2.13
The Things I Didn’t Do at GMC
Watching others shine, staying quietly myself
Some evenings at GMC, the day ended not with a ward round or a viva, but with a song.
We would drift towards the auditorium in small groups, still in our college clothes—tired, hungry, and oddly hopeful—as if music could wash off the smell of formalin and fatigue. The hall was never grand, but it felt grand to us. A few minutes after the first note, even the most overworked student stopped looking at his watch. For that one hour, we were not medical students racing against time. We were simply an audience, grateful to be alive.
The 1970s at GMC had a glow of their own. On some evenings, the auditorium turned into a small concert hall, and our classmates—especially the batch of 1973—sang the golden hits of Mohd. Rafi, Talat Mahmood, Mukesh, Manna Dey, Kishore Kumar, Hemant Kumar, Asha Bhosale, and Lata Mangeshkar. For a couple of hours, the burdens of anatomy and ward postings loosened their grip. We sat back and let familiar melodies do their quiet repair work.
Jayant Pande and Vivek Deshpande sang with ease. Shriram Kane and Uday Gupte played the sitar. Rajendra Sarda and Rajendra Phadke brought their flutes to life. Shashikant Khaire made the accordion sound like a cheerful conversation. Jayant, apart from singing, could make almost any instrument behave—congo, bongo, even the mandolin. He performed with the calm of someone who had never been afraid of an audience, and the applause he received was never out of politeness. It was pure delight.
Debates had their own star. Vivek Kulkarni did not merely speak—he held the hall. His arguments were sharp, his delivery effortless, and his mind seemed to run a step ahead of everyone else. He died young, at thirty-three, from cancer of the oesophagus. The news stunned us. Some people belong so naturally to the world that you never imagine them leaving it early.
Sports, too, had its heroes. Cricket had Sanjeev Chandorkar, Avinash Deshmukh, Ravi Kasat, Vikas Chitnavis, Sanjay Warhadpande, Dilip Tikkas, Pradeep Desai, and Rajendra Phadke. Hockey had Thomas Chacko, Nasrin Gangriwala, Archana Srivastava, Allison Girling, and Shobha Dani. Basketball belonged to Avinash Deshmukh, Vikas Chitnavis, and Arun Deshmukh. Volleyball had C.S. Sonkusare, Harish Baheti, Sanjay Gadre, Viraj Tandale, and Avinash again. Badminton had Ravi Kasat, Ajit Pradhan, Ashok Badhe, Sujata Sawangikar, and Alka Desai. Table tennis had Rajiv Biyani, who seemed to rule it by birthright.
And then there was me.
I had no gift for music. No appetite for debates. No talent for drama. And certainly no instinct for sport. I was the quiet watcher—the man in the back row who enjoys the show, remembers it for years, and claps the loudest when someone else steals the evening.
The only cricket match I played seriously came much later, during internship—a game between Bhadravati and Ballarpur—where I managed the only boundary of my life. I still remember it with the pride of a man who has very little to show in that department.
At GMC, our cricket was more improvisation than sport. We played on the small terrace of Hostel No. 4, barely forty feet by forty. The bowler delivered a tennis ball from six yards, not twenty-two, and the batsman was surrounded by close-in fielders waiting like creditors. That was the full extent of my cricketing career: a few hurried shots, a few near-misses, and a great deal of enthusiasm.
Yet I remained devoted to the game. I was—and still am—one of those hopeless watchers who can recall scorecards from the 1960s with embarrassing accuracy, despite having no first-hand experience beyond terrace cricket.
In a college full of singers, players, and speakers, I contributed mainly as an audience. But even that had its pleasures. Those were good days. They return even now, whenever an old song begins and, for a moment, the world feels lighter.
I did not sing, I did not play, and I did not score runs worth remembering. But I watched my classmates shine, and that was its own education. In those days, we clapped without irony, cheered without restraint, and returned to our books feeling less burdened.
Looking back, I realise those programmes and terrace matches were not distractions from medical college. They were what kept us human.