Early Struggles

IIt was a warm evening in Nagpur, and I had just finished my anatomy class. Eager to get back, I walked briskly to the spot where I had parked my cycle. It was not there.

At first, I assumed I had made a mistake. I walked up and down the stretch, looked behind trees and pillars, retraced my steps. Slowly, reluctantly, the truth dawned on me. The cycle was gone.

My heart sank. Beads of sweat gathered on my forehead. That cycle was my prized possession—my only reliable means of getting around the city. To lose it felt like a personal calamity.

As I stood there, unsure of what to do next, Anil Sharma happened to pass by. He noticed my expression and stopped. At the time, I was shy, timid, and painfully awkward in social situations. English came to me haltingly; sentences rarely emerged intact. Anil, by contrast, seemed to belong easily to the world. He was the son of a professor, educated in an English-medium school, and carried himself with a quiet assurance.

Yet what struck me immediately was not his confidence, but his warmth.

He understood the situation without my having to explain much. Putting his arm gently around my shoulder, he spoke reassuringly and led me to the Ajni police station. He sat beside me patiently as I struggled to file a complaint. When words failed me, he filled the gaps. The officer listened, noted the details—the make, the colour, a few distinguishing marks—and asked us to wait.

The cycle never returned.

What stayed with me was something far more enduring. Anil’s calm presence, his unhurried kindness, and his ability to make a frightened, homesick student feel less alone. His words were gentle and steady. They eased my agitation and soothed a mind stretched thin by unfamiliar surroundings.

Soon after, Anil left Nagpur. His father was transferred to Mumbai, and Anil moved with him. Life took us in different directions, as it often does.

Years passed.

In the winter of 1994, I found myself at Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai. My father-in-law had been admitted for bypass surgery, and I was walking through one of its long, confusing corridors when I ran into Anil.

After MBBS, he had gone on to earn his MD and then a DM in Cardiology. By then, he was a cardiologist at Hinduja—well known, well regarded, very much at home in that world. Yet the moment he saw me, he smiled and recognised me instantly.

That evening he took me out to dinner at a nearby restaurant. Over a simple meal, we spoke of Nagpur, of medical college, and of a stolen bicycle that had quietly introduced me to friendship. It was deeply moving.

Anil faced his final years with remarkable courage. Even as he battled metastatic prostate cancer, he refused to indulge in self-pity. He joked about his illness, laughed easily, and lived fully—just as he had practised medicine, and just as he had once walked a shaken student to a police station.

He passed away on 17 August 2018.

Some people enter our lives briefly, but leave behind a lasting warmth. Anil was one of them..

***

August 1973 was when our life at Government Medical College began in earnest. Two hundred of us stood together for the first time—newly admitted, freshly ironed, and trying hard to look as though we belonged. We knew, in a vague and solemn way, that we would spend the next five years in one another’s pockets: in lecture halls, dissection rooms, exam queues, and hostel corridors.

A few students joined later, and the final count rose to 204—45 women and 159 men, pulled in from towns and villages across Vidarbha. Even among the women, the distribution had its own odd imbalance: eleven in Batch A, sixteen in Batch B, and nine each in Batches C and D. I don’t know what invisible logic produced those numbers. We accepted them the way we accepted everything else in those days—without question.

Looking back, the figures feel almost antique. Today, women make up more than half of medical admissions. At MGIMS, I have watched them take the lead with quiet certainty—topping merit lists, collecting medals, and walking away with prizes that once seemed reserved for the loudest boys in the room. Whether this is long-delayed justice or a slow retreat of young men from medicine is a question I leave hanging.

Most of us had come from small vernacular schools. English was not our natural language; it was something we wore like a new shirt—stiff, uncomfortable, and slightly ill-fitting. A handful spoke it easily, as if they had been born into it. The rest of us spoke in fragments, hoping confidence would fill the gaps.

Only about a tenth of the class had a parent who was a doctor. Nearly a fifth came from farming families. The backgrounds were as varied as the accents. Fifty-eight were day scholars who could go home each evening to proper food and familiar voices. The remaining 146—including me—were scattered across hostels, shared rooms, and relatives’ houses, learning early that independence is often just another name for loneliness.

We arrived carrying notebooks, lunch boxes, and ambitions shaped by very different worlds. We did not yet know who would become our closest friends, who would turn into rivals, who would disappear quietly, and who would shine. We only knew that we were now inside the gates—and that the college, without any hurry, would begin to sand down some differences and sharpen others.

***

Bruised and Battered

A month before our batch formally entered Government Medical College, ragging was still treated as a sacred tradition—like dissection, viva voce, and the occasional humiliation that came free with the syllabus. Seniors called it “toughening up.” Juniors called it “just survive.” Humiliation was routine, abuse was common, and a slap or two was not considered newsworthy. It wasn’t so much approved as inherited.

One afternoon in July 1973, I was walking past Medical Square when a group of seniors intercepted me. There was no anger in their faces—only that casual confidence of people who know the rules favour them. They steered me towards Shri Ram Dharamshala and into a room. The door shut behind me with a soft finality. I had heard enough hostel stories to know this was not a social call.

The room filled quickly—with laughter, cigarette smoke, and the sharp excitement of an audience waiting for entertainment. I stood in the middle, unsure where to place my eyes. Words came at me from all sides—mocking, coarse, unnecessary. Someone asked me something. Someone else repeated it louder. The rest laughed, as if volume improved the joke.

I tried to move away. There was nowhere to go.

What I remember most is the feeling of being exposed—like a specimen held up for inspection, except the examiner was drunk on power and the questions had no right answers. Their gestures were crude, their language uglier. I was sixteen, new to the city, new to the college, and suddenly aware that decency was not guaranteed inside a room full of medical students.

At some point I cried. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet, involuntary leaking of fear and helplessness. It was the sort of crying that embarrasses you even as it happens.

Then one senior intervened.

Indra Kumar Mohta—from Hinganghat. I don’t know what moved him. Perhaps I looked too young; I still hadn’t grown a moustache. Perhaps he simply got bored of the spectacle. He told the others to stop. The room cooled by a degree. Relief arrived, but it brought no joy—only a dull wish to leave.

They let me go.

I walked back to my room—nearly a kilometre away—slowly, as though I had forgotten how to walk normally. The city looked unchanged. People went about their business. A tea stall steamed. A bicycle bell rang. The world, annoyingly, continued.

That afternoon, I felt a kind of vulnerability I had never known before.

Much later I learnt that vulnerable comes from the Latin vulnerare—to wound. In 1973, I did not need Latin. I understood the meaning perfectly. I had moved from a small town where everyone knew everyone, to a large city where strangers could do what they liked and call it tradition.

For weeks, the memory lingered. Shri Ram Dharamshala—meant to shelter anxious relatives of patients—had briefly turned into a private theatre of cruelty for first-year boys. I could not reconcile it with a profession that spoke endlessly of compassion. We were training to heal. Yet we seemed oddly skilled at hurting.

Change came from an unlikely source: Vinod Sawaitul (Roll No. 173), a classmate who later earned a quiet place in GMC folklore. Within a fortnight of joining, he too was ragged. Hurt but resolute, he protested and filed a formal complaint. It triggered a strike, forced the administration to act, and—miracle of miracles—ragging was abolished. For a while. Even the rigid dress code for first-years disappeared, as if someone had finally admitted that white trousers did not produce better doctors.

Time, however, is the most experienced administrator of all. It dilutes every order.

***

The English Test

The early days of the 1970s remain vivid in my mind. Ragging had returned to the campus, but in a milder avatar, playing out like a scene from an old film. The stage was usually the dusty stretch of road connecting the Anatomy Dissection Hall to the Dental College. It was lunchtime; the sun was high, and we would be walking back, ravenous after hours of standing over cadavers, when a senior would step in. He would single me out and draw me aside with a conspiratorial grin.

“SP,” he would command, nodding toward a female Parsi classmate walking ahead in her pristine white coat. “Go and ask that girl’s name. In English.”

It sounds trivial now, but back then, the gender divide was a chasm. We were mostly boys from small towns—I was fresh from Wardha—and the English language felt as foreign and formidable as the anatomy we were struggling to memorize. Fluent conversation was as uncommon as a cool breeze in a Nagpur May. The simple sentence, “May I know your name, please?” felt as daunting as crossing the Nag River in full flood.

Heart racing, palms still clammy from the formalin of the dissection hall, I would approach her. I would freeze, then stammer, “N-name… please?”

She would blush and look at her feet; I would retreat in haste, my face burning. The seniors would erupt in laughter, slapping my back in approval. “Cleared, Kalantri. Go eat.”

It seemed harmless at the time, a clumsy rite of passage. Yet, looking back through the lens of decades, I realize those afternoons imparted a subtle lesson we later had to unlearn: the idea that embarrassment could pass for camaraderie, and that authority often disguised itself as tradition.

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