The Labours of Love

Faces at my desk

When I look back at three decades in Sevagram, my mind doesn’t go first to big lectures or committee meetings. I see faces—young MD residents, eager and anxious, sitting across my desk or around our dining table at home.

To the outside world, an MD thesis is a formality: a black-and-gold bound volume that ends up on a library shelf. For me, it was something else. It was a long apprenticeship in thinking. It was also a shared struggle to find a little truth inside the noise of clinical data.

I wasn’t an easy guide. In my younger days, people found me strict—sometimes too strict. I demanded discipline. I lost my temper. I sent residents back to collect data again, or rewrite a chapter they thought was “good enough.” I can see how that must have felt. But my intention was never to harass anyone. I wanted one simple thing: if a thesis carried the Sevagram name, it should be solid, honest work.

And for a few years, we had proof that the hard work mattered. In the Academy of Medical Sciences competitions, our residents did consistently well. Their theses didn’t look like hurried paperwork. They looked like careful clinical inquiry.

The pioneers and the rebels

It began, for me, with Monica Ahuja.

Those were typewriter days. The institute ran on the clack-clack of keys and the smell of correction fluid. Monica, a Mumbai girl from Borivali, worked steadily on her thesis—studying the prognostic value of stress tests after a heart attack. She was meticulous, but she also had a quiet rebellious streak. She carried her entire manuscript to Baroda because a friend there had access to a computer—still a novelty in those years. She returned with what was probably the first computerized thesis MGIMS had ever seen. It looked crisp, modern, almost too neat for Sevagram. That thesis didn’t just impress me. It signalled a shift. The typewriter era had begun to loosen its grip.

Not everyone stayed long enough to write a thesis, of course. Vijay Subbarao stayed exactly fifteen days. He quickly understood that Sevagram—and perhaps India—was not where he wanted to build his life. He left for Denver and went on to become a cardiologist. I hear he still cycles seriously. Some people never change; they only change continents.

Then there was Anjum Amreliwala—Anju Gupta, before love changed her name and, in many ways, her world. She married Irfan, a junior resident, converted to Islam, and came to the wards with fierce determination. Around that time, I had learnt fibre-optic bronchoscopy at KEM Hospital in Mumbai, and I used those skills to help her design her study on bronchoscopy in diagnosing chest tuberculosis. She became, without intending to, a bridge between cultures and institutions. Medicine, like love, doesn’t ask for permission.

Struggle, grit, and the wards as a classroom

If there is one privilege of being a guide, it is this: you see people up close, in their most difficult years.

Parimal Sarkar remains etched in my mind. He came from Tripura with almost nothing. For years, he survived on the kindness of his peers—friends pooled money for his food, books, and even clothes. He was a brilliant Bengali boy, and he chose a thesis that was classic Sevagram: the diagnostic value of vibration and percussion in assessing heart size. His work was built on careful observation, but his life was built on something else—friendship.

As time went on, the topics reflected what our wards were seeing. Dhanraj Singh studied physical signs of splenomegaly. Vikas explored snakebites and the “pit” that fascinated rural clinicians. Mohd Sami looked at people’s attitudes towards blood pressure measurement—simple, but crucial. Manoj Singh tried to quantify how well patients recognise fever in themselves. Priya worked on bedside examination to differentiate stroke subtypes. Others tackled hypothyroidism, heart attack risk factors, meningitis, ICU mortality, pesticides, organophosphorus poisoning—each thesis shaped by the questions that rose from our own floors and corridors.

These were not exotic research themes. They were bread-and-butter medicine, studied with seriousness. That was our strength.

My “ghostwriter” phase

I had one odd habit that made me different from many guides. I didn’t just supervise. I got involved—sometimes too much.

I would sit with residents for hours, typing their drafts, fixing tables, formatting references, redrawing figures, and polishing the language until it could survive the scrutiny of a journal editor. I wasn’t proud of this habit, but I couldn’t stop myself. If something was sloppy, I wanted to repair it.

Once, a resident—now a successful oncologist, so I will protect his name—walked into my office, saw the finished thesis, and asked innocently, “Sir, can you also write the Acknowledgement section?”

I laughed so loudly that I surprised myself.

“How can I thank myself?” I asked him. “How do I write a paragraph about how wonderful I am?”

That was my limit.

Bhavana’s quiet role

But the real thesis work didn’t happen only in the office. Much of it happened at home.

Residents often stayed late, and Bhavana became the silent partner in every project. She cooked dinner without making a fuss. She served tea. She made the house feel safe when the resident felt exhausted, stuck, or close to giving up.

Even today, when these doctors—now scattered across the world—meet me after years, they rarely talk about statistics or confidence intervals. They talk about Bhavana’s food. They remember the warmth of those late nights more than the results section. In some ways, that tells me what mattered most.

From typewriters to Word and EndNote

I was determined to push our department into the digital age. I taught residents Microsoft Word and Excel, and later EndNote. I wanted them to see that technology wasn’t a luxury; it was a tool that saved time and reduced errors.

One rule mattered to me more than the software: the resident must be the first author. The work was theirs. The sweat was theirs. The credit should also be theirs. That was non-negotiable.

Over the years, many residents embraced this new discipline—studying mortality in snakebites, ICU outcomes, patterns of fever, stroke risk factors, meningitis, pesticides, organophosphorus poisoning. By the end of my guiding years, the circle felt complete. The questions had come from our wards, and the answers—imperfect but honest—returned to the wards.

What the thesis really gave them

Most of these residents didn’t become full-time researchers. Many went into private practice. Some became teachers. A few took up administrative roles. Earlier, I used to feel a small disappointment about that. I wanted more of them to publish, to stay in research.

Now I see it differently.

The thesis wasn’t meant to turn everyone into a scientist. It was meant to teach a doctor how to think. How to read a paper without being fooled. How to respect uncertainty. How to understand what a p-value can say—and what it cannot. How to bring a little discipline to the bedside.

I was their guide, yes. But in many ways, they guided me too. They kept me alert. They tested my patience. They forced me to update my own thinking. They allowed me the privilege of watching them grow from frightened residents into confident clinicians.

Those theses may be gathering dust on library shelves. But to me, they are not dead paper. They are the recorded history of our lives together in Sevagram.

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