Success gets remembered as a single moment—a name announced, a medal handed over, a room full of applause. What it actually took to get there is usually invisible by then, and mostly happened at hours nobody was watching.
For Amrita, those hours were in Wardha.
After doing well in her tenth standard, she joined Jankidevi Bajaj Science College. College was really just the frame; the actual work happened in tuition classes and notebooks, in the plain discipline of turning up even on the mornings she didn’t want to. What stays with me from those years is Amrita and her friend Anvi, wrapped up against the winter cold, riding a moped through pitch-dark streets to reach Professor Chaudhary’s chemistry class before sunrise.
The roads were empty at that hour, lit in patches, with only the stray dogs for company. Day after day the two girls rode through those lanes anyway, because missing the class was not something either of them considered. It wasn’t the dramatic kind of courage. It was the kind that repeats itself every morning until no one, including the person doing it, thinks to call it courage at all.
Nagpur
When the time came for the Pre-Medical Test, Amrita moved to Nagpur and shared a rented room at Chhatrapati Square with Anvi and Rutuja Gangane. Between them they rented a cooler and a fridge for Rs 500. They ate out of tiffin boxes and studied until their eyes ached and their backs stiffened. For those months, the world shrank to textbooks, test papers, and the sense that time was always running out.
When the results came, there was an irony in them that still makes me smile.
Amrita had spent years perfecting her handwriting, as though a beautiful answer sheet might soften an examiner’s judgement. It nearly worked everywhere except one paper. She scored brilliantly across the sciences, but in Gandhian Thought—the one subject MGIMS treats as almost a moral requirement—she barely crossed the line: 26 out of 60.
She was heartbroken about it. I offered the usual things fathers say—exams are subjective, marks don’t tell the whole story—and she wasn’t in the mood for any of it. She wanted the marks to be fair, not explained away. Luckily her science scores carried her through, and she got her seat at MGIMS. The news travelled through Wardha the way good news always does. My daughter was going to be a doctor.
The professor’s daughter
Medical school is hard. It becomes harder when your father is a professor in the same institute.
Like Ashwini before her, Amrita carried an extra weight through those corridors that had nothing to do with the syllabus. People noticed her more closely than they noticed other students. When she did well, it was put down to her surname—”She’s Dr. Kalantri’s daughter, of course she’ll do well.” Had she slipped, I suspect the whispers would have been less kind.
So she did what children of professors learn to do early—she simply worked harder than the moment required. Through all of MBBS she stayed among the top three in her class. She never argued with the gossip. She just answered it with her marks.
Medicon
Amrita was more than a good student. In 2012, during her internship, she took on something that struck me as slightly unreasonable for a twenty-two-year-old: organising Medicon 2012, a national research conference for undergraduates.
A conference is one thing in a city with hotels and taxis on call. In Sevagram, it means building everything from nothing. But Amrita wasn’t only trying to pull off an event—she wanted it to mean something. She called it “Return to Your Roots,” and the idea behind it was simple: to ask young doctors to look past their textbooks at the India most of them would actually go on to serve.
The war room
For months, a room near the Obstetrics gate—normally home to the Hospital Information System—became her command post; everyone simply called it the War Room. Officially she was the Organising Secretary. In practice she was the one who decided everything, argued everyone into agreement, and put out whatever was on fire that day.
She pulled in her own batchmates and the juniors from 2010, and somehow turned a group of exhausted interns into people who got things done. It felt, those weeks, like a house getting ready for a wedding—the same mix of chaos and purpose. They found computers, argued with printers, designed brochures, and turned a forgotten corner of the hospital into the busiest room on campus.
Giants on campus
The guest list alone was enough to unsettle a grown organising committee. Amrita was corresponding with Dr. Vinay Kumar, whose name is on the cover of Robbins Pathology in nearly every medical student’s bag; with Dr. Abhay Bang; with Dr. Binayak Sen; and with Dr. Sanjay Nagral.
I watched her with them, and she was never starstruck—she was simply the host, managing their travel, their schedules, their small demands, with a composure I hadn’t quite managed myself in decades of teaching. When Dr. Vinay Kumar walked those corridors, it was Amrita’s team looking after him, not the faculty.
An ethical stand
The thing that made me proudest happened before a single guest arrived. A four-day event for four hundred students needs money, and the easiest source is always the pharmaceutical industry, which is generally happy to pay for the visibility.
Amrita and her team said no.
They raised the money instead through delegate fees, through INFORMER (the Forum for Medical Students’ Research), and through MGIMS itself. They found grants from the Lady Tata Trust and the BMJ Group, and travel support from ICRAG. It was more work, and it meant the conference owed nothing to anyone.
The four days in July
From July 11 to 14, 2012, Sevagram looked like a different place. More than four hundred students arrived from across the country, and for four days the campus ran on stem cell research, public health arguments, clinico-pathological correlations, and panel discussions that occasionally got heated.
I stood at the back of the auditorium and watched her move through it all—fixing whatever had stopped working, greeting delegates, checking that the food was ready, keeping the whole schedule from sliding. She looked worn out. She also looked, unmistakably, like someone doing exactly what she was meant to be doing.
That was when it struck me that she had quietly stopped being just a student. She wasn’t only learning medicine anymore. She was helping decide what the conversation about it would even be.
A speech written between stations
That same year gave me another glimpse of how she is made. She was chosen for the MVPM Scholar Award, one of only five students from the community to receive it, and the ceremony was in Pune.
We settled into the AC compartment of the Nagpur–Pune Express, and I began worrying the way parents can’t seem to help. Amrita hadn’t written a speech.
“You need to rehearse,” I urged her.
She waved me off, put her headphones on, and looked as unconcerned as if she were headed to a picnic. I lay awake most of the night imagining her going blank on stage. The next morning, in the taxi to the auditorium, I saw her typing quickly on her iPad.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Writing my speech,” she said casually.
My heart sank. This, I thought, was exactly the kind of planning that gives fathers high blood pressure.
But on stage, none of that showed. She didn’t read from notes; she simply talked to the room. “I can’t tell you what to do,” she told them, “because I don’t have a clue either. But here I am. So I must have done something right.”
She quoted Maya Angelou, spoke about resilience, and had the whole hall listening. When she finished, the applause went on longer than these things usually warrant. I sat there feeling proud and slightly foolish in equal measure, for ever having doubted her.
Residency
Marriage to Sahaj took her to Delhi, but it did not soften her ambition. If anything, it sharpened it.
She began her DNB residency in Radiology at Mata Chanan Devi Hospital, hoping it might leave room for an actual life alongside the work. It did, but there was a cost: she was the only resident in her batch. No one to compare notes with after a long day, no real teaching structure to lean on.
Most people would have complained. Amrita did what she usually does, which is find her own way round the problem. In the evenings she went to Ganga Ram Hospital and the Army Base Hospital to learn MRI and CT reporting on her own time. She more or less taught herself the job.
The gold medal
Then came the DNB examination itself. Very few candidates pass it, and no one ever quite knows what to expect from the practical—you go in prepared and come out unsure of everything.
When the results came out on 22 September 2018, I was stunned. She hadn’t just passed. She had topped the country and won the gold medal.
Vigyan Bhavan
I’m still not sure how a father is meant to take in news like that.
Bhavana and I sat in the audience at Vigyan Bhavan, with Sahaj and his parents beside us. When Amrita’s name was called and she walked up to receive the medal from the Health Minister, I remember everything around me going quiet.
I thought of the girl on the moped riding through the dark lanes of Wardha. I thought of the intern running a national conference out of a converted computer room. I thought of the speech written in a taxi while I fretted beside her. I thought of the long evenings in Delhi hospitals, learning on her own what no one had time to teach her.
And then she stood there, holding the gold medal.
My eyes filled, not because of the medal itself, but because of everything behind it—the early mornings, the small sacrifices, the many times she chose to do more than what was asked of her. The moment on stage lasted a minute. Getting there had taken years.
And that, I think, is really how success gets made.