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Chapter 4: Widening Horizons
From Sevagram to the World
From 1989 to 2003, Sevagram slowly became more than my workplace. It became my training ground—professional, personal, and sometimes painfully practical. These were the years when life felt full: young children at home, busy wards in the hospital, residents at my table, and an unspoken pressure to keep growing. Looking back, I don’t remember grand milestones as much as I remember ordinary days that quietly changed me.
Some of those days were almost comic. A foot wound forced me to take leave, and Bhavana—without any formal medical training—ended up giving me intravenous gentamicin at home with the calm confidence of a seasoned nurse. In another season, I found myself chasing alumni addresses, proofreading pages late at night, and discovering that editing a newsletter or an annual report requires as much stamina as a medical emergency. These stories may look small on paper, but they shaped the texture of our lives in Sevagram.
This chapter also follows my slow drift from bedside work to the world of words—news bulletins, annual reports, and later, medical journals. Editing taught me discipline: how to cut fluff, respect facts, and still keep the human voice intact. My time with the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics brought another kind of education—one that forced me to think about power, consent, conflicts of interest, and the uncomfortable places where medicine stops being purely scientific and becomes deeply moral.
And then, almost without warning, Sevagram opened outward. Evidence-based medicine entered my life like a fresh wind—first through workshops and friendships, then through McMaster, and later through the UK, where I met alumni who carried Sevagram in their accents and their habits. Along the way came unexpected companions: typists who delivered theses like midwives, residents who tested my patience and strengthened my purpose, and colleagues who made the work lighter. These thirteen pages are not a list of achievements. They are the story of how my world widened—one patient, one page, one friendship at a time.