In four decades at MGIMS, I worked under eleven leaders. Some I admired. Some I merely respected. A few I disagreed with loudly and publicly. All of them, in ways they probably did not intend, shaped the physician and administrator I became. This is not their official record — that exists in the files of the Kasturba Health Society. This is what I remember of them as people: their habits, their contradictions, their moments of grace and occasional failure.

When I arrived in Sevagram in 1982, MGIMS did not yet have a Dean. It had a Principal. The difference was not merely titular.

***

The Man Who Made Kheer — Dr. M.L. Sharma

Dr. M.L. Sharma was part of the original contingent from Nagpur that arrived when MGIMS was barely a year old. He joined in 1970, became Vice Principal in the same year, and Principal in 1974 when Dr. I.D. Singh departed. For the next decade, he was the trusted right hand of Dr. Sushila Nayar — attending her card sessions in the evenings, reciting the Sunderkand at her request, and walking with her in the evenings to keep her spirits steady.

He was not merely her administrator. He was her companion in the long project of building an institution from nothing. And he was her confidant — a man who sat close to power for twenty years and never once reached for it. In an institution where proximity to the founder was a currency many coveted, Sharma spent it on none of his own purposes. That, in my experience, is rarer than it sounds.

For twenty years, Sharma was my neighbour in Vivekanand Colony. A deeply religious Marwadi Brahmin, he performed puja every morning and made prasad with his own hands every fortnight — never failing to bring kheer for my family.

One Sunday, my mother was visiting from Wardha. We were talking in the backyard, in Marwadi, when Sharma overheard us from his kitchen window. He rushed out, his large eyes magnified behind thick spectacles. “Kalantri!” he exclaimed. “I thought you were Maharashtrian. But you are a Marwadi! And you speak it so well!” I laughed. “Sir, Marwadi is in my blood. How could I not?” He remained wide-eyed — shocked that he had mistaken a Marwadi for a Maharashtrian for so long.

He lived simply and without apology. Rented quarters all his life, no car, no scooter, no airplane journey. “I’ve never built a bungalow or boarded a plane,” he would say, with a quiet pride that was entirely genuine. “My students are my wealth.” In the lecture hall, he was a king — his pharmacology classes punctuated by perfectly timed jokes that students remembered decades later. His office was always open, grievances met with humour and empathy, mischief handled with the lightest possible hand.

He walked always a step behind Dr. Sushila Nayar, arms folded behind his back, matching her deliberate pace. It was not subservience. It was the most eloquent form of respect I have seen in an institution full of people performing respect.

***

The Lone Sikh — Dr. K.S. Sachdeva

In 1983, Dr. Kharak Singh Sachdeva arrived in Sevagram not at the beginning of a career but well past its peak — fifty-eight years old, recently retired as Director of Medical Education and Research for Punjab, and expecting, one imagines, a quiet advisory role as Professor of Physiology. Sevagram had other plans.

Within months of his arrival, the management committee created the post of Dean — a position MGIMS had functioned without for fifteen years. On February 14, 1984, after appearing before a selection board that included Dr. Sushila Nayar and the Director General of Health Services, Sachdeva became the first Dean of MGIMS. He was the only candidate. Whether this was destiny or institutional convenience, I cannot say. Probably both.

He was a striking figure — tall, turbaned, salt-and-pepper beard, eyes large and piercing behind thick glasses. Anyone who entered his office would first meet that unwavering gaze, scanning them from head to toe. Then, in a quiet but firm voice: “Why have you come?” That question alone was enough to unsettle most visitors.

Where Sharma’s office had been warm and conversational, Sachdeva’s was formal and deliberate. He spoke little, kept his distance, and never indulged in gossip. He walked slowly, always alone, acknowledging those he passed with a graceful nod. Discipline was his religion — khadi was worn on campus, alcohol and non-vegetarian food remained absent, and the Friday all-religion prayer was attended without fail. He sat cross-legged on the floor and listened as Guru Nanak’s verses were recited. A request from Dr. Sushila Nayar, in his words, was never a request. It was an order.

It was Sachdeva who made me a Reader in 1986. He signed the papers without ceremony. That was his way.

***

The Quiet Reformer — Dr. J.S. Mathur

After a brief and troubled tenure by Dr. Prabhakar — marked by favouritism and a mark-sheet scandal that shook institutional confidence — stability returned in 1991 with Dr. J.S. Mathur, a gentle soul from Meerut.

Mathur’s most significant administrative contribution was deceptively simple: he introduced double-blind coding to the Pre-Medical Test, removing the scope for manipulation that had existed in the examination system. It sounds technical. In practice, it was a declaration that the institution would be honest about how it selected its students.

He was also, quietly, a leveller. Where previous Deans had taken senior professors to supervise examinations in Nagpur and Delhi — a privilege of rank — Mathur took the juniors. Reddy, Ramji Singh, Deepak Kumar, Tyagi, Mehendale, and me. He treated us with the same courtesy he showed his peers. For those of us accustomed to being managed rather than consulted, it was a small revolution.

It was Mathur who appointed me Incharge of Medical Education at MGIMS in 1992 — a decision that not everyone welcomed. Within a month of my appointment, a senior colleague rose in a faculty meeting and objected sharply, arguing that seniors were being bypassed. I rose in response, gave him what I believed was a fitting reply, and then — in what I can only describe as a moment of dramatic foolishness — resigned the post on the spot. The room fell silent. I stuck to my resignation. I did not take the post back.

Mathur, to his credit, said nothing publicly. He understood, I think, that some battles have to be fought and lost before they can be won differently.

He was my neighbour as well, and taught my children to fold their hands in Namaste when greeting elders. A diabetic who injected insulin three times daily, he had a helpless love of sweets that he never quite conquered — he simply dialled up his insulin before a good dinner and considered the matter settled.

***

The Scientist — Dr. B.C. Harinath

Dr. Bhaskar Chenappa Harinath was our first non-medical Dean — a PhD biochemist from a village near Tirupati who had built, over three decades, one of the finest research departments in rural medical education in India. He joined MGIMS in 1970 and spent the next forty years guiding nineteen students through their PhDs, with a focus on filariasis and tuberculosis diagnostics that earned international recognition.

He had spent time at Cincinnati and Philadelphia, and was not reluctant to mention this. “When I was in Cincinnati…” or “As I told John Morris in Philadelphia…” were phrases that punctuated his conversation with a regularity that his colleagues found, depending on their patience, either charming or wearing. He built his department with Telugu-speaking faculty recruited from Sri Venkateswara University, and the cultural distance between his laboratory world and the Punjabi-speaking senior faculty was never entirely bridged. He was, in the end, more comfortable with a research paper than a committee meeting — which is not the worst thing to say of a man in academic medicine.

***

The Physician’s Physician — Dr. O.P. Gupta

Dr. O.P. Gupta came from Jhansi in 1971, rose through the Department of Medicine, served as Medical Superintendent, and eventually Dean. We worked alongside each other for years without a single disagreement — a record I cannot claim with anyone else in this list.

He was soft-spoken and concise. He never projected authority; he simply exercised it, quietly and without theatre. His most lasting reform was replacing long essay examinations in the Pre-Medical Test with Multiple Choice Questions — a change that introduced objectivity into a system that had previously left too much room for the examiner’s preferences. He was not a man who spoke of his contributions. He simply made them and moved on.

His self-effacing quality was genuine, not performed. In an institution full of people carefully managing their reputations, Gupta was the rare administrator who seemed genuinely indifferent to his own. I respected him more than I told him.

***

The Doon School Microbiologist —Dr. P. Narang

Dr. P. Narang — who would later write me the letter appointing me Medical Superintendent — was a Microbiology professor of considerable polish and poise. Her father had taught in Dehradun; she had been educated at the Doon School, whose alumni included politicians, industrialists, and senior bureaucrats. Her English was impeccable. Her confidence, even when it did not quite show on her face, was never in doubt.

She had navigated her own early career as a young woman with children in an institution that did not always make that easy. She remembered it. As Dean, she took a quiet but firm position: that a young woman with small children should not be judged by her publication count in her first years of appointment. Let her settle. Let her find her footing. The papers will come. It was not policy. It was decency — and in an institution accustomed to measuring everything, it was not nothing.

She was not a risk-taker administratively, and she knew it. She worked within tradition, avoided radical departures, and maintained a warmth with students and faculty that made her genuinely beloved. In a list of leaders who were often distant or difficult, she was accessible. That is not a small thing in an institution as complex as ours.

***

The Marathi Insistence — Dr. K.R. Patond

Dr. K.R. Patond and I go back further than his deanship. At GMC Nagpur, he was an intern in Medicine while I was a resident — a year my junior, learning the ward as I was leaving it. We enjoyed a good relationship then, and that ease survived his elevation.

He was quiet, introverted, and spoke almost exclusively in Marathi — not out of regional pride but out of a conviction that doctors working in rural Maharashtra must communicate in the language of their patients. The result was that faculty from Punjab, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu learned, gradually and sometimes reluctantly, to conduct their conversations with him in Marathi. He was also famously unable to maintain eye contact in conversation — a shyness so pronounced it became, among those who knew him, a kind of affectionate legend.

He had come from a small farming village near Akola, the son of a father who had studied only to the fourth standard. The distance between that village and the Dean’s office at MGIMS is not measured in kilometres.

It was a MUHS regulation — that one person could not hold two administrative posts simultaneously — that eventually moved the deanship from Patond to me. He chose his surgical department over the superintendency. The superintendency, as I have described elsewhere in this memoir, landed on my table.

***

The Boy from the Remand Home — Dr. Nitin Gangane

The last Dean I worked under was the first I had taught. Nitin Gangane was my student before he was my colleague, and my colleague for many years before he was my Dean. He was born at Kasturba Hospital in 1961 — in the very institution he would one day lead — delivered by a woman who later became Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society. Even his birth, it seems, was plotted by Sevagram.

His father was a freedom fighter from the Hyderabad Liberation Movement who had abandoned his education at sixteen to go underground, eventually settling in Sevagram as a follower of Vinoba Bhave and Baba Amte. The son inherited the stubbornness.

On June 26, 1976 — the first anniversary of the Emergency — a seventeen-year-old Nitin attended a resistance meeting in Wardha. The police raided it. He was arrested and sent to a remand home under the Juvenile Act, where he remained until October 1977, completing his eleventh and twelfth standards while in detention, attending college during the day and returning each night. The Emergency was lifted in March 1977. Nitin stayed in the remand home for six months after it ended, because the wheels of the Juvenile Act grind independently of political events.

That experience produced a man who was constitutionally incapable of accepting authority he considered illegitimate. He was a leftist, an anti-establishment activist, and — on the occasions we disagreed, which were not infrequent — a formidable opponent. During the worst months of Covid-19, our arguments were sharp and sometimes public. But he gave me a free hand to run the hospital, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt when I could.

He became Dean in 2018 after pursuing the position with the same tenacious legal persistence he had applied to everything since the remand home. He was the first MGIMS alumnus to hold the post — leading the institution where his life had literally begun.

We both resigned our administrative posts within a fortnight of each other in January 2022. Neither of us, I think, was entirely sorry.

***

Looking back across four decades, what strikes me is less the variety of administrative styles than the consistency of the underlying challenge: running a complex institution in a resource-scarce setting, keeping it honest, and maintaining its connection to the patients it was built to serve. Some of my Deans did this with warmth, some with discipline, some with quiet stubbornness, and at least one with a combativeness that never entirely left him.

They were my neighbours, my mentors, my occasional adversaries, and — in ways none of us planned — the people who made me whoever it is I became at MGIMS.

The names on the Dean’s door change. The spirit of Sevagram, built from rural service and academic rigour and the particular idiosyncrasies of the people drawn to this place, does not.