains something about why he stayed. Many faculty members came to Sevagram from cities and experienced the simplicity as a sacrifice to be endured. Mendiratta arrived already formed by the rural Punjab experience — the 1984 riots following Indira Gandhi's assassination had eventually driven him to seek something new, but what he was looking for was not urban comfort. He wanted to do better microbiology. Sevagram, under Dr. Pratibha Narang, offered exactly that.

Deepak Kumar Mendiratta was born on October 30, 1952, in Agra, the son of Shri Prem Nath Mendiratta, an aeronautical engineer in the Indian Air Force, and Rita Rani Mendiratta. The family moved with his father's postings — Agra, Tambaram, Bangalore, where he attended St. Joseph's High School — and he completed his matriculation in 1969 at Baroda High School after five years there. He earned his BSc at Government Mohindra College, Patiala, in 1973, and his MBBS at Government Medical College, Patiala, in 1977.

Between 1977 and 1982, he served in the Punjab Civil Medical Services, which included four years at the Sauja primary health centre — the bicycle and the scooter and the quiet difficulty of medicine practiced far from backup. In December 1982, he moved to a Demonstrator post in the Microbiology department at his alma mater in Patiala, completing his MD in December 1984.

After his MD, he returned to village practice for two years. Punjab in 1984 was convulsed by the riots following the assassination. Fear and uncertainty accumulated. A trip to Delhi brought him to Dr. Shrinivas, Head of Microbiology at AIIMS, who listened to his career ambitions and suggested Sevagram immediately — the Microbiology department under Dr. Pratibha Narang was exactly the environment he was describing. Mendiratta wrote to Dr. Narang. Her reply was warm and elegant. He packed his belongings and took the next train south.

He arrived on November 17, 1986.

He began in two-room accommodation in Kabir Colony. His parents, who had retired to Lucknow in 1979, moved to Sevagram in 1999 and remained there until their deaths. In 2002, he built his own house in Sushila Nagar Colony, a kilometre from the college, with Dr. Ramji Singh and Dr. B.S. Garg as neighbours.

The department he joined had Dr. Narang, postgraduate students Dr. Tripathi and Dr. Ramani, and two technicians. He had come from general practice and a demonstrator post — not from a research-intensive academic background. The initial hesitation was honest: he was uncertain whether he was equipped for faculty life. Dr. Narang's manner dissolved the uncertainty quickly. They worked side by side, sharing slides, discussing cases, refining diagnoses. The department had the atmosphere of a family rather than a hierarchy. Outside working hours, the young faculty community gathered for badminton, carrom, birthday celebrations, and staff club events — the social texture of a campus where people genuinely liked each other.

Two years after joining, drawn by the prospect of higher earnings, he applied for a faculty position in Saudi Arabia. Dr. Narang gave him a two-year leave of absence. He worked at Naib Hospital, Gazi, from February 1989 to February 1991. Dr. Sushila Nayar was keen for his return. When his Saudi term ended, he came back to Sevagram.

He was promoted to Associate Professor in August 1995, Professor in August 2002, and Director-Professor shortly before his departure. When Dr. Narang became Dean in 2002, she handed the Microbiology department to him. He led it for twelve years.

The research direction he inherited from Dr. Narang was tuberculosis, and he continued it with full commitment. Among his most significant contributions was a field trial on short-course chemotherapy for tuberculosis — work that helped establish the evidence base for the DOTS regimen adopted nationally. He conducted important research on tuberculous lymphadenitis and leptospirosis. In 2003, the department collaborated with the University of California, Berkeley, on a diagnostic study using gamma interferon to detect latent TB — the partnership with Madhukar Pai that Dr. Narang had initiated, continued and developed under his leadership.

Across his tenure, he undertook twenty-three national, international, and regional research projects, published nearly eighty papers, and guided eleven postgraduate students from Ravneeth Kaur in 2002 to Somnath Bhunia in 2013. Their theses ranged across the infectious disease spectrum of rural Central India — leptospirosis in acute febrile illness, Candida in preterm neonates, enterococcal resistance patterns, non-viral microbial keratitis, metallo-beta-lactamase production in Pseudomonas and Acinetobacter, PCR for neonatal sepsis diagnosis. The breadth reflected a department whose interests extended well beyond any single pathogen.

Teaching was a significant part of what he was — a fact that became sharply visible after he left Sevagram. At Chirayu Medical College in Bhopal, where he became Dean in May 2019, microbiology attendance among students stood at ten percent when he arrived. Within a few months, it reached ninety percent. This required no particular magic: it required the consistent application of the clarity, approachability, and high expectation that his postgraduate students at MGIMS had valued and that he brought unchanged to a new institution.

He described Dr. Narang with the precise warmth of someone who has chosen their words carefully: "It's rare to find and work with such a wonderful head of department. She was not only a philosopher and guide but also showered affection like an elder sister."

He married Mala, originally from Bareilly, on October 8, 1981. She had been teaching school in Patiala. In 1991, she joined MGIMS as a computer operator and rose through the institution's administrative structure to become Administrative Officer — a position she held until 2014, when she resigned coinciding with her husband's departure. Their careers at MGIMS ran in parallel for twenty-three years. Both left together when the chapter closed.

Their son Sidharth — MGIMS 2004, MS Surgery, MCh Plastic Surgery from CMC Vellore — practises privately in Nagpur. Their daughter Surabhi, an engineer, lives in the United States.

He left MGIMS on August 7, 2014, for Chirayu Medical College in Bhopal. The private, for-profit college environment was not congenial — the structured restrictions, the intellectual atmosphere thinner than what he had known, the loss of the autonomy Sevagram had given him. On October 31, 2022, he retired from academic medicine. He spends his time now in Nagpur with his grandchildren.

The years in Sauja on a bicycle, the years in Sevagram working through slides with Dr. Narang, the twelve years leading the department, the field trial that contributed to DOTS, the eighty papers, the eleven postgraduates — these are the constituents of a career built in village settings, by a man who was formed by rural life early enough that it never felt like sacrifice.

The day before he died, Dr. Bipin Tirpude drove out to Bahera — the ancestral village in Raipur district where Radheshyam Naik had chosen to spend the final chapter of his life. The Parkinson's had slowed him, and the dementia had loosened some memories, but that afternoon, sitting with his oldest student — now the head of the very department he had built — Naik talked about Sevagram. He remembered the classrooms, the hostel, the boys and their parties. He asked, quietly, whether it might be possible to go back and visit.

Tirpude said yes. He began making arrangements — a lunch, a gathering of the old department staff, a small reunion in the place that had occupied Naik for more than two decades. On April 1, 2018, a Sunday, before any of it could happen, Naik died at home. He went the way he had lived: without fuss, without spectacle, without the bustle he had spent his whole career carefully avoiding.

Radheshyam Naik was born on November 2, 1938, in Bahera, a village eighty kilometres north of Durg in what is now Chhattisgarh. He arrived on Krishna Janmashtami, so his parents named him accordingly. His father, Shri Man Rakhan Lal, was a zamindar who would later give a substantial portion of his land to Vinobaji's Bhoodan movement. The son inherited something of that willingness to hold things loosely.

He went to Government Medical College, Nagpur, earned his MBBS in 1962, and stayed for an MD in Medicine, completing it in 1970 under Dr. J.N. Berry — the legendary physician who ran the Department of Medicine with the quiet authority of someone who had seen everything and forgotten nothing. Three years under Berry left a mark. Naik emerged from them precise, unhurried, and constitutionally incapable of panic.

But medicine was not where he ended up. In those years, medical schools routinely pulled faculty from general medicine to staff their forensic departments — Forensic Medicine being the specialty nobody volunteered for. When Naik was asked to make the move, he made it without argument. He set about learning a new field with the same methodical thoroughness he had brought to the one he was leaving.

What followed was one of the stranger academic CVs in Indian medicine. To the MD in Medicine he added a Diploma in TB and Chest Diseases, then an LLB, then a Diploma in Business Management, then an MA in Public Administration, then an MA in Political Science. He studied law partly because a forensic physician who understands courts is worth more than one who does not, and partly because Naik simply liked to learn things. When he sat for his LLB finals, he topped the examination at Nagpur University. His first MD student, Dr. S.K. Singhal, topped the first year. Teacher and student attended law classes together in the early 1980s, sitting in the same lecture hall, taking the same notes. Neither seemed to find this arrangement unusual.

Forensic Medicine has a structural disadvantage as a teaching subject: its patients are dead. Students who have spent their early clinical years learning to read a living body find themselves asked to redirect that attentiveness toward a corpse. Most resist. The subject had acquired a reputation as dull, mandatory, and to be survived rather than studied.

Naik understood this, and he met it head-on. His lectures were scheduled every Tuesday and Saturday, and they had a hundred percent attendance — not because he demanded it, but because students wanted to be there.

He used Bollywood. His two favourite films for the purpose were Waqt (1965) and Ittefaq (1969) — both crime films, both built around mysteries of identity and evidence — and he used scenes from them to anchor legal medicine concepts in images his students already carried. He owned two licensed 12-bore guns, and when the curriculum reached firearms injuries, he brought them out. The students examined them. The mechanism of injury was no longer abstract.

"Forensic Medicine is traditionally perceived as a dry subject," said Dr. Ashok Mehendale, from the 1976 batch, "but Dr. Naik knew the art of injecting humour, spicing the tedious topics with humour and enlivening his classes. To the class he was a stress buster — jokes, witty metaphors, humorous similes, puns, sarcasm, or a funny story. He was an entertainer as well as an educator."

The one-liners circulated long after graduation. His Chhattisgarhi-inflected Hindi mixed into English mid-sentence — not as an apology for imperfect language but as a genuine expression of someone thinking in several registers at once. Dr. Bipin Tirpude, who spent fifteen years working alongside him, remembered the lectures as improvised performances: the man knew his subject, trusted his audience, and rarely needed notes.

He also had the instinct of an institution-builder. In the early 1980s, before most medical schools in Maharashtra had moved in this direction, Naik started postgraduate training in Forensic Medicine at MGIMS. Over the next two decades, he guided fifteen MD students while simultaneously pushing to separate forensic autopsies from the general pathology workflow, establishing forensic medicine as a discipline with its own rigour and its own institutional territory.

He also, almost incidentally, ran the cine club. Sevagram in the late 1970s had no television. The campus was a long way from anything resembling entertainment. Naik — by then also warden of the boys' hostel — began screening a film every weekend. The cine club ran for years, a weekly punctuation in the quiet of a village campus where evenings would otherwise have offered nothing but study.

He lived in Nagpur. He came to Sevagram on a scooter — one strategically stationed at each end of the commute, so that a scooter waited for him at Wardha station when he arrived by train, and another waited at Nagpur when he returned. The arrangement was purely practical, and he maintained it for years without complaint.

Dr. V.K. Gupta, from the 1976 batch, remembered him this way: "Cool in the classroom and well-versed with the subject matter, he was running the forensic department as a solo player. He never punished any hooligans. He was liberal with attendance and in the examination too."

As hostel warden, his philosophy was similar. The boys made noise, threw parties, tested rules in the ways that boys always do. He watched with the expression of someone who had long since made peace with human nature. He was not lax so much as realistic — understanding that the energy that makes a student difficult to manage at twenty-two is often the same energy that makes him capable at forty.

His own son, Tarun, was in the MGIMS class of 1987 — Naik's students were also his son's classmates. Dr. Abhay Kelkar, from the same batch, remembered this without ambiguity: "I remember him for his impartial attitude towards his own son. No undue favours were ever granted to him." The son had to sit the same examinations, answer the same questions, and earn the same passing marks as everyone else in the room.

Dr. S.P. Kalantri was Naik's neighbour for several years and also his physician. He wrote later: "Introverted, unassuming, and self-effacing, Dr. Naik was polite to a fault. Although he was armed with an MD in Medicine, he made light of his degree and played a perfect patient — listening to advice carefully and adhering to the treatment to the T."

There is a particular kind of doctor — and Naik was one — who, having spent decades telling patients what to do, cannot bring himself to exercise any authority over his own care. He followed instructions. He did not bargain. He did not deploy his degree as a reason to second-guess. He simply listened, and complied, with the patience he had brought to everything else in his life.

After retirement he went to Nepal — Pokhara — and taught for several years at a medical school there, because the alternative was to stop teaching and that was not a serious option. He came back in 2014 and went to Bahera, the village where he had started.

On the morning he died, the lunch in Sevagram was still being planned. His student was on the telephone. The tables had not yet been set.

He is survived by his wife; by Tarun, who operates at Chandulal Chandrakar Memorial Hospital in Bhilai; by Vishal, an engineer in Pune; and by Harsha, his daughter from the MGIMS batch of 1998, who is now in Manchester.

Three generations of students passed through his classrooms — from the 1975 batch to the 2004 batch. Somewhere in that span is almost every doctor currently practising forensic medicine in this part of India. They learned the subject from a man who had not chosen it, who had not trained for it in the conventional sense, who had simply been told to do it and had decided, without bitterness, to do it properly.

The Bollywood clips, the shotguns, the law classes with his own student, the weekend film screenings, the hundred-percent attendance on Tuesdays and Saturdays — these were the instruments of a teacher who had understood early that the subject was not the obstacle. The obstacle was indifference. And against indifference, he had a well-tested arsenal.

Professor & Head of Pharmacology · Sixteen Years at Sevagram · The Doctor Who Was Also a Celestial Singer

"Anybody with a bit of hard work and rote-learning could become an engineer or doctor," Dr. M.D. Khapre said, "but music and singing could not be learnt this way. It required exceptional imagination, passion, and talent. I wanted to be a devoted Hindustani Classical vocalist in my adolescence but ended up being a doctor instead."

He said this without bitterness. He had made peace with the compromise decades earlier, and the compromise had not been complete — music had remained present throughout his life in Sevagram, filling his home with mehfil sessions and bhajans, carrying him onto the stage of Dhanwate Rang Mandir in Nagpur in the early 1980s, resonating through cultural evenings at MGIMS where his baritone stopped whatever else was happening in a room. He was a doctor who taught pharmacology as though it were a performance art, and a musician who had chosen medicine as his profession, and over time the two vocations became so intertwined that those who knew him could not easily say which was the larger part of him.

Gajanan Ambulkar, who knew him for decades, remembered him simply: "His heart belonged to music, and we often wondered if he was a doctor or a celestial singer."

Madhav Dattatraya Khapre was born on February 4, 1937, in Nagpur, into a family of some standing — his father was a lawyer and landlord, their home a mansion called Khapre Wada on Pataleshwar Road in Badkas Chowk. He attended New English High School, a kilometre from home, and entered Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1955.

The path to pharmacology came through proximity and character. Dr. Dashputre, the Head of Pharmacology at GMC, lived near the Khapre family. His influence drew Madhav toward the department for his MD. Under Dashputre, and alongside Dr. M.L. Sharma, Dr. V.R. Deshpande, and Dr. P.R. Kherdikar, he learned the discipline as both science and craft — understanding not just mechanism and dosage but the pedagogical challenge of making a subject that students feared into one they could inhabit with confidence.

He began his career as an assistant medical officer at Mayo Hospital, Nagpur, then joined the GMC Pharmacology department as Lecturer in July 1967. In 1970, the Government of Maharashtra deputed him to MGIMS as Reader in Pharmacology. He arrived on February 21, 1971, joining Dr. M.L. Sharma, who had come the previous December. They were the entire department. Sharma was forty-one. Khapre was thirty-three. They had sixty first-year students before them and a great deal to build.

Dr. Sharma and Dr. Khapre were, by every account, complementary rather than interchangeable. Sharma was the senior figure — the Professor, the Principal, the institutional presence. Khapre brought a different register: lighter, more playful in manner, the music always visible beneath the surface, a warmth in the classroom that students felt immediately.

Together they established the culture of the Pharmacology department. Their lectures wove in humour without sacrificing rigour. They used jokes not as decoration but as delivery mechanisms — making a drug's mechanism memorable by embedding it in a story, making an adverse effect stick by attaching it to something funny. Notes taken in their classes were passed down through successive batches as treasured documents, used long after the teachers themselves had moved on. During the 1980s, when textbooks by Satoskar from KEM Mumbai and K.D. Tripathy from MAMC Delhi became the standard references, Khapre's classroom notes circulated alongside them as a parallel curriculum that students trusted more completely.

He understood the linguistic challenge his classroom presented — Marathi, Hindi, and Punjabi speakers, many with limited English fluency, confronting pharmacological terminology for the first time. He moved between English and Marathi during lectures with natural ease, not as a concession but as a genuine teaching decision, understanding that concepts needed to land in the language where the student actually thought. Students felt seen rather than accommodated.

"Pharmacology is like a puzzle," he would say. "Each drug is a piece, and it's our job to fit them together to create effective treatment plans for patients."

He was promoted to Professor in 1977. He returned briefly to GMC Nagpur before resuming his MGIMS professorship in April 1980, teaching seven batches between 1978 and 1985. In 1988, after leaving Sevagram, he mentored Dr. S. John Premendran through a PhD thesis examining the impact of calcium, strontium, and barium on various muscle tissues and their interactions with calcium antagonists — pure pharmacological science that reflected how seriously he took the research dimension of his discipline.

While completing his final MBBS years, he had explored Indian classical music under the tutelage of Pandit Annaji Kshirsagar, immersing himself in the teachings of the two legendary Vishnus — Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. He did not confine himself to any single Gharana. He was devoted to Ustad Amir Khan's style, and held deep reverence for Sant Gyaneshwar and Gulabrao Maharaj of Madhan, Vidarbha — a devotion that eventually produced an audio cassette of Maharaj's bhajans that he pressed and distributed among friends and colleagues at his own cost, asking nothing in return.

His home in Sevagram became a gathering place. For college events and the Ganpati festival, he organised musical mehfil sessions where his baritone resonated through the air — bhajans from the Ashram Bhajanavali alongside classical compositions. Sudam Ambulkar sang; Hari strummed the tanpura; talented medical students including Avinash Wagh played the tabla; Shyam Babhulkar and others joined. The sessions ran late. There was tobacco, paan supari, tasty chivda, and music until the night was well advanced. On those evenings, the distinction between the pharmacology teacher and the classical vocalist had entirely dissolved.

As Chairman of Sargam — MGIMS's musical society — and cultural in-charge for the college's annual day, he was the animating force behind the institution's cultural life. He performed songs from iconic Hindi films of the 1950s, transported listeners into nostalgia with the ease of someone who understood that music's function was to carry people somewhere they needed to go. He taught acting to MGIMS staff members. When Sujata, the school-going daughter of hospital cashier Mr. D.R. Bele, had performances lined up in Wardha and Nagpur, he accompanied her to the venues personally. The music teacher in him could not distinguish between his students in medicine and anyone else around him who was trying to learn something difficult.

In the early 1980s, he performed in a Marathi drama titled Pankh Labhale Aaj Suranna at Dhanwate Rang Mandir, Nagpur, alongside established actors including Pandit Prabhakar Deshkar. The doctor from Khapre Wada had made it, after all, to the stage he had imagined in adolescence — not as a full-time musician, but fully present, on his own terms.

Gajanan Ambulkar, eighty-two years old when he shared his memories, offered an image that said more than any professional assessment could. Dr. Khapre appeared at his father's funeral in the rain — not light rain, but the kind that turns Vidarbha streets to ankle-deep mud. He came anyway. He shouldered the arthi. He marched forward in the mud without comment, because the family needed him there and he had come to be there.

"I will forever cherish the memory of his presence at my father's funeral," Ambulkar said. "Rain pouring relentlessly. Undeterred by ankle-deep mud, he marched forward, shouldering my father's arthi — a symbol of profound respect."

This is the man the pharmacology lectures came from, and the mehfil sessions, and the quiet presence at performance venues. The kindness was not a separate quality from the teaching or the music. It was the source of all of it.

He left MGIMS in August 1987, taught briefly at GMC Aurangabad, took voluntary retirement in June 1988, then taught at Dr. Punjabrao Deshmukh Memorial Medical College, Amravati, and subsequently at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, until 2005. Each institution received the same quality of attention he had given Sevagram.

When I spoke with him by telephone on May 30, 2023, he was eighty-six years old. His voice carried nostalgia and warmth in equal measure. "The two decades I spent in Sevagram during the 1970s and 1980s were the golden days of my life," he said. The bond he had formed with the people, the joy in the work, the shared love of classical music, the sense of belonging — these had woven themselves into the fabric of his soul in a way that age had not loosened.

In the last years of his life, his health declined. A renal tumour required a nephrectomy. In January 2026, he developed bilateral femoral artery occlusions. Sepsis and multiorgan failure followed. His family, not wishing to prolong his suffering, asked the intensivists to withhold further life support. He died at Viveka Hospital in Nagpur on January 18, 2026 — a fortnight before what would have been his eighty-ninth birthday.

He had wanted to be a Hindustani Classical vocalist. He became a pharmacologist who taught like a performer, organised the cultural life of an institution, shouldered the arthi in the rain, and made his home a place where the music never stopped. He did not choose between the two lives. He lived both.

The train from Chennai had been running for twenty-two hours when it pulled into Wardha East on the morning of February 28, 1975. The platform was nearly empty. John Premendran, twenty-seven years old, a freshly minted MSc from CMC Vellore, stepped down with a single bag and looked around. A cycle rickshaw was the only transport on offer. He climbed in and asked for the medical college.

The road ahead was flat and featureless — no shops, no landmarks, no reassuring sign that a college lay anywhere in this landscape. By his own later admission, a dark thought crossed his mind: what if the rickshaw puller simply disappeared with his luggage? He said nothing, held his bag closer, and watched the road unspool into the distance.

The man delivered him safely to the college gate, helped carry his bag to the Physiology department, and refused to make a fuss about it. John gave him five rupees — a sum that felt both inadequate and right — and stood at the entrance of what would become his home for the next thirty-four years.

John Samuel Premendran was born on September 5, 1947, in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, the son of Dr. M. James Sudarsanam — a historian, a teacher, and the Vice Principal of Voorhees College. It was a household in which books mattered and precision was expected. Young John grew up wanting to be a doctor.

He came close. He sat the entrance examination for CMC Vellore's MBBS programme and missed the cutoff by a margin narrow enough to sting. What followed was not defeat but redirection. He completed a BSc at Voorhees College — botany, zoology, chemistry — and then returned to CMC, this time for an MSc in Pharmacology. He was, it turned out, exceptionally good at it.

After a brief stint as a lecturer at CMC, he began looking for what came next. A classmate, Mrs. Nambiar, who had taken a position in the Physiology department at a new medical college in a village called Sevagram, mentioned that Pharmacology had a vacancy. John applied. An interview was called. He boarded the GT Express north, and arrived — as described — at an almost empty station on the edge of Vidarbha's cotton country.

The village life felt, unexpectedly, familiar. He had grown up near Katpadi, a small town outside Vellore, and Sevagram's pace did not alarm him. That Marathi was unknown to him mattered less than the fact that written Hindi was not. He settled.

On March 1, 1975, John Premendran walked into the Pharmacology department for the first time as a member of staff. His salary was ₹530, paid in cash. He was housed in the boys' hostel. His teaching tools were a blackboard and chalk.

He never asked for more.

For thirty-four years, through every wave of educational technology — overhead projectors, slide carousels, the eventual arrival of PowerPoint — Premendran taught pharmacology with chalk. His lectures on the autonomic nervous system, on chemotherapy, on central nervous system pharmacology were constructed, line by line, on a blackboard, in handwriting his students recognised as his own form of calligraphy. The same precision appeared in everything he wrote outside the classroom: his letters, his research notes, his correspondence with students after they had graduated and moved on. He wrote it all in green ink.

The green ink was not an affectation. It was simply his — a marker of a sensibility that valued the particular over the generic, the handmade over the mass-produced. Students who received letters from him decades later knew, before they opened the envelope, who had written it.

His other signature contribution was practical. Premendran had trained in experimental pharmacology at CMC Vellore, where dog dissection was conducted with rigour. He brought that expertise to MGIMS and passed it on. A department attendant named Wankhede built a piston-and-lever apparatus to measure ureteric peristalsis in dogs, and the graphs it produced were exceptional. Research followed: plant extracts and snake venom, the behaviour of calcium and strontium and barium on muscle tissue. In 1989, this work became a PhD from Nagpur University.

When the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act ended animal experimentation in 1998, Premendran did not mourn the old methods for long. His first MD student, Dr. V. Bonde, was assigned a project on community-acquired pneumonia instead — a pivot made possible by his relationships across departments, with colleagues in Medicine and Paediatrics who welcomed a pharmacologist's student into their wards without hesitation.

"His discipline and punctuality were clear in everything he did," Bonde recalled. "And he made sure others followed his example."

There was something Sevagram did to people who stayed long enough. The absence of distraction — no cinema, no metropolitan restlessness — turned inward energy outward, toward students, toward music, toward community. Premendran felt this.

Every December, he spent a month training nursing and medical students in Christmas carols. On the evening of the 24th, the group would walk to Dr. Sushila Nayar's residence and sing for her. Dr. Nayar made a point of requesting him personally: "John, when will you bring your carol team?" After the singing, there were cakes and biscuits, and the kind of memory that a life accumulates without knowing it is accumulating anything at all.

On other evenings, he played the violin. He had begun learning Carnatic classical violin at twelve, under a teacher who charged ten rupees a month for lessons in both violin and harmonium. At MGIMS, he found a musical companion in Dr. Vivek Pophali, a faculty member in Medicine who played guitar. They performed together at college concerts — Pophali on guitar, Premendran on violin — while colleagues Dr. R.K. Gupta and Dr. M.D. Khapre contributed their voices.

He guided eleven MD students across three decades. One of the stranger dynamics of his career was that his first postgraduate student, Dr. V. Bonde, was fifty years old when he enrolled — five years older than his guide. The potential awkwardness was absorbed without comment. Premendran's view of teaching had no room for hierarchy based on age. Learning was what mattered; the rest was arrangement.

Premendran was, by temperament, an introvert. He did not fill rooms with noise. Students who knew him only from the corridor might have found him reserved, perhaps even distant. Those who knew him longer discovered the warmth underneath the quietness — a man of strong religious conviction, soft speech, and a precise ethical sense that he applied as rigorously to small decisions as to large ones.

Dr. Swanand Pathak, from the 1993 MBBS batch, remembered one image above all others: Premendran arriving at the railway station to receive him when he came to Sevagram for the first time. "He was not only a remarkable mentor," Pathak said, "but a man of great stature." The gesture — a senior professor, turning up at a station to meet a student he had not yet taught — said something that no formal tribute could have said more clearly.

His wife Sheila, who came from Chennai and initially found village life an adjustment, became a fixture of Kasturba Vidya Mandir, where she taught mathematics and English to the children of MGIMS faculty — some of whom later became doctors themselves. She eventually became the school's principal. On evenings and weekends, she tutored students at home. Decades later, her students — and their parents — still spoke of her with specific, undiminished gratitude.

John Premendran retired from MGIMS on August 18, 2009, after thirty-four years. He was not done teaching: he joined Mamata Medical College in Khammam, spent eight more years in a Pharmacology department, and served briefly as its head.

His son Ben, admitted to MGIMS in 1995, completed both his MBBS and his MD in Anaesthesiology at the same institution where his father had taught. In 2020, Ben moved to Abu Dhabi, and in 2022 his parents followed.

Sheila Premendran died on January 31, 2024, at their home in Sevagram, after a long illness. She had returned to the place that had, against early expectations, become hers.

John Premendran now lives with his son in Abu Dhabi. He is in his late seventies. Whether he still plays the violin is not recorded. Whether he still writes in green ink, one suspects, is not really in question.

On the morning of July 17, 1973, a train from Delhi pulled into Wardha station carrying a fifty-eight-year-old doctor with a neatly packed suitcase and, by all accounts, no intention of slowing down. Dr. B.K. Mahajan had just finished fourteen years as head of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at M.P. Shah Medical College in Jamnagar. He had also spent thirteen years before that in the Bombay State Health Services — as epidemic medical officer, plague control officer, district health officer, deputy director of public health — battling the diseases that moved through poor populations like water through cracked ground. He could, at fifty-eight, have stopped.

Instead, he had accepted Dr. Sushila Nayar's invitation to come to Sevagram and build a department. He stepped onto the dusty platform at Wardha and hired a conveyance to the campus. What awaited him was a medical college that had been running for four years, a community medicine department in early formation, and a founding director who had already decided that her students would learn medicine from villages, not only from wards.

Mahajan had been preparing for this, without knowing it, his entire career.

He was born on July 15, 1915, in Chuhar Munda, in the Sialkot district of what was then West Punjab — a landscape that no longer exists as he knew it, erased by Partition thirty-two years before he arrived in Maharashtra. His MBBS from Punjab in 1940 placed him fifth in the university. Prizes and scholarships followed.

His formation was unusually wide. Thirteen years in the Bombay State Health Services gave him the epidemiologist's habit of mind — the capacity to read a district rather than a patient, to see a disease not as an individual misfortune but as a consequence of water, housing, nutrition, and neglect. In 1961 and 1962, under the Colombo Plan, he trained in preventive and social medicine in the United Kingdom, then studied medical and hospital administration at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. By the time he arrived in Jamnagar for his first professorship, he had accumulated the kind of experience that no examination could confer.

The twenty-two research papers he published at Jamnagar covered filariasis, leprosy, smallpox, nutrition, water supply, and primary healthcare — a map of the public health problems that rural India faced and that urban medicine, trained in tertiary hospitals, was not designed to address. When Nayar was looking for someone to run community medicine at MGIMS, Mahajan's record made him the obvious choice. The question was whether he would come.

He came.

The programme that Mahajan inherited and built was, by the standards of Indian medical education in the 1970s, radical. First-year students — fresh from their school-leaving examinations, barely adults — were sent into villages. Not for a day trip. For ten to twelve days at a time, sleeping on charpoys, eating jowar bhakri, drawing water from wells, living as the people they were being trained to serve actually lived.

Dr. Ashok Mehendale, from the 1973 batch, remembered the geography of those early camps: Sevagram and Warud for the first batch in 1969, then Panar, Kharangana, Kutki, Karanji Bhoge, Barbadi, Mhasala in successive years, each village receiving a batch of students who arrived with their medical bags and left, a fortnight later, with something that no pharmacology lecture could provide: an unambiguous understanding of what poverty looked like from the inside.

"It was a life they had never known — simple yet harsh. And it changed them forever."

The National Medical Commission made comparable programmes mandatory for Indian medical colleges in 2023. MGIMS had been running them for more than fifty years.

The General Outpatient Department was the other instrument. Conceived with Nayar and executed by Mahajan, the GOPD was designed to function as a primary health centre nested inside a teaching hospital — a place where students saw the common ailments of a rural population before they were routed upward to specialties, where antenatal care sat alongside anti-rabies vaccines and tuberculosis follow-up, where triage was not a bureaucratic function but a clinical education. Students who passed through the GOPD early in their training understood, before they ever entered a specialty ward, that most of what a doctor encounters in practice is neither dramatic nor specialised.

In the classroom, his method was Socratic and unforgiving of passivity. "Tell me," he asked a student in the middle of a lecture, "if you were to start a malaria control programme in this very village, where would you begin?" There was no rote answer. He wanted them to think like practitioners, not like examination candidates. Dr. V.K. Gupta, from the 1976 batch, remembered that Mahajan kept his lectures anchored to the epidemiological triad of agent, host, and environment — and trusted students to read the rest. "The rest," he would say, "you can easily find in your textbooks." What they could not find in textbooks was the thing he gave them in the field.

He went to the villages himself. He walked when he had to, mapping disease patterns, running health camps, taking notes that his students remembered long afterward — not for their length but for what they noticed. He saw the subtle shifts in disease trends, the gaps between what government reports recorded and what was actually happening in a household. His students learned, by watching him, that the most important skill in public health was attention.

In June 1977, Nagpur University recognised MGIMS for postgraduate studies in Community Medicine — the first such recognition in the region. The first four MD students were Dr. Anand Tatte, Dr. G. Subrahmanyam, Dr. M.C. Mathew, and Dr. Luis A.V. Barreto. Nayar and Mahajan guided them together.

Sevagram was unlike anywhere Mahajan had worked before. The pace was slow. The campus was small. He lived at 14 MLK Colony with his wife Aruna, and the house became, in the way that certain houses on small campuses do, a place people gravitated toward — a space where ideas were exchanged and the warmth of the couple inside made the address familiar to everyone on campus.

His closest companion at MGIMS was Dr. M.L. Sharma of the Pharmacology department. Their friendship was a feature of campus life — two senior men of a certain seriousness, and between them an ease and humour that those around them found reassuring. Mahajan's Punjabi — pure, lilting, carrying the cadences of a Punjab he had left decades before — would emerge in moments of pleasure or teasing. He had a fondness for catching medical students off-guard, leaving them both confused and smiling.

His colleagues found in him a particular quality of fairness. He listened to residents rather than merely instructing them. He sought the views of nurses. He treated the laboratory technicians with a patience and precision that made them trust him. Even the administration softened around him, because he never bullied and never raised his voice, and yet, somehow, always got what he needed.

On January 24, 1966 — the day Indira Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister — an Air India Boeing 707 crashed near Mont Blanc. Among the 117 people killed were the physicist Homi Bhabha and Lalit Mahajan, B.K. Mahajan's twenty-two-year-old son, who was on his way to the United States to study engineering.

Mahajan did not speak of this often. Those who knew him in Sevagram knew it as background — a sorrow that had been carried for years before he arrived, that had not broken him but had altered him in ways that a man of his reticence would not have named. To keep his son's memory present in a form that had meaning, he established the Lalit Mahajan Award, given each year to the best student in Preventive and Social Medicine. A father's loss, redirected toward the subject to which he had given his working life.

He left Sevagram in August 1982, after nine years. Col. S.K. Chatterjee left the same month. Two founding figures gone simultaneously, a gap that the department would take years to close.

He went to AIIMS, New Delhi, as a senior consultant for the Integrated Child Development Services, working on child health policy at a national level until 1988, then advised the Delhi Council of Child Welfare until 1997. The work continued to move outward, as it always had with him — from the individual patient to the community, from the community to the district, from the district to the country.

What he left at MGIMS was structural. The village immersion programme, the GOPD as a model of integrated primary care, the postgraduate curriculum in community medicine, the cohort of doctors who understood — in their bodies as well as their minds, because they had slept on charpoys and eaten jowar bhakri — that public health was not a specialty practised in hospitals. It was a way of seeing that either developed early or not at all.

Dr. Suneela Garg, from the 1974 batch, remembered his rare capacity to bring together people who did not naturally cooperate — bureaucrats, policymakers, villagers, students — and hold them in the same room long enough to accomplish something. He visited the villages himself, she said, and addressed problems directly rather than delegating them downward.

The Lalit Mahajan Award is given every year. The villages are still visited. The GOPD still runs. The man who sent doctors to sleep on charpoys in Vidarbha's villages is gone, but the habit he instilled — of looking past the patient to the conditions that produced the patient — is still, fifty years later, part of what MGIMS does.

In February 2018, Dr. Mohan Gupte walked back through the gates of MGIMS for the first time in thirty-five years. The campus had swelled—new architecture casting longer shadows, a sprawling hospital, corridors thick with a new generation of students—but he still knew its bones. These were the rooms where he had taught; these were the offices where he had argued over leprosy data before leaving in 1983. That departure had launched a career spanning the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the chair of the first WHO Technical Advisory Group for Leprosy Elimination.

He had returned to receive the International Gandhi Award for Leprosy from the Vice President of India. The honor had been instituted by the Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation in Wardha, the very organization where he had labored in the 1970s before finding his academic home at MGIMS. To stand on this specific soil, receiving an award for work that had pivoted exactly here, possessed the kind of quiet symmetry an epidemiologist might describe as statistically improbable.

He accepted the honor, quietly redirected the entirety of the prize money to mental health research, elderly services, and a struggling student, and then he went home.

The Sanctuary in Pune

Born in Pune on February 10, 1948, his earliest education was not in a classroom, but in his own living room. His father, Digambar, was a headmaster who viewed education as the only honest lever to lift the impoverished. His mother, Venutai, took that philosophy a step further. She brought struggling students and ostracized women directly into their home, offering them shelter before guiding them toward Annasaheb Karve's Hingne Institute. For the Guptes, a house was never merely a residence; it was a sanctuary.

In 1966, a tragic fall at school claimed Venutai’s life. Mohan was eighteen. Already a brilliant scholar—holding a national scholarship and ranking in the top thirty of the Maharashtra SSC examinations—the sudden grief reoriented his compass. Rather than chasing the lucrative avenues his academic brilliance afforded, he sought out the margins. He harbored no interest in wealth; he possessed a singular need to be fundamentally useful.

This drive led him to B.J. Medical College in Pune, culminating in an MBBS in 1970, followed by a Diploma in Public Health and an MD in Preventive and Social Medicine. Two mentors profoundly shaped his hands and his mind. Dr. N.S. Deodhar, a surgeon retrained at Harvard, taught him to view populations, rather than just individuals, as his patients—treating statistical evidence as a vital clinical instrument. Dr. P.V. Sathe taught him the delicate balance of holding clinical medicine in one hand and community health in the other. Under Sathe’s guidance, Gupte investigated ergot poisoning—a toxic grain fungus devastating the poor. Mastering the intricate machinery of high-performance liquid chromatography, he forged habits of meticulous precision that would anchor him for a lifetime.

The Inconvenient Observation

Before he arrived in Sevagram, there was the smallpox campaign, and before that, the quiet, heavy wards of leprosy hospitals. In 1976, Dr. Deodhar sent him to interview for the Deputy Director post at the Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation. The panel was formidable, featuring Baba Amte, R.R. Diwakar, and Devendra Kumar. Diwakar looked at the young doctor and asked a piercing question: Had he ever seen poverty up close?

Gupte answered without academic abstraction. He spoke with the heavy, unadorned truth of what his own eyes had witnessed. He was hired immediately.

Rising to Acting Director, Gupte began to notice fractures in the established medical gospel. Textbooks unequivocally stated that regular dapsone therapy prevented deformities in leprosy. Yet, as Gupte tracked his clinical records, the data refused to comply. He watched patients faithfully take their medication, only to see their deformities advance. He published his findings. The medical establishment met him with harsh skepticism. But he stood firmly beside his data, willing to say in print what others whispered, until time and science proved him right.

When internal politics at the Foundation became a barrier to his work, he walked directly into Dr. Sushila Nayar’s office at MGIMS in November 1979. He explained his reality. Recognizing his rare caliber, she offered him a readership in Preventive and Social Medicine before he left the room. By December, the thirty-one-year-old was living in Sevagram.

The Architecture of Illness

His three-and-a-half years at MGIMS were a whirlwind of quiet revolution. Promoted to Professor and Head, he mentored postgraduates, treated patients, and even taught statistics to the faculty—with Dr. Nayar herself sitting in the audience, absorbing his lectures.

It was here that his unparalleled observational skills flourished. When an unusual number of nursing students from Kerala began falling ill with tuberculosis, he did not simply treat the cases as unfortunate statistics. He looked at the architecture of the Birla-donated building—Community Medicine occupying the floor directly above the Medicine wards—and traced the invisible paths of contagion that others had walked past without a second glance.

He was a man deeply embedded in the realities of his patients. He examined them with bare hands and, in a detail his own biography records without a hint of self-pity, he personally contracted leprosy during this period. Treated by Dr. K.V. Desikan, he made a full recovery, his empathy for the afflicted now etched into his own immune system.

Building the National Stage

In June 1983, with Dr. Nayar’s blessing, he departed for Chennai to lead a massive ICMR leprosy vaccine trial. MGIMS had been the vital connective tissue between his early fieldwork and his future on the global stage.

What followed was a masterclass in institution-building. He led tuberculosis epidemiology at the Tuberculosis Research Centre and oversaw biostatistical monitoring across India. In 1999, he became the Director of the National Institute of Epidemiology, building India's capacity for outbreak investigation from the ground up. He helped shape the multidrug therapy (MDT) program that revolutionized global leprosy treatment, established India's first Field Epidemiology Training Centre, and spent a decade lobbying to create the ICMR One Health Institute in Nagpur.

Today, the young reader who arrived in Sevagram with a resignation letter in his pocket is an elder statesman of global public health. The dapsone observation that was once dismissed is now standard medical doctrine. He began in a headmaster's home where the struggling were welcomed off the street, and he spent his entire life doing a grander version of the exact same thing: finding the problems the world refused to name, and naming them anyway.

Professor & Head of Community Medicine · Six Years at Sevagram · The Only Man in Sevagram

When Lt. Col. Sudhir Kumar Chatterjee retired from the Indian Army Medical Corps on February 29, 1976, after twenty-five years of service, five medical colleges offered him a position. He had just completed his MD in Preventive and Social Medicine at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune, at the age of fifty-four. He was experienced, qualified, and entirely employable. Four of those colleges were in cities. The fifth was MGIMS, Sevagram — a rural campus on the edge of a cotton-farming village in Vidarbha, built on Gandhian principles, run by a woman whom he would later describe, without irony, as the only man in Sevagram.

He chose Sevagram. He arrived on March 9, 1976. His monthly salary was ₹1,531 — the same as his army pay. He did not consider this a sacrifice worth mentioning. What mattered, as those who knew him understood, was not the salary but the work. And the work at Sevagram, he had decided, was the kind that mattered.

He was born on February 3, 1921, in Baidya Para, Jamalpur, Bihar — the fifth of nine children in a household shaped by the rhythms of the Indian Railways, where his father worked. The family ethos was not complicated: discipline, education, duty. He attended Hari Sabha Bengali Medium School, then Eastern Railway Boys' High School, then Haji Mohsin College in Hooghly. He entered Calcutta National Medical College in 1939 and graduated in 1945.

The army followed. He joined the Indian Army Medical Corps in 1949, the same year he completed his Diploma in Public Health Administration at the All India Institute of Hygiene. Field postings took him to Siliguri, Srinagar, Gaya, and across the subcontinent — the life of a military doctor in newly independent India, making quick decisions in difficult places, learning that medicine practised under constraint was still medicine, and often the most consequential kind.

His daughter Gopa, who was nine years old when India went to war with Pakistan, remembered what those years felt like from the other side of the uniform: "How dreadful were the days when war broke out with Pakistan. Communication was scarce, and the uncertainty was agonizing. We would wait anxiously, hearts heavy with worry, longing for any news of his safety."

He survived the wars. He moved through postings in Agra, Shillong, Delhi, Bombay, and finally Pune, where his role shifted from field medicine to teaching. At the Armed Forces Medical College, he spent four years as Reader and then Associate Professor in Preventive and Social Medicine. He was fifty-three when he enrolled for his MD. He obtained it in 1975. Then the army released him, and Sevagram called.

He arrived at MGIMS as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in November 1980. He headed the Department of Community Medicine through years in which the department was finding its shape — absorbing the legacy of Dr. B.K. Mahajan, who had left the previous month after building the village immersion programme and the GOPD from nothing, and pressing forward into the postgraduate training in community medicine that Mahajan had begun.

Colleagues remembered two things about him immediately. The first was his bearing. A quarter-century in the army had produced a particular quality of presence — erect, precise, economical with words, the kind of man who said "meet me in the department office" when he had something serious to discuss, and who meant it. His instructions were crisp. His expectations were clear.

The second thing they remembered was the hat. In Sevagram, where the Gandhian ethos meant khadi was standard dress for those who took the institution's founding principles seriously, Chatterjee wore khadi — and paired it with a British-style hat. The combination was entirely his own: the military man who had absorbed the village, the retired officer who had chosen rural service, the Bengali from Bihar who had come to Maharashtra and put on its cotton while keeping something of his own formation visible on his head.

He had a particular phrase he returned to when describing Dr. Sushila Nayar. "The only man in Sevagram is Dr. Sushila Nayar," he would tell colleagues — not as a comment on gender, he would explain, but as the most precise description of authority he could offer. Then he would tell the story. In April 1966, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was preparing to visit the United States, her ambassador B.K. Nehru was asked how President Johnson should address her. She answered without hesitation: "You can tell him that my cabinet ministers call me 'Sir.'" Chatterjee told this story to explain Nayar. The parallel was clear to anyone who had encountered both women.

His daughter Gopa was in his classroom. She had secured admission to MGIMS in the same year he joined — 1976 — so that father and daughter arrived on campus together, one to teach, one to learn. His son Rajib graduated three years later, in 1979. The campus was, for those years, also home.

The transition from military to civilian institutional life is rarely seamless, and Sevagram's particular character — its Gandhian quietness, its deliberate simplicity, its ethos of service that asked for no salute — offered the army's structures and habits nowhere to rest. Chatterjee absorbed this without apparent difficulty. He wore the khadi. He attended the department. He did the work.

What Sevagram gave him in return was duration — time in one place, with one community, long enough to see the students he had taught go on to practice and teach themselves. Dr. Ashok Mehendale, who graduated from MGIMS in 1976 and would eventually head the same department three decades later, was among those who passed through his classroom. The continuity mattered. The army had moved him constantly; Sevagram held him still long enough to accumulate something more than competence.

He officially retired in February 1981, then continued on contract until July 1982. When he finally left, the department he and Mahajan had built was a functioning entity — a postgraduate programme, a community medicine curriculum grounded in fieldwork rather than lecture halls, and a generation of doctors who had spent ten days sleeping on charpoys in Vidarbha villages and understood, in their bodies, what the epidemiological textbooks meant.

He did not stop. In 1983 he joined Charutar Arogya Mandal — now Pramukhswami Medical College. In January 1986 he moved to Pravara Rural Medical College in Loni, teaching until December 1988. He was sixty-seven. The Royal Institute of Health and Hygiene, London, made him a Fellow in 1986. He was deputed to Nairobi and Tanzania under the Aga Khan Project. The career continued to expand outward, as it had throughout his life.

In his final years in Pune, he led a community tuberculosis surveillance team. On Sundays — not weekdays, Sundays — he conducted home visits, screening patients, counselling them, checking that they were taking their medication. He was, by that point, well into his eighties. The habit of going to where the patient was, rather than waiting for the patient to come, had been built at MGIMS and had never left him.

He lost his wife Gita in May 2017, after sixty-six years of marriage. The family had begun planning a centenary celebration for his hundredth birthday — February 3, 2021, the same date on which, a century earlier, he had been born in a railway town in Bihar. He died in November 2020, three months before the party.

There is something fitting, though not consoling, in the near-miss. He had spent his life just ahead of schedule — obtaining his MD at fifty-four, joining a new institution at fifty-five, still doing home visits in his eighties. That the hundredth birthday arrived without him is the kind of irony that a man of his precision would have noted, filed, and declined to make a fuss about.

His two children both graduated from the campus where he taught. His students went on to build the discipline he had helped establish. The khadi and the British hat are gone. The department remains.

The Scrabble Game

On most evenings in Vivekanand Colony, if you knocked on the Ghulianis' door at the wrong moment, you would find a Scrabble board mid-game and two people quietly annoyed at the interruption—who would wave you warmly inside anyway.

By day, Dr. K.K. Ghuliani moved through the Department of Community Medicine with the unhurried precision of a man who had spent decades learning that urgency and panic were not the same thing. But in those evenings, he transformed into an animated storyteller and a fierce cricket enthusiast. His laughter, when it finally broke, was rich and entirely unguarded. Mrs. Mohini Ghuliani would place something hot on the table, effortlessly making the guest feel that their intrusion had, in fact, been the point of the evening all along.

This was the Ghuliani the department only saw obliquely. In the classroom and the office, he was someone else entirely: short in stature, invariably dressed in crisp khadi, economical with his words, and possessed of a deep, steady calm that no one dared confuse with weakness.

Mianwali, and the Border Crossed

He was born on September 16, 1926, in Mianwali, in the North-West Punjab that is now Pakistan. When Partition fractured the subcontinent in 1947, it took his geography from him. He crossed the border carrying only what he could hold, eventually securing his MBBS at Punjab University in 1950. At the time, Government Medical College in Amritsar—the single functioning medical college in northern India—was buckling under the overflow of a newly divided nation's desperate need for doctors.

He joined the Army Medical Corps in 1951, serving as a Regimental Medical Officer through postings in Amritsar, Jubbulpore, Kirkee, and Jhansi. The military forged the architecture of his professional life. It instilled a permanent belief that rigorous preparation was the only reliable shield against chaos; that discipline was not a personality trait, but a clinical tool; and that a doctor who lost his composure under pressure was a doctor of limited use.

He chased the advancing frontier of science throughout his career, studying hygiene, preventive medicine, malariology, and statistical quality control whenever the army permitted, eventually earning his MD in Preventive and Social Medicine from AIIMS in 1967.

By the early 1980s, the Community Medicine department at MGIMS was in a precarious state. Dr. Mohan Gupte had left for Chennai, leaving Dr. S. Nagesh as a solitary lecturer carrying a weight no single academic should bear. A department of that size desperately needed a head. Dr. Ghuliani—recently retired from the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune and fresh from a WHO malaria evaluation team in northeastern India—was available.

He arrived on October 28, 1983, at a salary of Rs. 2,520 a month. He took the helm of the department and made absolutely no fuss about the condition in which he found it.

The Weight of Quiet Authority

The Department of Community Medicine had been built by men of considerable, affectionate noise. Dr. B.K. Mahajan was a classic Punjabi presence—broad, warm, and booming. Lt. Col. Chatterjee commanded rooms with the clipped, polished register of colonial-era military precision. Dr. Mohan Gupte was effortlessly magnetic, accumulating friends simply by existing.

Dr. Ghuliani was none of these things, nor did he try to be. His authority was never a performance. It resided entirely in his absolute consistency. What you saw on his first day was exactly what you saw on his last. His standards did not fluctuate with his mood, and he never raised his voice because he simply never needed to. Students and junior staff calibrated themselves to his quiet frequency quickly. They learned that his silence was not coldness; it was a profound form of respect. He assumed your competence until you proved otherwise, and he withheld both judgment and praise until they had been thoroughly earned.

Under his eight-year watch, his MD students systematically mapped the public health geography of Wardha district. They investigated maternal health, hypertension in business communities, occupational hazards in ginning mills, and trachoma in slums. This was not an eclectic list of academic curiosities; it was a deliberate, utilitarian index of the exact afflictions plaguing Vidarbha, designed to make the department useful to the people rather than just productive for journals.

He spoke Punjabi, Pashto, Urdu, and Hindi fluently. Marathi, however, remained beyond his grasp. He never pretended otherwise. This linguistic gap was the quiet hallmark of his generation—men who had crossed borders they had not chosen to cross, who rebuilt their lives in places that were not quite home, and who dutifully made those places home anyway.

The Letters from Pune

While Dr. Ghuliani anchored the department, Mohini Ghuliani anchored the campus. She played the sitar, she knitted, and she taught flower arrangement to the women of Sevagram with a patience that turned her into a neighborhood institution. Their home became a place of reliable, magnetic warmth—the kind of house people gravitated toward without planning to, and always left much later than they intended.

In July 1991, he handed the department over to Dr. G.V.S. Murthy and moved to Pune to support his daughter through her Paediatrics MD. He worked as a WHO consultant for the National Leprosy Eradication Programme, quietly following the institutional footsteps of Dr. Mohan Gupte once again.

After leaving Sevagram, he never returned to the campus. By his own quiet admission, he was too introverted for the managed emotions of a grand reunion or the self-consciousness of being perceived after a long absence. Instead, he kept his bonds alive in the way introverts often do: through the written word. Long, meticulous letters would arrive in Sevagram, the handwriting as precise as his military training, the sentiments as unguarded and warm as a Friday night Scrabble game.

He died on March 13, 2015, at the age of eighty-eight, survived by his wife.

The MD theses his students produced still sit on the department's shelves, serving as a patient, quiet record of Wardha's history. But his true legacy does not exist in institutional files. It lives in the memory of a steady man who stepped into a fractured department, offered eight years of undemonstrative brilliance, and asked for nothing in return except that the work be taken seriously. In Sevagram, that was always enough.

The complaint remained identical across three decades. A researcher would appear at Dr. Naresh Tyagi's door—sometimes an anxious postgraduate student, sometimes a senior faculty member clutching a sheaf of handwritten data—and explain that they had conducted a study and now required his help with the analysis.

Tyagi would adjust his glasses and look at the numbers. He would ask when the study had been designed. Inevitably, he would learn that the design had been finalized months or even years earlier, entirely without his involvement.

"One of the problems I encountered all my life was that people didn't ask me to help them design the study. They would do the study, come along with the data, and then ask for my help."

He said this not with bitterness, but with the mild, enduring exasperation of a man who had spent his entire life explaining a fundamental truth of science: a statistician consulted after an experiment is like a doctor called after the patient has died. He could sometimes salvage the analysis; he could perform a brilliant statistical autopsy. But he could never salvage a flawed design. Yet, knowing this, he kept coming to work anyway, chasing the numbers in the hope of catching them early.

Born on January 6, 1951, in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, Tyagi lost his mother when he was still a child. After the fifth grade, he left home, drifting from hostel to hostel, staying ahead of his studies through the kind of fierce, quiet self-sufficiency that early loss either shatters or cements. He completed his matriculation in Muzaffarnagar, earned a BSc from Vardhaman College in Bijnor, and finished an MSc in Statistics at DAV College in 1974.

He moved to Delhi for a difficult year, surviving a job at a private college that routinely failed to pay its staff. He abandoned a half-started MA in Economics only when a Government of India fellowship came through for the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai. Population studies—the sweeping mathematics of human existence—became the specialization that would eventually lead him to Sevagram.

Between 1977 and 1980, he worked as a Junior Scientific Officer at K.E.M. Hospital in Mumbai, mapping the statistical effects of environmental pollution on human health. A WHO fellowship then took him to Indonesia and Thailand. Upon submitting his findings, the universe presented him with a rare, binary choice. On a single morning in 1980, two envelopes arrived simultaneously: one offering a position in the Indian Police Service, the other offering a post at a rural medical college in a Gandhian village.

He looked at the two divergent paths. He chose Sevagram.

He joined MGIMS on September 10, 1980, as a Lecturer in Statistics and Demography. It was a deeply unusual position: a non-medical statistician embedded inside a medical institution. His value was entirely dependent on the quality of the questions the clinicians around him were willing to ask—and on how early in their research they thought to ask them.

His closest intellectual partnership was forged with Dr. B.D. Bhatia, an Associate Professor of Paediatrics. Crucially, Dr. Bhatia did not bring Tyagi dead data; he brought him questions before the data existed. Together, they designed and published a groundbreaking series of papers on the relationship between low birth weight and maternal measurements. This work informed Tyagi's own MPhil thesis and his 1990 PhD in Statistics. The central question—why some babies are born underweight while others are not—was investigated through rigorous multivariate analysis across Wardha district. It was exactly how Tyagi believed all clinical research should function: a doctor and a mathematician, arriving at the truth together.

In 1982, when MGIMS acquired a computer from the ICMR, Tyagi sat down and wrote original programs in BASIC and FORTRAN to handle salary calculations and student admissions. Before the machine arrived, he had run the entire biostatistics operation on fiercely systematic paper-based methods, designed to impose rigid consistency on data that would otherwise arrive in chaotic, incompatible forms from different wards. His wife, Sudesh, joined MGIMS as a computer operator, working alongside him in the Medical Records Department to collect, enter, and clean the hospital's data. The institute's records from that era carry the unmistakable, reliable hallmark of two people who took numbers seriously enough to treat them with reverence.

Numbers governed his professional life, but they also dictated his personal rhythms. Every morning, Tyagi walked the Sevagram-Wardha road carrying a walking stick. It was not a social stroll; it was the kind of solitary, kinetic movement that a highly analytical mind requires to process complex probability. Those who passed him on those mornings knew better than to interrupt unless they had an equation worth solving.

In the evenings, the rhythm changed. Chess was his particular arena. The campus provided a rotating cast of formidable opponents—Dr. S.C. Varshney, Dr. R.M. Raizada, Dr. U.S. Jajoo, Dr. S.P. Kalantri, and Dr. G.V.S. Murthy. The chess games were fiercely strategic; the conversation around them was wonderfully light.

He was known for speaking his mind with mathematical precision. In an institutional setting, where diplomacy often dilutes the truth, his directness was legendary. He refused to soften assessments he knew to be accurate, and he never inflated praise for sloppy research. In a discipline where the integrity of a study depends entirely on an honest critique at the design stage, his bluntness was professionally essential, even if occasionally unwelcome.

His other great passion, entirely removed from medicine, was the Bombay Stock Exchange. Beginning in 1976 with the purchase of Tata Motors shares, Tyagi applied the exact same analytical rigor to the market that he brought to epidemiology: tracking trends, calculating moving averages, and making his own assessments rather than following the herd. Whether this obsession made him wealthy is unrecorded. That it engaged his brilliant, number-hungry mind is absolute fact.

He retired from MGIMS in January 2011, packing up thirty years of data. But men who chase numbers rarely stop counting. He immediately joined KLE University in Belagavi, Karnataka, as Professor and Head of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. In a sense, he was simply founding the same department he had built at MGIMS in 1982 all over again. Over the next decade, he developed curricula, expanded a PhD program, and was made a Fellow of the Indian Society for Medical Statistics.

His legacy at MGIMS, however, remained profoundly personal. His son, Vishal, completed his MS in Otolaryngology at MGIMS and now practices in Mumbai. His daughter, Swati, completed her MBBS at MGIMS and practices Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Haryana. Both were trained by the very colleagues their father had sparred with over chessboards and datasets for three decades.

Biostatistics is the subject medical students dread and researchers routinely abuse. They dread it because its logic is alien—the cold language of probability rather than the warm art of diagnosis. They abuse it by consulting its practitioner too late, asking a statistician to bless a badly designed experiment.

Dr. Tyagi spent thirty years at MGIMS fighting to be present at the beginning of the story rather than the end. He succeeded often enough to accumulate a monumental body of work: the birth weight studies, a hundred published papers, the original BASIC programs, and a generation of students who finally understood that a statistician is not a calculator, but a collaborator.

The core problem he described—that people came to him too late—was never fully solved. But the people who did sit across from his desk learned what it looked like to do science correctly. And that is exactly what a master teacher leaves behind: not a perfectly solved equation, but a much clearer understanding of the math.

In his final MBBS examination at Guntur Medical College, a young G.V.S. Murthy sat down for the Preventive and Social Medicine (PSM) paper. He scored 75 out of 200. He failed. Six months later, he reappeared, scored 119, and quietly scraped through. The subject had beaten him once, and then, seemingly, released him.

Two decades later, that same young man was a full professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He was one of India's foremost public health researchers, the man who built the country's first Community Ophthalmology Department in the public sector, and the architect of a diabetic retinopathy screening program that would eventually safeguard the vision of 25,000 patients in Wardha district alone. The subject he had once failed had become the absolute cornerstone of his life.

An epidemiologist might describe this kind of irony as a confounding variable. Dr. Murthy preferred not to dwell on it. There was always the next project to build.

His full name—Gudlavalleti Venkateswara Satyanarayana Rao Murthy—carries his village inside it. Gudlavalleru, a town fifty kilometers southeast of Vijayawada, anchors the front of his name, a traditional Telugu marker tying identity permanently to geography. Born on New Year's Day in 1956, he was schooled in New Delhi before returning south to Guntur Medical College in 1974.

When he graduated with competent, though unexceptional, marks in 1979, he did not follow the familiar, ambitious trajectory of a young Indian doctor. Instead, he went to the mountains of Bhutan. Serving as a Medical Officer at the Chukha Hydroelectric Project from 1981 to 1982, he learned something a classroom cannot teach: how to practice medicine when the supply chain is broken, the infrastructure is minimal, and the textbook answer is simply unavailable.

By the time he completed his MD in Preventive and Social Medicine at AIIMS in 1985—spending his residency moving between tribal villages, urban slums, and rural settlements—he had accumulated a depth of fieldwork rarely seen in purely institutional careers. He had seen the vast, painful gap between what public health promised on paper and what it delivered in practice, and he began to think seriously about how to close it.

In October 1988, an elegant arrangement was proposed. Murthy's wife, Vishala, a brilliant microbiologist, wanted to pursue her MD. MGIMS had a vacancy in Microbiology under Dr. P. Narang. Meanwhile, the Community Medicine department needed a researcher. The geometry was perfect: Sevagram would gain a brilliant mind, and the Murthys would gain an academic base.

He arrived on January 2, 1989, taking a Reader position at Rs. 1,200 a month. By December 1990, he was an Associate Professor. By 1991, Vishala had completed her MD thesis on Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The plan had worked precisely as designed.

What had not been part of the design was how deeply Sevagram would embed itself in him.

Short, stocky, with large expressive eyes, Murthy possessed an immediate, magnetic ease in the classroom. He could pivot seamlessly between polished English and fluent Hindi mid-sentence. His true genius lay in his ability to shatter a complex epidemiological concept into its simplest components, reassembling it in front of his students so the logic glowed visibly at every step. Students who had found public health statistics utterly opaque suddenly discovered that, under Murthy's hands, the subject had a beautiful shape.

Beyond the lecture hall, he became the rare kind of academic that an institution quietly relies on to survive. He could hold a department head's absolute confidence without ever seeming obsequious, and defend a junior colleague's interests without appearing confrontational. He understood Sevagram’s Gandhian ethos not as a dusty historical footnote, but as the actual, living framework for practicing medicine. Whether navigating the unpaved village lanes of Anji or the academic corridors of the hospital, he was entirely at home.

On May 2, 1992, after three and a half years, he resigned. Vishala’s MD was complete, his aging parents in Delhi needed him, and AIIMS had offered him a position at the Dr. R.P. Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences.

It was a narrow door, but it opened into a massive room. Because Murthy arrived at community ophthalmology through the lens of public health, he began asking questions no one else was asking. While India’s eye care system in the 1990s was laser-focused on adult cataracts, Murthy looked at the devastating, unaddressed gap of childhood blindness.

He built India's first Community Ophthalmology Department in the public sector. He established a model pediatric eye care program that shifted national policy—a model later replicated in Indonesia and Nepal. From 2005 to 2015, as a full professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), he worked with the WHO in Geneva, advised UNAIDS, and helped build the national monitoring system for India's HIV/AIDS control program.

His friends in Sevagram had always insisted that when Murthy left in 1992, the departure hadn't quite taken. He returned too often; he slipped back into old conversations too easily.

They were right. Decades later, a conversation with a former MGIMS colleague evolved into a massive public health intervention targeting diabetic retinopathy—an epidemic quietly blinding rural India. On October 20, 2016, MGIMS launched the Diabetic Care Initiative for Wardha district, funded by the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust and supported by LSHTM. Mobile screening units drove into communities that had never seen an eye specialist.

Twenty-five years after leaving the campus, the man who had once failed his PSM exam was back in Wardha, serving as the architect of a program that identified 25,000 diabetic patients to safeguard their vision. The subject had claimed him completely.

Murthy is still active today, splitting his time between Hyderabad and London, still generating the crucial evidence that health policy in low-income settings requires but rarely receives. His elder son, Anirudha, a dentist with a master's in social entrepreneurship, works at the intersection of disability and health systems, walking the same territory his father pioneered.

In March 2024, the family suffered the kind of loss that disrupts every accounting of a life. Their younger son, Aashrai, a neurologist practicing in the United States, died young. In his memory, the Gudlavalleti family established the Dr. Aashrai Sai Venkat Gudlavalleti Memorial Award in Neurological Sciences, turning their grief into a lasting mechanism for medical excellence.

Dr. Murthy still carries his village's name at the front of his own, and it has traveled with him to Geneva, London, Lagos, and Kathmandu. He came to Sevagram for a brief three and a half years, failed to stay, and spent the next thirty years returning. His friends were right all along: he never really left.

The cricket bat was not merely decorative. Three years later, in the inter-college tournament of 1979, MGIMS faced an engineering college from Nagpur. The opposing team boasted two fast bowlers who had played in the Ranji Trophy, and MGIMS was floundering. Mehendale walked to the crease at number six. He faced a searing delivery and, in one fluid, seemingly effortless motion, flicked his wrists. The ball soared over long-off, cleared the boundary fence, and landed permanently in institutional memory.

Those present that afternoon still recall the collective intake of breath from the crowd, the stunned expression on the bowler's face, and the quiet, almost imperceptible smile that crossed Mehendale's lips as he watched it land. He would spend the next five decades in Sevagram teaching community medicine with that exact same quality—the rare capacity, at the precise moment it mattered, to make the impossible look effortless.

He was born in Wardha on March 22, 1956, though his family possessed no settled geography. They had roots in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, passing through Vadodara and Navsari before arriving in Pune. His father, Dr. Madhukar Anant Mehendale, was a Sanskrit scholar of towering international standing—the mind behind the Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles, a researcher of rock inscriptions, and a lecturer at Göttingen and Yale. His mother was a librarian. At home, Ashok was called "Gamya," a name his parents elegantly constructed from the third and fourth notes of the Indian classical music scale.

As a child, his handwriting was flawless. In the fourth standard, his boru (reed pen) glided across the page with such precision in an inter-school competition that relatives later joked it predicted his fate as a doctor. (Naturally, once ballpoint pens replaced fountain pens, his handwriting deteriorated comprehensively, cementing his medical destiny).

When he sat for the B.J. Medical College entrance in Pune, he tied for the final available seat. The seat was awarded to a female student. His mother, who had once held admission to three medical colleges without attending any, refused to accept this as the end of the road. She pointed him toward the entrance examination for MGIMS. Soon after, a telegram arrived from Dean Dr. I.D. Singh, summoning the young man to Sevagram.

On July 27, 1976, he stood before a formidable ten-member interview panel. Decades later, he would remember only one face clearly: Dr. Sushila Nayar, who had designed the examination herself and insisted on questioning each candidate personally.

"Why do you want to become a doctor?" she asked him.

Mehendale knew the expected answers: to serve the poor, to help the suffering, to give back to society. He chose to say something true instead.

"This is the only profession where one can blend swarth—self-interest—and parmarth—altruism."

Badi Behenji smiled. She then tested him on Gandhian history. He named the Aga Khan Palace and Yerawada Jail without hesitation, recalled Gandhi's appendectomy at Sassoon Hospital, and spelled out "BCG" in full when challenged. At six o'clock that evening, the results were posted. He had topped the entrance examination.

From that first interview until her death in January 2001, Ashok Mehendale remained firmly within Sushila Nayar's trusted inner circle. He shared meals at her table, drove her to the hospital, accompanied her on remote field visits, and traveled with her across the country. In a railway compartment in Delhi, she casually introduced him to Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Though she always struggled to pronounce his Marathi surname—there being no equivalent for the hard 'L' sound in Hindi—she considered him family.

Her influence on his career was absolute, direct, and entirely unconventional. When he completed his MBBS and wanted to specialize in pediatrics, she simply told him the seat was taken. When he asked to pursue a Diploma in Child Health, she refused. When he drifted into Pathology as a demonstrator, she promptly summoned him back and placed him in Community Medicine. There, the General OPD offered him exactly what he had actually been searching for: children to treat, immunization programs to run, and mother-and-child welfare at the absolute center of his daily life.

Dr. Sushila Nayar personally selected his MD thesis topic, despite not being his official guide, signing off on it at the Nagpur airport before buying him a cup of coffee. In April 1986, when he sat for his MD practical examination, she was in Delhi undergoing surgery and could not be present. He passed the examination without her in the room. He later reflected that perhaps this was the entire point—she had spent a decade preparing him to stand without her.

The rural programs that defined his teaching life at MGIMS were originally conceived by Dr. Sushila Nayar and Dr. B.K. Mahajan, but they became Mehendale’s to run, his to inhabit, and eventually his to transmit to a generation of students who had never met the founders.

He oversaw the grueling Social Service Camps for decades, sending first-year students into villages for a two-week immersion where they ate the same food and drank from the same wells as their assigned families. Because he had been one of those terrified students himself in 1976, he knew exactly what the experience required and precisely the kind of doctor it was capable of producing.

The Reorientation of Medical Education (ROME) camp at the Kasturba Rural Health Training Centre in Anji was his personal domain from 1988 to 1990. Students arrived stripped of their tertiary hospital assumptions. They worked alongside village health workers and conducted surveys that forced them to view a community as a living organism rather than a collection of hospital beds.

Dr. Amol Dongre, who was posted at Anji under him, remembered Mehendale braving floods during fieldwork, collecting jowar for the Health Assurance Scheme, and sleeping on rough gunny sacks when the work ran late into the night. It is a precise memory, because a senior doctor sleeping on a gunny sack in a flooded village is the kind of image a medical student never forgets.

In 1990, Dr. Sushila Nayar informed him he was to become the Warden of the Boys' Hostel. Her logic was unassailable: "You've been a student here since 1976 and know hostel life inside out. Now it's time to sit on the other side of the table." He dutifully packed his belongings, left his comfortable quarters, and moved into the Warden's Apartment in A Block for five years.

He had lived in those exact rooms himself. He knew instantly when midnight noise was genuinely dangerous and when it was simply the kinetic energy of twenty-two-year-olds with nowhere else to put it. He rarely raised his voice; a single, calibrated look was usually sufficient. He was not positioned "above" the students in the traditional, antagonistic manner of wardens. He was, in some essential sense, continuous with them—he was simply the boy who had arrived at Wardha station with a cricket bat, just a little further down the line.

In 1995, Mehendale applied for a Master's in Public Health through a United Nations Development Fellowships program, backed by a fierce personal recommendation from Dr. Sushila Nayar. The selection committee quickly informed him that the program was exclusively for women from developing countries. He was entirely ineligible.

Dr. Sushila Nayar pressed his case anyway. The committee bowed to the pressure, creating an unprecedented "thirteenth" fellowship position—an exception made specifically for him, making him the only male recipient that year. He completed the program between Jaipur and the University of North Carolina, returning to Sevagram in 1996 with an MPH and immediately resuming the heavy work that had been waiting for him.

Among those who knew him, what stayed with you was not just the reach of his memory, but its warmth. It did not feel stored; it felt inhabited. Years later, an alumnus would return quietly, unsure if he would be recognised, and before he could introduce himself, Mehendale would look up, say his name, ask after his parents, recall the town he came from, and trace, in a few unhurried sentences, the arc his life had taken. Nothing announced, nothing displayed—just a mind in which people did not fade.

That same instinct shaped the MGIMS Alumni Association he helped found in 1993 and tended for decades. When visitors arrived—researchers, donors, old students finding their way back—the institute turned to him almost by reflex. He would begin without preamble, his voice settling into its natural register, moving between Hindi, Marathi, and English as the moment demanded. What followed was never a formal account. It was a walk—through the Ashram, across the wards, into the spaces where the institution had slowly taken form.

And somewhere along the way, the years would begin to gather. A name would open into a face, a face into a family, a family into a place you could almost see. He would pause at the library, linger in the Adhyayan Mandir, and then, as if she had only just stepped out for a moment, Dr. Sushila Nayar would enter the telling—present, immediate, unmistakably alive. You might begin by listening. But before you knew it, you were no longer outside the story. You were walking through it.

He was promoted to Additional Professor in December 2000. Just ten days into the new year, on January 3, 2001, Sushila Nayar died. The Silver Jubilee reunion of his 1976 batch had been held just days prior on Christmas. The profound loss that followed was the kind that never truly resolves; it simply becomes part of the permanent architecture of a life.

He led the department from October 2010 to March 2020, guiding twenty-three postgraduates and authoring fifty research papers. In May 1995, he married Anuradha. Their children, Ajita and Shivansh, were both born in Sevagram and naturally gravitated toward the healing arts—Ajita pursuing her postgraduation in dental surgery, and Shivansh in orthopedics. Even after his official retirement from MGIMS, the compulsion to teach remained unbroken. He took a final guard at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College until late 2024. Only then did he finally declare his long innings closed and walk back to the pavilion—gloves off, pads unbuckled, his bat resting quietly after half a century at the crease.

He arrived in 1976 with a tin trunk and a cricket bat. He never quite left. The terrified young students who passed through his village camps are now the senior doctors and department heads shaping the future of Indian medicine. They still remember the man who slept on a gunny sack in a flooded village, and who could still, half a century later, tell them their own names without ever needing to be reminded.

Four days before he fell, Dr. A.P. Jain walked into Dr. Kalantri's office and sat down. They spoke for an hour—about the past, the present, and what he hoped for in the days ahead. His hands trembled, and his steps were heavily unsteady, but there was absolutely no fear in his voice.

He said, simply: "I take life as it comes." Then, with shaking hands, he pushed back his chair and walked away.

On February 6, 2025, he fell in his bathroom, suffering a devastating brain hemorrhage. He spent four weeks navigating critical care units in Nagpur and Sevagram. He died on March 15, 2025, inside the very ICU where he had taught, treated, and mentored for nearly fifty years—connected, in the end, to the dialysis machines he himself had introduced to the hospital two decades before.

His name, Ajeet, meant unconquerable. Those who knew him found the name astonishingly precise.

Born on May 1, 1945, in Sikandrabad, western Uttar Pradesh, he was the sixth of nine children. He completed his MBBS and MD at King George's Medical College in Lucknow. After briefly exploring psychiatry, he found his permanent, unyielding territory in internal medicine.

He married Sushila in Mumbai in 1972 and returned to Sikandrabad to establish a private practice. The practice did not survive. It failed because his patients expected treatment without payment, and he found himself expected to be a physician without sleep. After a brief, frustrating stint at the Durgapur Steel Plant Hospital—where trade unions attempted to dictate his medical prescriptions—he found a vacancy at MGIMS.

He arrived in June 1974. Sevagram in that monsoon season was a two-trains-a-day village, accessible only by horse-drawn tonga, entirely devoid of hotels or English-medium schools. For a couple raised in Lucknow and Bombay, the adjustment was sharp and unforgiving. But Sevagram had a way of making itself necessary to certain people before they quite understood how it had happened. He intended to stay briefly. He stayed for forty-nine years.

He kept a specific, pointed phrase for medical residents who relied too quickly on laboratory tests: The area between the two ears—the brain—is a physician's first and most powerful instrument. He meant this literally. He had trained in an era where clinical diagnosis was meticulously built from history, physical examination, and a basic X-ray. He brought that fierce discipline to Sevagram and maintained it across five decades, even as the technology around him exploded. He was not a Luddite—he introduced echocardiography to the department alongside Dr. O.P. Gupta, and he procured the hospital's first hemodialysis unit. He simply insisted that technology must confirm what the physician’s examination had already suggested, never substitute for it.

At the bedside, he physically crouched down to the patient's level. He listened not only to their symptoms but to their pauses, their hesitations, the things they started to say and abruptly stopped. He took the pulse. He asked a perfectly timed question. He could trace the invisible arc of an illness through history and bare hands alone. His residents watched this method not as a theatrical performance, but as a masterclass demonstrated repeatedly, available to anyone willing to pay attention.

His postgraduate sessions began at 8:00 a.m. Punctuality was not a preference; it was the baseline condition under which teaching was even possible. The structure was beautifully rigid so the learning inside it could be fluid: Mondays were journal clubs, Tuesdays and Thursdays were bedside cases, Wednesdays were mortality reviews, Fridays were X-ray discussions.

In his early years, he was strict in a way that many residents experienced as sheer severity. He routinely dismissed people from the ward for mistakes. He had absolutely no patience for sloppy clinical thinking, careless documentation, or informal English. He corrected their grammar. He corrected their handwriting. For those who survived the crucible, he was modeling a standard of precision that medicine desperately requires but rarely enforces. Looking back across their careers, his students realized the strictness and the brilliance were inseparable.

He guided thirty-four MD students. He established the DNB Family Medicine program and the PG Geriatric Medicine course, both achieving national recognition. In a beautiful piece of institutional irony, the man who had personally failed the DNB examination in 1983 was awarded the National Board’s "Best Teacher Award" in 2018.

In 1995, Dr. Sushila Nayar suffered a heart attack. As the powerful founder-president, she could have demanded treatment at AIIMS. She could have flown abroad.

Instead, she chose Dr. Jain as her physician, keeping him in that role until her death six years later. He was not merely her cardiologist; he was the one person she trusted to understand what she needed and to tell her the unvarnished truth about it. To be trusted completely by a woman who had spent decades ruthlessly assessing the trustworthiness of everyone around her was not a medical credential. It was a measure of absolute character.

In 2018, he was diagnosed with a rare, progressive genetic ataxia. There is no cure. Suddenly, every physical step became a conscious, dangerous calculation. His hands, which had held a stethoscope with the relaxed authority of half a century of practice, began to tremble violently when he wrote. Vertigo constantly threatened his balance. He was forced to grip the podium during presentations. Yet, he fiercely resisted assistance.

He did not ask why. He simply continued. He led rounds, attended seminars, and participated in journal clubs until his contract ended in August 2023.

But his greatest lesson was not taught in a lecture hall. When his wife, Sushila, suffered a catastrophic cardiac crisis in 2022, and later severe sepsis in 2024, she required life support at Sevagram. On both occasions, Dr. Jain stepped back entirely. The physician who had spent his entire life fiercely insisting on his own clinical judgment chose, when it mattered most, to exercise none of it. He placed his wife's life in the hands of the treating team without a single question, without interference, and without demanding a second opinion. That breathtaking act of restraint told his colleagues more about his profound trust in the institution than fifty years of ward rounds ever could.

He survived long enough to see his legacy multiply. His sons, Pramod and Manish, became professors in Orthopaedics and Paediatrics at MGIMS. Their wives, Sonia and Shuchi, rose to head the departments of Dermatology and Obstetrics & Gynaecology. Today, five distinct clinical disciplines are anchored by a single family at the college where he spent his life.

He died in the ICU he had built, on the machines he had procured, inside the hospital he had served for forty-nine years. In his last recorded conversation, he said he took life exactly as it came. He pushed back his chair with shaking hands. And he walked away, unconquered.

Before echocardiograms and digital monitors entered the wards, cardiology depended almost entirely on the raw acuity of a physician’s senses. Dr. H. N. Khattri belonged to that fading, masterful era.

In a rural hospital where technology was exceptionally scarce, his trained eyes, highly sensitive hands, and attentive stethoscope more than filled the gap. He practiced and taught medicine at a time when diagnosing a patient meant studying the living, breathing person in front of you, not merely scanning a printed sheet of investigations.

In his hands, the basic physical examination—inspection, palpation, percussion, and auscultation—was elevated to an exact science. He seemed to literally read the heart through the chest wall. Long before humming machines traced cardiac images onto glowing screens, Dr. Khattri could reliably anticipate exactly what those images would eventually show.

Among the students at MGIMS, he acquired a quiet, awed reputation: he was the physician who could "see" the heart without ever opening the chest.

Dr. Khattri came to Sevagram carrying formidable academic credentials. Born in November 1937, he graduated with his MBBS from King George Medical College, Lucknow, in 1959. Like many ambitious, elite physicians of his generation, he traveled to the United Kingdom for advanced training, earning his MRCP from Edinburgh.

In the early 1970s, he trained at London’s prestigious Hammersmith Hospital, working directly alongside renowned cardiologists such as Professor Goodwin and Professor Shillingford. It was there that he refined his deep understanding of coronary artery disease and the then-emerging techniques of cardiac angiography.

When he returned to India, he joined the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGI) in Chandigarh. Yet, by the late 1970s, his academic promotions had stalled within the institutional bureaucracy.

At that very moment, MGIMS found itself in a crisis. Its Professor of Medicine had suddenly left for a lucrative post in Libya, and the department was left adrift. Dr. Sushila Nayar moved quickly. In September 1978, she wrote to the Director of PGI in words that were at once candid and urgent: “We are badly in need of a substitute… I understand that you have with you Dr. Khattri and Dr. Deodhar, and that their promotions are blocked. I also understand that Dr. Khattri is keen to come. I would be grateful if you could depute him to us for a year.”

The solution benefited both institutions perfectly. MGIMS secured a highly capable physician to stabilize its teaching program; Dr. Khattri secured a department where his elite skills could be fully utilized. In November 1978, the London-trained cardiologist arrived in Sevagram on deputation.

It is deeply tempting to imagine Sevagram’s early faculty as purely self-sacrificing, uncompromising idealists. Dr. Khattri, however, was also a highly practical father.

His son, Sanjeev, was an excellent student and an accomplished swimmer in Chandigarh. A sudden move to a remote, dusty village could have severely disrupted the boy’s academic and sporting development. Before fully settling into Sevagram, Dr. Khattri made careful, calculated arrangements. He ensured that Sanjeev secured admission to the Central School in Nagpur, allowing the child to continue his education and athletic training without interruption.

It was a brilliant, pragmatic compromise: the father would serve the rural hospital, while the son’s future remained entirely secure in the city.

Dr. Khattri stayed at MGIMS for barely two years, yet the mark he left on the institution far outlasted his brief tenure. A cardiologist and professor of medicine in the 1970s, he was remembered above all as a master of bedside teaching.

He lived in the MLK colony near the hospital and ran his clinical service with daunting discipline. Ward rounds began at 7:00 a.m. sharp. A student who arrived even a minute late risked being shut out of the entire day’s teaching, sometimes in full view of others. He inspired admiration, but he also kept his students in a state of constant alertness. In his presence, one came prepared or not at all.

Because formal postgraduate programmes had not yet begun at MGIMS during his tenure, he devoted the greater part of his formidable energy to undergraduate MBBS students. His bedside clinics became legendary. They were long, exacting, and often exhausting, but they opened a world that no textbook could fully capture.

These were the years when rheumatic heart disease crowded the wards of rural India. Patients came with scarred valves, enlarged hearts, raised neck veins, and breathlessness that had already worn down the body. Standing beside the iron hospital beds, Dr. Khattri taught students how to read these signs with their eyes, their fingers, and their ears. He showed them how to detect a distended jugular venous pulse, how to feel a displaced cardiac apex, and how to separate one murmur from another in the noisy uncertainty of a crowded ward.

He began with first principles and moved steadily through anatomy, physiology, and physical signs, explaining not only what to look for, but why it mattered, how it arose, and when it could be trusted. He was never theatrical. He did not mimic murmurs or turn the clinic into a performance. In a calm, measured voice, he made the heart intelligible.

He trained his students patiently and relentlessly. He taught them to listen before they reached for machines, to trust the hand on the chest wall, the eye on the neck veins, and the ear at the precordium. By the end of their clinical postings, they could interpret complex ECGs and diagnose serious cardiac disease with striking confidence, often without relying on sophisticated equipment. In a resource-poor setting, such disciplined clinical skill was not merely admirable. It was indispensable.

His classroom lectures did not quite carry the same life as his bedside sessions. He would arrive with a set of small cards—his own modest version of slides—and build the lecture carefully, point by point. If the wards revealed his brilliance, the lecture hall showed his method.

He also cut a distinctive figure. For a cardiologist, he seemed an unlikely one: heavily built, clad in khadi, walking regularly along the Sevagram-Wardha road, yet never losing his stout frame. But what students remembered in the end was not his appearance. They remembered the presence—a thick-glassed, khadi-clad cardiologist with a formidable command of clinical cardiology, and the rare gift of making generations of students hear the language of the heart.

Like many exceptionally strong personalities, Dr. Khattri had his limitations. He formed opinions about his students very quickly, and once those impressions were formed, they were cast in iron.

Members of the 1975 batch later recalled that, months before the university examinations even took place, he could confidently predict who would pass and who would fail. His predictions were often uncannily accurate—partly because of his razor-sharp clinical judgment, and partly because of the self-fulfilling biases that accompanied his favoritism.

He ruled the medical wards with an iron hand. Winning his approval was notoriously difficult; provoking his displeasure was dangerously easy.

Yet, his academic contributions to the institution were undeniable. He introduced rigorous journal clubs, unflinching mortality meetings, and systematic case discussions. He mentored brilliant younger faculty members like Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. A.P. Jain, and Dr. U.N. Jajoo. His teaching left such a profound impression that several of his students—including Dr. Krishan Agarwal—subsequently chose cardiology as their own life’s work.

Many students from the MGIMS batches of 1973 through 1977—among them Mohammad Jusab Khan, Hari Oam, Ashok Birbal Jain, and Kapil Gupta—still remember his bedside cardiology clinics almost word for word. Each of these clinical innings would often stretch for three unbroken hours, with the master diagnostician holding the young men and women in rapt attention.

In early 1980, Dr. Khattri requested to return to his parent institution at PGI Chandigarh. He left Sevagram in April of that year.

Three decades later came a tragic irony that medicine often delivers with quiet cruelty. The master physician who had spent an entire lifetime meticulously diagnosing diseases of the heart died from one himself.

Dr. Khattri succumbed to a massive pulmonary embolism that went entirely undetected until it was far too late. The brilliant doctor who could detect the faintest, most subtle murmur in a crowded, noisy ward was ultimately claimed by a silent clot within his own body.

His tenure in Sevagram was incredibly brief, but its influence deeply endured. Generations of MGIMS alumni still clearly recall the lessons he taught at the bedside—the lost art of observing carefully, touching thoughtfully, and listening deeply. Through them, the legacy of the physician who mastered the language of the human heart continues to live.

In July 2022, at the age of eighty, Dr. O.P. Gupta began volunteering at MGIMS. He had already retired from the headship of the Department of Medicine, from the medical superintendency of Kasturba Hospital, and from a decade as Dean. He had his chest opened for a bypass in 1995 and an angioplasty in 2020. By any reasonable measure, he had done enough.

Yet, at the postgraduate sessions he attended as a volunteer, he was always the first to arrive. He walked briskly. He stood straight. When a presentation contained a subtle clinical error, he found it. When a resident needed encouragement, he offered it. He did not invoke his staggering fifty-one-year institutional history as a reason for anyone to listen to him. He simply sat down and began to teach.

He would stay another year, finally retiring in August 2023. His fifty-two-year tenure is the longest in the history of MGIMS, a span that encompasses the institution’s entire existence from its chaotic third year through its modern sixth decade. Between 1969 and 2022, he taught every single medical student admitted to the college—3,680 future doctors. Today, his students practice medicine across the globe. On February 14th each year, they celebrate his birthday with the warm, grateful reverence reserved for people who were formed by someone whose discipline was absolute, but whose kindness was deeper.

Om Prakash Gupta was born on July 2, 1942, in Chirgaon, Jhansi. The youngest of four children, he completed his BSc in Gwalior and entered Gajra Raja Medical College in 1961. He had initially wanted to be an orthopaedic surgeon, but he found his true calling in internal medicine, completing his MD in 1969.

After a mandatory two-year government service requirement, he arrived at MGIMS on September 20, 1971. He did not apply through a formal advertisement, nor did he leverage a powerful connection. (Dr. Sushila Nayar, the formidable founder-president of MGIMS, hailed from his exact hometown, but he deliberately chose never to mention it. He wanted the position on its merits, or not at all).

He was twenty-nine years old when he joined as a Demonstrator. He would not leave for fifty-two years. His professors had practically demanded he enter lucrative private practice, but he found Sevagram’s serene simplicity and the prospect of a lifetime of teaching far more compelling. "For me," he later reflected, "the decision was as simple and straightforward as that."

When he arrived, the Department of Medicine had exactly three faculty members. Within weeks, one left. Dr. Gupta and the department head, Dr. S.P. Nigam, were left to shoulder the entire clinical, teaching, and administrative load of the nascent institution between the two of them.

For nearly fifteen years, Gupta admitted and treated patients in a decaying two-story building originally constructed by G.D. Birla as a guest house for visitors to Gandhi’s ashram. The general wards resembled dormitories, dimly lit by flickering tube lights. There were no mechanical ventilators, no multipara monitors, no infusion pumps, and no central oxygen. The most advanced piece of equipment in the entire building was a single ECG machine.

Every morning at 8:00 a.m., Dr. Gupta met with Dr. A.P. Jain and Dr. Ulhas Jajoo to painstakingly review the ECG interpretations made by residents overnight. This was not a formal protocol; it was the daily discipline required to maintain clinical excellence in a place with virtually no resources. Living a short walk from the wards in MLK Colony—in an era without television or mobile phones—he visited the wards unannounced in the evenings. He did not come to inspect or intimidate; he came to ensure his patients were safe.

He became the Head of Medicine in May 1980. Trained in the classic bedside tradition, he taught residents that while machines can confirm a diagnosis, a careful physical examination reveals it. Yet, he was never trapped in the past; he personally introduced echocardiography to the department in 1990, demonstrating that the preservation of clinical skills and the embrace of new technology were entirely complementary.

He did not delegate teaching. He guided thirty-four MD students to completion, listening to every family and every resident with absolute patience, even when the wards were overflowing.

"Dr. Gupta mastered the rare skill of bringing joy and engagement to every task," recalled Dr. Tejal Lathia. Dr. S.P. Kalantri, who joined his unit in 1983, remembered something quieter: a lunch invitation shortly after Kalantri’s marriage. Gupta and his wife, Geeta, received the young newlyweds as though they were the most honored guests the house had ever seen. The warmth was not reserved for formal occasions; it was simply the daily temperature of the man.

Dr. Gupta served as Medical Superintendent from 1985 to 1990, and then as Dean from 1994 to 2002. His leadership was defined by what he did not do: he did not project authority, he did not raise his voice, and he fiercely kept the institution clear of the nepotism and favoritism that routinely plague medical administration.

His most profound administrative legacy was introducing multiple-choice questions to the pre-medical entrance test, replacing the vulnerable long-essay format. It was a structural reform that made the selection process fairer, more objective, and impossible to improperly influence.

His quiet administrative grace extended to his relationship with Dr. Sushila Nayar. In her later years, when profound hearing loss caused her visible anguish during administrative meetings, Gupta began sitting beside her. Without being asked, he wrote out the ongoing conversations in longhand so the aging founder could still follow the proceedings of the institution she had built. It was the simple, practical, deeply human response of a physician to a patient in need.

In August 1990, at just forty-eight years old, the man who had spent his life treating heart attacks suffered an acute inferior myocardial infarction. It shocked the campus. He was thin, walked briskly, ate sparingly, never smoked, and had pristine blood sugar.

He recovered, eventually undergoing a bypass in 1995 and an angioplasty in 2020. He applied the same rigorous, proactive discipline to his own secondary prevention as he demanded of his residents. The man who had managed heart failure in a Birla guest house with nothing but an ECG machine lived to experience the full, miraculous progression of modern cardiac medicine as a patient—and he returned to work, always the first to arrive.

He retired from administration, but his mind never stopped moving. He edited the Journal of MGIMS for eighteen meticulous years. In his later life, encouraged by Mrs. Kamala Desikan, he took up sketching and painting.

Most remarkably, he cultivated a deep passion for poetry. His collection, Roshani ki Anant Talash, reflected the philosophical depth he had always brought to medicine. In a beautiful act of intellectual playfulness, he translated the Mandukya Upanishad—the shortest of the ancient texts—into haiku-style Hindi verse.

Today, at eighty-three, he types with the blistering speed of a professional and posts his chaste Hindi poetry on Facebook, where former students across the globe share it widely. Dr. Kalantri frequently spotted him through the wooden partition of their offices, hunched over his computer screen, deeply engrossed in learning something entirely new from the internet.

His wife, Geeta, retired as the Principal of Kasturba Vidya Mandir and continues to serve the women of Wardha. Together, they raised three highly successful children: their son Dilip, now the Head of Surgery at MGIMS; their son Sanjeev, a Vice President at Capgemini; and their daughter Deepti, a Senior Health Service Officer in Mumbai.

When Dr. Gupta finally retired in August 2023 alongside his lifelong colleague Dr. A.P. Jain, their combined departure stripped the department of over a century of clinical wisdom. The atmosphere in the hospital felt noticeably, permanently quieter.

He arrived at twenty-nine, when the institution was barely three years old. He left at eighty-one, having taught every student it had ever admitted. Across those fifty-two years, he turned up early, stayed late, and treated the people in the rural wards as though their care was the absolute center of the medical universe. In Sevagram, it was always supposed to be. And because of Dr. O.P. Gupta, it actually was.

He was born on Independence Day—August 15, 1957—the youngest of six siblings in a Marwadi family that had produced, across generations, not a single doctor. His father, Gokuldas Kalantri, managed cotton factories owned by the Bajaj group. His mother, Parvati Devi, had been educated only to the fourth grade. There was no medical tradition in the family, and no particular reason to expect that the youngest child would spend his entire life in a Gandhian hospital five miles from home. There was, in fact, no reason to expect much of anything, except that the youngest child always had to find his own way.

He found it, as he would find most things, through a combination of accident, instinct, and the quiet stubbornness of someone who knows what he does not want, even when he cannot yet name what he does.

His schooling moved through Wardha’s institutions, shaped by circumstance rather than a grand plan. He attended Balmandir, then Craddock High School—where a classmate named Suhas Jajoo sat nearby, sparking a friendship that would later determine his entire professional trajectory. At Swavalambi Vidyalaya, English arrived with the Biology curriculum, and Mathematics was quietly dropped. He opted out of Mathematics entirely out of fear. In retrospect, that fear was the most consequential academic decision he ever made: it permanently closed the door to engineering, leaving medicine as the only viable path forward.

When he enrolled at Jankidevi Bajaj Science College, he scored 73% in his BSc Part 1 examination—precisely the margin required for admission to medical college. Medicine had entered his life not through a burning vocation, but through the back door of habit and proximity. He was not marching toward a white coat with purpose; he was simply moving forward.

He entered Government Medical College (GMC), Nagpur, in 1973. Out of a batch of two hundred students, he would eventually emerge ranked fourth in his final MBBS examination. For much of his time at GMC, from undergraduate through postgraduate, he lived in Room No. 99—a number that became a private landmark. During his second year, his childhood friend Suhas Jajoo moved in with him. The Wardha connection had followed him to Nagpur.

During his 1978 internship, the rural posting in Bhadrawati planted something durable in his mind: an unvarnished understanding of what healthcare in rural India actually required, a lesson no lecture hall had ever conveyed with equivalent force. When he began his house jobs, he gravitated immediately toward Internal Medicine. It was not an accidental choice; all of his role models—the sharpest clinical minds at GMC—were in Medicine. He wanted to emulate them, without a single second thought.

His MD program began in 1980 under the formidable Dr. B.S. Chaubey. In a highly unusual move, Chaubey transferred the young doctor into his own unit and took him personally under his wing—a first in GMC Nagpur’s history. Kalantri completed his MD in 1982. He was twenty-four years old, sitting in Room No. 99, with absolutely no map for what came next.

He knew only one thing with uncomfortable certainty: he did not want to sit alone in a private clinic. He craved the noise and rigorous discipline of a teaching hospital—the ward rounds, the fierce arguments over a diagnosis, the quiet pride of watching a terrified student grow into a doctor.

In early May 1982, he went to visit Suhas at his home in Jajoo Wadi, Wardha. By sheer luck, he ran into Suhas’s elder brother, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, who was already a Reader in Medicine at MGIMS Sevagram. Ulhas looked at him for a moment—long enough to sense exactly what the young man wasn’t saying—and asked casually: "Why don’t you join us at Sevagram?"

There was no grand speech. No persuasion. Ulhas simply acted. A brief word to the Medical Superintendent, Dr. Karunakar Trivedi. A quick meeting. A nod. The post of Senior Registrar was his, for ₹650 a month.

His father had already drawn a very different map. He had built a modest structure in Wardha with windows facing Indira Market. It was meant to be his son’s clinic, the steady income practically within reach. When told of the change in plans, disappointment slipped visibly through his father's eyes. But with a grace his son would only fully understand later in life, he said nothing, and quietly stepped aside.

On a scorching afternoon—May 4, 1982—Shriprakash Kalantri rode his Bajaj Priya scooter through the gates of MGIMS. After the imposing stone architecture of GMC Nagpur, Sevagram felt like another country. The hospital still partly occupied the old Birla guest house; the wooden floors creaked, and the walls peeled in tired layers. There were no ventilators, no monitors, no infusion pumps. Medicine here was practiced the old way: with a stethoscope, a remarkably steady hand, and whatever clinical judgment could be gathered at the bedside.

He joined Dr. A.P. Jain’s unit. The morning ECG correction sessions, led by Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. Jain, and Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, possessed the disciplined, terrifying quality of a court hearing. Residents lined up with the night’s ECGs clutched like confession letters, where every missed P-wave was a matter of grave consequence.

He was exactly where he needed to be.

His ascent was steady, each step earned through the slow accumulation of correct decisions at the bedside. He became a Lecturer in 1983, a Reader in 1987, a Professor in 1997, and a Director Professor in 2012.

In February 1984, he married Bhavana Laddha, a science graduate from Indore. Their son, Ashwini, and daughter, Amrita, were both born in Sevagram, delivered by Dr. Shakuntala Chhabra. Ashwini would go on to become a Professor of Community Medicine at MGIMS, marrying Shaily Jain, an administrative officer at Kasturba Hospital. Amrita completed her DNB in Radiology and married Dr. Sahaj Rathi, a hepatologist. The family that the institution had helped begin in 1982 had, by the next generation, grown into the institution itself.

When a lucrative offer to become Professor and Head at a privately owned medical college arrived in 1993, he swiftly declined. Sevagram had given him his professional ethics, his work culture, and an unbreakable connection to his students and patients. He never wanted to leave.

Acquiring an independent unit in 1992, he eventually guided thirty MD students. Many of their theses were published in international journals with the student listed as the first author and SP Kalantri as the last—a deliberate inversion of the academic hierarchy that distinguishes a teacher building careers from one simply harvesting credit.

A week-long workshop on Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) in Toronto in 2001 permanently altered the register of his clinical thinking. The analytical tools he had been blindly reaching for finally had a name and a rigorous method. He returned with absolute clarity: the pharmaceutical industry’s deep, pervasive presence in the hospital was scientifically and ethically indefensible.

In 2001, he successfully persuaded the President of the Kasturba Health Society, Dhirubhai Mehta, to ban pharmaceutical and device companies from sponsoring medical conferences at MGIMS. It was the beginning of a massive structural earthquake.

In 2004, a Fogarty Scholarship took him to the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed an MPH in Epidemiology. When he returned, equipped with formal epidemiological weaponry, his stance was unambiguous: the industry had to go entirely. When he became Medical Superintendent in 2009, he banned medical representatives from the campus and launched a low-cost generic drug initiative. The cost of a hospital admission at Kasturba plummeted, fundamentally redefining what affordable healthcare meant in Vidarbha.

For decades, Kasturba Hospital’s information lived on fragile paper—registers, slips, and carbon copies covered in handwriting that oscillated between elegant and illegible. It worked, but with immense friction.

When the Hospital Information System (HIS) finally arrived in Sevagram in 2004, it required a decade and a half of agonizing, unglamorous labor. There were 3:00 a.m. trains to Nagpur, blue screens of FoxPro, and servers that crawled. Bhavana stepped in as the system’s database administrator. It was not a supporting role; she became the absolute spine of the project, holding the data architecture together whenever the institution’s enthusiasm for change collided with its appetite for familiar routine.

Today, the HIS that runs Kasturba Hospital is one of the few fully functional systems in India. It carries, invisibly, the legacy of two people with the same surname who spent fifteen years simply refusing to let it fail.

Nothing in Sevagram’s collective memory prepared it for March 2020. For MGIMS—an institution built on the Gandhian promise of open doors—the COVID-19 pandemic posed a cruel paradox: How do you serve the highly contagious without becoming victims yourselves?

As Medical Superintendent, Kalantri found himself in a war room without a map. The old administrative tools of negotiation and consensus-building were instantly obsolete, replaced by oxygen flow rates, tanker GPS coordinates, and the cold, terrifying arithmetic of mortality.

The hospital admitted nearly 6,000 COVID-19 patients. He secured massive donations to install permanent oxygen systems. Crucially, he demanded that only strictly evidence-based therapies govern clinical management, fiercely eliminating the irrational, politically promoted drug regimens sweeping the rest of the country. On Twitter, and across national media, he publicly argued for science. While much of Indian medicine temporarily capitulated to panic and pressure, in Sevagram, rational medicine held the line.

On February 15, 2023, he voluntarily stepped down as Medical Superintendent. His reasoning was characteristically sharp: "It is time to step down when people ask why, not why not."

Over the years, he gathered lives outside the hospital. Obsessed with books since the age of five, he also allowed cricket to shape his imagination. In 2015, he discovered cycling, completing grueling 300-kilometer non-stop brevets alongside his daughter Ashwini, sparking a cycling culture across the campus.

He writes relentlessly in Hindi, Marathi, and English. He documented all 204 classmates of his 1973 batch. He blogs on Matter-of-Fact. And eventually, he compiled ninety-three definitive portraits of the medical teachers who built MGIMS across four decades.

This book is the completion of that massive project. He arrived on a Bajaj Priya, trading his father’s carefully imagined clinic for ₹650 a month and a hospital with creaking floors. He found what he did not even know to ask for: a place where medicine became not merely a job, but the very structure around which his entire life would beautifully organize itself.

He is still here.

<strong>1973 — The Accidental Entry</strong></p>

<p>Joined GMC Nagpur for MBBS, having “inadvertently shut the engineering door” by choosing biology in Class 9.</p>

<strong>1981 — The Credentials</strong></p>

<p>Obtained MD in General Medicine from Government Medical College, Nagpur.</p>

<strong>1982 — The Summer of Arrival</strong></p>

<p>Arrived in Sevagram as a Senior Resident in the Department of Medicine, beginning a “brief posting” that has lasted over four decades.</p>

<strong>1983 — The Staff Register</strong></p>

<p>Appointed Lecturer in Medicine after an interview with the “titan” Dr. B.S. Chaubey.</p>

<strong>2004 — The Berkeley Pivot</strong></p>

<p>Awarded the Fogarty AIDS International Research Scholarship; obtained an MPH in Epidemiology from UC Berkeley, returning with a new focus on evidence and asking better questions.</p>

<strong>2007 — The Superintendent’s Chair</strong></p>

<p>Appointed Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital, focusing on low-cost drug initiatives and the “grammar” of hospital systems.</p>

<strong>2020 — The Pandemic Years</strong></p>

<p>Led the hospital’s COVID-19 response, showcasing that desperate times do not require desperate measures—and that in medicine, restraint is often the best intervention.</p>

<strong>2026 — The Chronicler</strong></p>

<p>Returned to the wards and the classroom, while undertaking the “quiet urgency” of documenting the institutional history of MGIMS.</p>

After completing his MD in August 1988, Sanjay Diwan noticed a job advertisement for MGIMS Sevagram circulating through the Department of Medicine at Gandhi Medical College in Bhopal. He was intrigued, but uncertain. Before acting, he sought the counsel of Shri Banwarilal Choudhary—a man deeply rooted in the Gandhian tradition, his father's trusted mentor, and someone who had spent considerable time at the Gandhi Ashram.

Choudhary did not offer a lecture. He did not weigh the strategic advantages of MGIMS against its alternatives. Instead, he simply gave the young doctor two names: Shri Kanakmalji Gandhi of Sevagram, and Dr. Ulhas Jajoo. That was all.

The names were enough. Diwan applied. While his friends anxiously urged him to take a secure, highly predictable Public Service Commission placement he had already been offered, he waited out the MGIMS interview period in a temporary post. He officially joined the institution on November 3, 1989. Looking back across the decades, he calls ignoring the safe path the best decision of his life.

Born on November 11, 1962, in Megha, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, he was the fourth of six children. His father, Vinay Kumar Diwan, was a Joint Director of Agriculture, a government post that kept the family moving regularly across the state. Diwan attended modest but sufficient schools in Dhar and Itarsi before arriving at Gandhi Medical College in Bhopal with the 1979 batch.

He completed his MBBS in 1984 and his MD in Medicine in 1988. He wrote his thesis on the comparative clinical efficacy of Flurbiprofen and Naproxen in rheumatoid arthritis. The subject was highly specific—not the kind of sweeping public health question that makes global headlines, but the kind of careful, granular comparative work that teaches a young doctor exactly how to weigh evidence. It was a habit of precision he would carry directly into the hospital wards.

At MGIMS, he was assigned to Dr. A.P. Jain's Unit II. The education that followed was entirely different from what he had encountered in Bhopal. In Sevagram, medicine meant thinking a problem through to its absolute end before reaching for an investigation. It meant meticulously organizing the history, working the physical examination, carefully constructing a differential, and arriving at a diagnosis through strict logic rather than clinical reflex.

The bedside was the arena where the teaching happened, and Dr. Jain ran it with a sharp precision that left absolutely no room for the comfortable vagueness that busy wards sometimes permit.

The residents who rotated through during those years—Ashwini Kumar, Kalpana, Chandra, Sanjeev Sharma, Ashish Bhalla, Firoz Sogiawala, Manisha Tanjea, Renuka Lamba, Prabhat Goel, Skand Trivedi—remained permanently etched in Diwan’s memory. In a small irony typical of the medical world, Dr. Trivedi is now his colleague at Bansal Hospital in Bhopal. Sevagram's alumni have a beautiful habit of reappearing in each other's lives at unexpected intervals.

During his tenure, he was promoted to Reader in November 1993. Six months before ultimately leaving Sevagram, he married Niharika, a dietician at Kasturba Hospital from Nagpur. Their lives and careers had been shaped by the exact same institution before they had ever spoken to one another—perhaps the most Sevagram kind of beginning possible.

He spent sixteen years at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in Sawangi, rising to Professor of Medicine by November 1999. What he encountered there, however, and what eventually made the institution untenable for him, was the familiar, suffocating pressure of a for-profit medical school. He found himself surrounded by wealthy students and administrators whose primary priority was keeping those students' families satisfied, rather than ensuring they had actually learned medicine.

The mechanism was straightforward and, tragically, not unusual in Indian private medical education: students who had not performed adequately were passed anyway. Teachers who objected were deemed inconvenient. Dr. Diwan had not entered medicine to sign off on failures. After sixteen years of trying to teach properly within a structure that fundamentally did not want him to, he walked away in 2016.

A second attempt at the Mahaveer Institute of Medical Sciences in Bhopal—owned by a childhood friend who had promised a different kind of ethos—revealed the exact same pattern: unfinished buildings, inadequate supplies, and a management far more interested in extracting fees than educating students. He did not stay long. By 2019, he had moved to Bansal Hospital, where the work was purely clinical and consultative, and where the heavy pressures of institutional compromise were finally replaced by the straightforward, honest demands of patient care.

At Sevagram, he had always been a man of few words. This did not stem from reticence or cold distance, but from a profound disposition that preferred deep attention over unnecessary speech. In the wards during the long, anxious nights before examinations, or in the frantic corridors between medical crises, he was the kind of presence that residents actively sought out. He was steady, unhurried, and always prepared to listen without rushing the speaker toward a conclusion.

Those who trained under him in Sevagram speak of what he offered not merely as instruction, but as atmosphere. He had a way of approaching a clinical problem that communicated, without a single announcement, that there was absolutely no need to panic—that the patient in front of them had not fundamentally changed since yesterday, and that a clear head was still the most useful instrument in the room. This is not a quality that can be quantified on a curriculum vitae. But for a terrified resident standing in the ward at two in the morning, it was the only quality that mattered.

His son Amartya, born in 1998, studied computer science. His daughter Tanvi, born in 2000, completed her MBBS and interned in Ujjain. They were born into the institutional life that Sevagram had started, even if Sawangi was where they physically arrived.

Dr. Diwan was at Sevagram for just over two thousand days—five and a half years, a brief tenure by the standards of a department whose other pillars stayed for decades. He came because a wise man gave him two names and no further explanation, because the two names were sufficient, and because something about the campus, once seen, proved far more compelling than the safe, stable salary his well-wishers had urged him to take.

He eventually left because the next stage of his career required it, not because Sevagram had given him any reason to go. He has always been clear about the difference. The sixteen years that followed, and the two painful departures from institutions that refused to meet his ethical standards, were the long consequence of having started his career in a place that showed him what medical education could actually be. He had simply found, thereafter, that most other institutions were not it.

On a bitterly cold December morning in 1970, Dr. Satya Prakash Nigam (known to generations of MGIMS students as Dr. S.P. Nigam) sat down in Solapur to write a letter. He was writing to Dr. Sushila Nayar to accept her offer of a faculty position at MGIMS. He formally stated that he was pleased to accept. But then, almost in passing, he added a tiny detail: he mentioned that he had already purchased khadi fabric to have new clothes stitched for his arrival.

This was not an accidental inclusion. Nigam knew that Sevagram had strict rules, and that wearing khadi was one of them. He also knew that Dr. Nayar, who had worked closely alongside Gandhi and carried the unbending ethos of those years into everything she built, would instantly notice a man who understood the cultural significance of the cloth before he had even set foot on campus. The mention of the khadi was a small act—a sentence, perhaps two—but it was the calculated, respectful act of someone who had read the place perfectly and wanted its founder to know it.

He arrived at MGIMS on January 22, 1971. He was thirty-four years old, carrying an MD from Maulana Azad Medical College and a paper already published in the British Medical Journal. Crucially, from the moment he began teaching, he became the very first faculty member in Medicine that the inaugural MBBS batch of MGIMS would ever encounter.

Born on October 22, 1936, he enrolled at Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1957. During his college years, he was a debater—a serious one, not merely a casual participant. He won inter-college competitions, earned the prestigious college color for debating, and served as the secretary of the debating society. The skills this crucible produced—clarity of argument, the rare ability to hold an audience’s attention, and absolute confidence at the front of a room—would serve him brilliantly in hospital wards and lecture halls for the next four decades.

He earned his MBBS in 1961. What followed was a long, deliberately varied apprenticeship: a research fellowship in Medicine at Jabalpur, a senior residency at Irfan Hospital in New Delhi, and a lectureship at Miraj Medical College. The geographic range was intentional. He was assembling a vast command of clinical medicine from multiple settings that no single institution could have provided on its own.

His MD, completed at Maulana Azad Medical College in January 1967 under Dr. Chuttani, produced a thesis on ulcerative colitis. The resulting paper was published in the British Medical Journal in October 1967 and was described, in the parlance of the time, as trendsetting. He was just thirty years old and had been practicing medicine for nine years. By 1971, he was in Sevagram, wearing his new khadi.

When Nigam walked into the MGIMS wards in January 1971, the Department of Medicine was not yet a department in any formal sense—it was simply a man, a nascent teaching program, and a cohort of students who had never been taught clinical medicine by anyone else.

He carried the immense weight of that beginning, and his success was visible in what those inaugural students went on to accomplish. Dr. Balkrishna Maheshwari, from that first batch, topped Nagpur University in the Final MBBS. Dr. Govinda Pillai excelled in General Medicine. The department Nigam built from the ground up produced the academic results that justified the Medical Council of India's eventual recognition of MGIMS—a recognition for which his early, foundational work had been absolutely essential.

He was promoted to Associate Professor in July 1973—a role that briefly required him to also lead the Paediatrics Department when the need arose—and to Professor of Medicine in September 1976. The rapid pace of these promotions reflected the reality of a young, ambitious institution: seniority was accumulated quickly simply because there was a massive amount of work to do, and very few people qualified to do it. His starting salary was Rs. 750 a month. By July 1972, he had secured a scooter allowance of Rs. 40 per month—a rare badge of practicality in the social grammar of a Gandhian campus.

The 1970s at MGIMS belonged to a completely different diagnostic world. Investigations were severely limited, imaging was basic, and the laboratory's capabilities were restricted to those of a young rural hospital. In this bare-bones environment, raw clinical judgment—the trained capacity to read a patient's illness purely through observation, history, and physical examination—was not merely a traditional virtue; it was a daily survival necessity.

Nigam was, by all historical accounts, exceptionally gifted at it. He took immense pride in the diagnostic precision he could achieve with minimal technological investigation. His method at the bedside was characterized by a highly specific quality of attention: he was unhurried, obsessively thorough, and spoke in a tone that frightened patients found instantly reassuring. He was soft-spoken. His language was chosen carefully. Patients often felt that his presence itself was a form of treatment—that the simple act of being seen clearly and spoken to gently by a master physician who was plainly not in a rush was a powerful medicine all its own.

Outside the college, he served as the personal physician to Acharya Vinoba Bhave and the Bajaj family in Wardha. He ran medical camps in the surrounding villages, offering top-tier clinical skills to rural populations who would never otherwise have had access to a physician of his caliber.

In July 1978, he resigned, citing domestic and financial circumstances that he did not specify in detail, and which his colleagues respectfully accepted without pressing him. He was officially relieved of his duties on September 14, 1978, exactly seven and a half years after his arrival. He was forty-one years old.

He moved to Katni, a small town northeast of Jabalpur, and built a private practice from scratch. The transition from pure academic medicine to private practice is notoriously difficult—the skills overlap, but they are not identical. The social intelligence required to establish a thriving practice in an unfamiliar town is not taught in any medical curriculum. Yet, Nigam made the transition seamlessly. He understood that private practice required the ability to connect with patients as individuals, to factor their social circumstances into clinical decisions, and to cultivate relationships with other consultants grounded in mutual respect rather than cutthroat competition. Within a few short years, he became one of the most trusted physicians in Katni.

He practiced there for twenty years, bringing the exact same unhurried quality of attention to his private clinic that he had brought to the rural wards of MGIMS. Tragically, on August 5, 1998, he was killed in a road accident. He was sixty-one years old.

He had married Shashi in Lucknow in 1967, the same year his landmark paper appeared in the BMJ. Together, they raised three daughters. When he left MGIMS in 1978, none of them were old enough for medical college. But years later, two of them came back.

Jyotsna, from the 1985 MBBS batch, completed her MD in Medicine at MGIMS—studying in the very department her father had built from nothing. Namita, from the 1989 batch, completed her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the same institution. Their third sister, Divya, studied medicine in Odessa.

The two daughters who returned to Sevagram walked the exact same corridors where their father had once taught the inaugural batch of students. They learned from physicians he had personally trained, participating in an invisible, multi-generational chain of medical transmission that institutions sustain without always being consciously aware of it.

In December 1970, their father had written a letter stating he had bought the khadi. It was a small thing to say. It was also, as history proved, exactly the right thing to say—the quiet act of a man who understood that truly arriving somewhere requires far more than formally accepting a job offer. It requires the absolute willingness to become part of the place.

During his first year at Government Medical College in Nagpur, a seventeen-year-old Ulhas Jajoo was mercilessly ragged for wearing khadi. It was 1968. The fabric was crumpled, the cut was old-fashioned, and teenagers are rarely generous toward anything that marks a classmate as different. He endured the mockery for as long as he could bear it. Finally, defeated, he went to a shop and bought a white shirt and trousers in terrycot—synthetic, unremarkable, perfectly invisible.

He went home and told his father what he had done. His father listened quietly. Then he asked a single question: "How long will you allow fear to guide your path in life?"

Ulhas returned the terrycot clothes. He put the khadi back on. The ragging eventually stopped, as these things usually do. For the next fifty-eight years—through medical college, through his MD, and through a half-century career at MGIMS—he wore khadi every single day. He drove a simple scooter. He wore locally made chappals. He never owned a car. These choices were never a performance; they were simply the outward expression of a man who had decided, at seventeen, exactly who he was going to be.

Born on February 14, 1951, in Wardha, Ulhas was a brilliant student who placed tenth in the state matriculation examination. He was admitted to the Laxminarayan Institute of Technology (LIT) in Nagpur to study mathematics and engineering. He had found his subject. He was ready to begin.

Then, Dr. Ramchandra Wardekar, founder of the Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation and a close family friend, came to visit. When Ulhas mentioned his engineering plans, Wardekar went quiet. He then revealed that his own path into medicine had been entirely shaped by Ulhas's grandfather, Shrikrishnadas Jajoo. The family possessed a deep history of healing that Ulhas had not inherited. Wardekar gently suggested that he should.

Ulhas confessed he was terrified of frogs and dissections. Wardekar assured him the fear would pass. Trusting the older man, Ulhas withdrew his admission from LIT, spent a year studying earthworms and cockroaches at JB Science College to conquer his squeamishness, and entered medical college in 1968. The fear of frogs did, in fact, pass.

He completed his MBBS in 1972 and his MD in general medicine shortly after. He chose internal medicine specifically because it could be practiced without heavy infrastructure, relying on nothing that was unavailable to the poor. Before joining any institution, he spent a month traveling across India to meet doctors who had chosen unconventional paths—Dr. Rajnikant Arole in Jamkhed, Harivallabh Parikh, and Narayan Desai. He needed to understand what a life in rural medicine actually looked like before he committed to it.

On April 26, 1977, he joined MGIMS as a Lecturer in Medicine.

Within a year of arriving, the twenty-seven-year-old Jajoo wrote a bold, four-page letter to Dr. Sushila Nayar. It outlined a radical vision for village healthcare, developed not in a library, but by riding a rented bicycle through monsoon rains to reach remote communities. Sitting in their homes, he had realized a fundamental truth: a villager's priority is their daughter's marriage, bank loans, and subsidized seeds—not their blood pressure.

He proposed a three-tier system: village health workers, a mobile health team, and the hospital. He advocated for community kitchens, people's courts, and cost-price medication. His central argument was revolutionary for a clinician: charity is insufficient; a community must be actively involved in its own health.

Dr. Nayar recognized something incredibly rare in the young man: a physician with the brilliant diagnostic instincts of a clinician, but the deep systemic convictions of a public health worker. She repeatedly tried to persuade him to take over the Department of Community Medicine. He politely declined. He believed that a strong foundation in curative internal medicine was essential to any credible public health work. He refused to leave the wards. Instead, he did both, holding curative medicine and village outreach in the same hand without ever finding the combination unusual.

He called his medical residents sherus—lions. And he meant it.

He taught at the bedside with the ease of a man for whom the ward, not the seminar room, was the natural location of truth. He physically crouched to the patient's level. He listened to the pauses in a patient's history just as closely as the words. He employed Socratic questioning—refusing to hand a student the answer before they had worked through the reasoning themselves. He visibly delighted in being proven wrong by a resident who had looked more carefully than he had.

Between 1984 and 2013, he guided thirty-eight MD students, researching the exact diseases ravaging rural Wardha: heart attacks, strokes, hypertension, and diabetes. His lectures drew students who had no obligation to attend, holding them spellbound for hours.

Year after year, on his February 14th birthday, tributes pour in from across the globe. What is striking about these accounts is what they omit. They rarely dwell on his diagnoses or publications. Instead, they consistently return to his professional ethics, his unbreakable character, and his profound way of simply being present with a suffering person. With Dr. Jajoo, the medicine was always inseparable from the man.

He resisted email for years. He avoided Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp. He preferred to write letters by hand on simple postcards. The scooter he rode was not a loud political statement against cars; it was simply what he had always used, and he saw no logical reason to replace it.

He spoke Hindi, Marathi, English, and Marwari, moving between the languages in a crowded room the way one moves between rooms in a beloved house. For more than two decades, he organized the Tapodhan Shree Krishndas Jajoo Smriti Karyakram, an annual gathering honoring unpublicized social service. Standing at the microphone in his white khadi, translating stories for the villagers, he was frequently moved to tears. He never tried to hide them.

When his parents entered their late eighties, he moved them into the familiar walls of their century-old family home. Alongside his brother Suhas, a plastic surgeon, he provided total care. Because he had never separated his role as a son from his role as a physician, the care was simultaneously filial and medical.

Having deeply absorbed the writings of Dr. Manu Kothari and Atul Gawande on mortality, he understood that how a person dies is as profound a medical question as any other. He arranged for his father, and later his mother, to die with absolute dignity at home, surrounded by family. They were not rushed to ICUs. They were not subjected to tubes and interventions that would have prolonged their dying rather than their living. As a master physician, he knew exactly what those interventions would entail. He consciously chose otherwise.

His legacy at MGIMS is deeply embedded. His wife, Kiran, taught school in Wardha, while his daughter, Namita, and son, Sumedh, both studied medicine at MGIMS and now work in the very department where their father spent his life.

On February 28, 2026, shortly after turning seventy-five, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo finally retired.

The students who passed through his unit are now the senior physicians shaping the next generation of Indian medicine. When they look back, they do not remember a specific paper or a complex technique. They remember a man in a crumpled khadi shirt, crouching at a villager's bedside, listening to the silence after a sentence ended, and asking the exact question that made them look again.

At seventeen, his father asked him how long he would allow fear to guide his path. He returned the terrycot clothes that day. And for the next fifty-eight years, he never stopped answering the question.

In 1978, a twenty-four-year-old Vivek Poflee had topped Medicine in his final MBBS examinations. He had successfully secured a highly coveted seat in the MD program at IGMC Nagpur, placing himself within reasonable distance of the secure, prestigious career his family expected and he had worked relentlessly toward.

Then, he took a hard look at the man running his department. He saw a Head of Department who spent his energy cultivating political connections, who remained entirely indifferent to patients, and who valued self-promotion above teaching—making genuine learning the absolute last priority in a place where it should have been the first.

Poflee watched this for as long as his conscience allowed. And then, he walked out.

"Madness," said some. "Reckless," said others. But he resigned anyway. This pattern—of deliberately leaving a situation that was working adequately on paper because the conditions for integrity had been compromised in practice—would recur in his career. It defined him far more precisely than any medical credential ever could.

He was born on August 1, 1954, in Nagpur. His father, Dr. Wamanrao Poflee, was a medical officer in the State Medical Services. His mother, Sumati, had been a brilliant student who chose instead to raise children deeply curious about how the world functioned. The household naturally produced scientists, engineers, economists, and doctors.

Young Vivek absorbed an early and permanent obsession with the mechanics of the physical world. He spent hours in his bedroom and at Somalwar High School building call bells, buzzers, and wireless transmitters, much to the amusement—and occasional alarm—of his family. His instinct was always for tinkering, for taking a system completely apart to understand it, and then reassembling it better than it had been before.

Medicine entered his life as the natural next step from a household where healing was present and his own aptitude for science was undeniably clear. He entered IGMC Nagpur in 1971, topped his MBBS in 1975, and secured his MD seat in 1978. Then came the resignation.

What followed was a masterclass in self-sufficiency. Rather than navigating the politics of the Indian academic system, he went to Baghdad in January 1979. He spent two years in Iraq—moving through Quadhmia Republic Hospital, Balad Republic Hospital, and Mahmood Hospital—practicing medicine in a foreign landscape, far from the institutional support that makes clinical work comfortable. When he returned to India, he bought a friend's dispensary, set up a private practice, and quietly rebuilt a life that worked.

Three years after walking away, with merit finally restored to the department, he reapplied to the MD program. This time, he trained under Dr. P.Y. Deshmukh—a man of genuine intellectual seriousness, precisely the thing his previous supervisor had not been. He completed his MD in 1983. In September 1984, he joined MGIMS in Sevagram.

He arrived at a Department of Medicine already in formidable formation. The unit in the mid-1980s stood, as he later described it, on four massive pillars: Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. A.P. Jain, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, and Dr. S.P. Kalantri. Each was a complete physician in the manner the institution demanded—holding clinical, teaching, and research commitments simultaneously without apparent strain. Poflee found his place within this structure not by replicating what the others were doing, but by bringing exactly what they lacked.

He gravitated toward clinical neurophysiology—EEGs, EMG, and nerve conduction studies. It was a field resting at the precise intersection of neurology and physics, requiring the kind of patient, systematic attention to electromechanical data that suited his engineering temperament perfectly. After training at NIMHANS in Bangalore and CIIMS in Nagpur, he returned to MGIMS and established the neurophysiology clinic—a facility that had not existed before his arrival.

His most widely noticed contribution, however, was the Hand Mill Test. It began with a straightforward clinical roadblock: some patients requiring coronary evaluation could not walk on a treadmill due to severe knee arthritis or muscular conditions. The standard stress test was therefore impossible.

Poflee, channeling the boy who built wireless transmitters, took a stationary exercise bicycle, modified one of its pedals, and bolted the entire metal frame to a concrete platform so patients could crank the machine with their hands instead of their legs. He tested it with a cardiologist in Nagpur, then replicated it at MGIMS. A Medicine resident, Dr. Sanjeev Batra, wrote his thesis on the comparative results. Soon, engineering students from nearby institutions began seeking out the MGIMS doctor who physically built his own diagnostic equipment. He welcomed them all.

He had played the guitar for years, though the brutal demands of medicine had gradually displaced the music. At MGIMS, Gajanan Ambulkar—an artist by temperament and training—persuaded him to pick it up again.

A small, beautiful ensemble formed: Poflee on guitar, Dr. S. John Premendran on violin, and Dr. R.K. Gupta from Pharmacology on flute. When Mrs. Kamala Desikan invited them to perform at the college's Silver Jubilee, they played a patriotic musical program to an audience of faculty and students. It was the kind of magical occasion that small institutions, when they are functioning well, generate entirely without effort—people with separate, hidden skills discovering that they could produce something beautiful together.

He left MGIMS in April 1992. He was not unhappy; he was simply honest. The four pillars of the Medicine department were firmly rooted where they had always been, and there was absolutely no upward movement available for a fifth person of his seniority. He named this reality clearly, rather than constructing a more flattering, diplomatic account of his departure.

In 1992, he joined Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in Sawangi as Professor and Head of Medicine. The college was only two years old and desperately needed someone to build it from nothing. He did exactly that, eventually extending his reach into the roles of Medical Superintendent and Dean.

And then, he resigned again.

Administration was not the work he had come into medicine to do. The endless files, the bureaucratic meetings, the institutional politics—they were pulling him away from the patients and the teaching. In 1994, he returned to Nagpur, resumed private practice, and continued clinical neurophysiology at SureTech Hospital, deliberately ensuring his services remained available to patients who could not pay.

In 2005, a profound tragedy struck. An autoimmune vasculitis rapidly took his hearing in both ears. But the tinkerer simply adapted. He did not retire. He continued his work as a neurophysiologist in total silence.

He and his wife, Sandhya, were among the very first doctors in Nagpur to drive an electric car—first the Reva, then the Comet. The choice was deeply consistent with a sensibility that had always been drawn to how complex systems worked, and what those systems cost the world they operated within.

He delivered health talks on All India Radio. He conducted workshops on the cybernetic principles of business management. In 2021, he published a book of devotional songs he had composed and set to music himself. His interests were too vast to be reduced to mere hobbies; they were the natural expression of a mind that simply refused to observe the usual, artificial partition between the scientific and the spiritual.

His son Hrishikesh, born in Sevagram in 1986, studied computer science, moved to the United States, joined the US Army as a cybersecurity specialist, and married Dr. Teja Mehendale, a family physician from Pune. The invisible connections between what MGIMS produced and the wider world run, in his case, across a generation and an ocean.

Vivek Poflee walked away from his first MD when a supervisor made integrity impossible. He walked away from a Deanship when administration made medicine impossible. Both decisions required him to actively discard something highly valuable—time, position, the path of least resistance—in order to preserve something he valued far more. Neither departure was made in anger. Both were made with wide-open eyes.

The Hand Mill he built is still used. The neurophysiology clinic he established at MGIMS continued to serve patients long after he left. At seventy, he remains a working neurophysiologist in Nagpur, completely at peace with the knowledge that he has fulfilled his calling.

The tinkerer who built wireless transmitters in his childhood bedroom never actually became a different person. He simply found a field large enough to contain him.