The Belgaum Bond

Two nights in Delhi

In January 2003, a few months before my McMaster trip, I landed in Delhi for a different kind of learning. Dr. Peush Sahni, the editor of the National Medical Journal of India (NMJI), had organised a two-day workshop at AIIMS for editors of Indian biomedical journals.

Workshops like these are useful, of course. But what stays with you is often what happens after the sessions—over tea, in corridors, and sometimes in the room you are allotted.

That is where my luck worked quietly.

AIIMS paired me with Dr. Premnath Kotur, a senior Professor of Anaesthesiology from JN Medical College, Belgaum. He had already spent close to two decades in academics. On paper, we had little in common. He was from the south, I was from central India. He worked in anaesthesia, I worked in medicine.

But once the lights went out and the Delhi winter began pressing against the windows, we started talking.

We didn’t waste time on small talk. No cricket. No politics. We went straight to the things that kept bothering both of us—medical ethics, evidence, and the quiet power an editor holds. We spoke about what gets published, what gets ignored, and how easily medicine can drift when nobody asks hard questions.

By the end of those two nights, I felt I had found a fellow traveller.

When we checked out, Dr. Kotur said, “Kalantri, you must write for my journal.”

An invitation that became a platform

He wasn’t being polite. Dr. Kotur edited the Indian Journal of Anaesthesiology, and he actually meant it.

Over the next few years, I wrote a series of articles for his journal—pieces that had little to do with anaesthesia drugs and everything to do with the practice of medicine. I wrote about informed consent, not as a form to be signed, but as a human contract. I wrote about medical errors, a subject most doctors preferred to keep locked away. I wrote about the drug industry and conferences, and about the uneasy space where ethics and evidence collide.

Dr. Kotur published them without flinching. In those days, that itself was an act of courage. He gave these ideas a home when many journals would have found them “uncomfortable.”

Belgaum, and a workshop years later

Our connection deepened in May 2009. By then, evidence-based medicine was no longer a fancy phrase—it was becoming a way of thinking.

Along with my younger colleagues, Dr. Rajnish Joshi and Dr. Saranya Sridhar, I travelled to Belgaum to conduct a two-day workshop on Evidence-Based Medicine at KLE University. Dr. Kotur, now the Registrar, was our host.

It felt oddly satisfying. Six years earlier, we had whispered these ideas in a room at AIIMS. Now we were teaching them from a podium in his institution, to a hall full of young doctors.

Some friendships grow slowly. Ours grew through shared work.

When the roles reversed

In 2016, Dr. Kotur decided to do something that surprised me—not because he lacked ability, but because he already had stature. Despite seniority and administrative responsibilities, he enrolled for a PhD in Evidence-Based Medicine.

When his viva came up, he asked me to be the external examiner.

A PhD defence has its own atmosphere. The candidate stands alone at the front, years of effort condensed into slides and answers, while the examiners watch like hawks. The room is always tense. Even confident people suddenly forget their own names.

But as Dr. Kotur presented his work, I saw the same man I had met at AIIMS—careful, serious, and quietly stubborn about getting things right. I asked him difficult questions, because that is what the role demands. He answered calmly, without shortcuts. He knew his subject, and he had earned his conclusions.

When it ended, I didn’t feel like I had examined a candidate.

I felt I had witnessed a friend complete a long, honest climb.

The best connections are of the mind

When I think of Dr. Kotur now, I don’t remember a formal conference or a big stage. I remember a shared room at AIIMS, the Delhi cold outside, and two doctors talking late into the night about the grey zones of medicine.

That room gave me more than a workshop certificate.

It gave me a colleague for life.

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