Tales from the Typists

The MD thesis is more than a document. It is a visa. Without it, you cannot enter the final examination hall, no matter how good your clinical work is. And as the submission deadline approaches, the same panic returns every year—like a seasonal fever in the hostel.

Postgraduates begin hunting for two people with almost magical powers: a statistician who can rescue a stubborn p-value, and a typist who will stay awake when the rest of the campus has gone to sleep.

As a guide, I usually saw only the final bound volumes—neat, heavy, and deceptively calm. I rarely saw the labour behind them. Recently, I spoke to a few alumni and to the typists who carried generations of residents through those final weeks. Their memories trace a quiet technological revolution—from carbon paper and manual typewriters to laptops, EndNote, and PDF uploads. But one thing has stayed unchanged: the last-minute desperation.

The carbon paper years (1980–1990)

When MGIMS started its first MD programme in 1980, a thesis was a physical project. It came in four bound volumes, and each copy had to be typed, checked, corrected, and typed again. Sevagram had a small group of typists who became legends in their own right—Shantanu Dawande, the late Kuljeet Singh, Sanjay Bawse, and Mahendra Chaudhari. In Wardha, the familiar names were Prashant Thakre, the late Sachin Yugaonkar, and Deshpande.

Most residents wrote their drafts by hand. The typists had to decode them—often with more imagination than grammar.

Errors were common, and some were unforgettable. Dr Pradeep Vyavahare (1985) told me his typist repeatedly typed “hydrogen” or “hydrocarbon” instead of “hydrocele.” There was no spell-check, no red underline, no helpful suggestion. Only a tired resident, a tired typist, and a growing pile of corrections.

Some residents couldn’t afford a typist at all. They borrowed machines and typed on their own.

Kishore Shah (1974) used a Remington Rand manual typewriter with a black ribbon and three sheets of carbon paper. He hit the keys so hard that the fourth copy would not look like a ghost. Arvind Ghongane (1979), a self-declared two-finger typist, survived on bottles of whitener. His thesis probably contained more correction fluid than ink.

The first computers arrive

Computers entered Sevagram slowly, and they entered like VIPs—expensive, rare, and slightly intimidating.

Dr Monika Ahuja (1982) was ahead of her time. With no computers available in Sevagram, she travelled to Baroda with her mother as a chaperone. A group of four friends helped her type and print her thesis on a dot-matrix printer. It must have sounded like a tractor starting up, but it worked.

In Sevagram, the real turning point came with Shantanu Dawande. In 1995, at just 24, he opened Excel Computers at Sevagram Square. His first machine was an Intel 386, bought for ₹85,000—a fortune in those days. It had 1 MB RAM, a 20 MB hard drive, and ran on MS-DOS.

Residents were suspicious at first. A thesis typed on a computer felt risky, almost like taking an unfamiliar drug without a trial. But once Dr Pati from Biochemistry took the plunge, others followed. Soon, Shantanu moved from hand-drawn graphs with sketch pens to using SPSS. He also became an expert in reading handwriting—especially the kind that gets worse with every sleepless night. He still remembers trying to decode the drafts of residents like Nandkishore Banait, Manu Kishore, and Chandan Tikku.

Mahendra Chaudhari, another stalwart, bought a Pentium computer in 1994 for ₹42,000, paid in instalments. He became the favourite of Dr V.K. Mehta’s students, known for clean formatting and a patience that never made it into any syllabus.

The hardware wars

By the late 1990s, computers began appearing in hostels, but they were still luxury items. Owning a desktop was like owning a small car—people noticed.

Dr Rajnish Joshi (1999) had an assembled desktop running Windows 98, with a floppy drive but no USB port. It cost around ₹30,000. Dr Devashis Barik (1991) had an HP Pentium II with a modem, which made him look like a man who lived in the future. Dr Rahul Narang (1987) managed with the official computer in the Microbiology department, which probably had more users than a hospital stretcher.

Much later, MGIMS itself changed the story by giving laptops and MacBooks to faculty and residents on interest-free loans. That one decision quietly shifted power. Residents no longer depended entirely on typists. They learned Word, Excel, and later EndNote. The typists didn’t disappear—but the relationship changed. The resident now arrived with a file. Not a bundle of scribbled pages.

The night shift at Sevagram Square

Even with better machines, the thesis season remained brutal.

In those weeks, Sevagram Square turned into a small nocturnal city. Binding shops stayed open late. Printers ran hot. Residents moved around with dark circles, stapled papers, and the kind of silence that comes only after too much caffeine.

Vishakha Jain (1996) remembers the shops buzzing late into the night. Sheetal Bodakhe (2005) still recalls riding her Scooty from Wardha to Sevagram at 2:30 a.m., clutching fresh printouts like they were blood reports in an emergency.

Some stories were funny. Others were painful.

Ramesh Pande (1989) told me he once rode his scooter to Ramnagar in the dead of night to dictate his thesis to a typist. “Occasionally,” he said, “he would lock the door from inside to sleep. I would stand there in the rain, ringing the bell, knowing he was inside but refusing to open.”

He returned to Sevagram empty-handed, with the kind of heaviness that no medicine can treat.

The midwives of academia

Over time I realised the typists were not just typing. They were absorbing panic.

People like Prashant Raut, Yogesh Khond, Prashant Thakre, and others saw residents at their worst—sleep-deprived, anxious, irritable, sometimes close to tears. They didn’t just format tables and correct margins. They offered tea. They offered reassurance. They said, “Ho jayega,” in the same tone a nurse uses in the labour room.

Prashant Raut, who typed nearly a hundred theses, described the process perfectly:
“The drafts changed so many times that the final version often looked like the first. It was like climbing a mountain and coming back to the same rock.”

He wasn’t joking.

Typing a thesis is a kind of labour. The resident is the mother in distress. The thesis is the baby that refuses to come out. And the typist becomes the obstetrician—using whatever tools are available: formatting tricks, last-minute rearrangements, emergency reprints, and sometimes a full “Caesarean section” in the form of massive edits.

By the time the thesis is finally bound and submitted, everyone is exhausted. The resident looks relieved. The typist looks older. And the guide—usually me—receives the final volume like a calm, dignified document.

Only a few people know what it cost to bring it into the world.

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