Kaal

In February 2026, Bhavana and I travelled to Rajasthan — not as tourists, but as people looking for something older than memory. We were tracing our roots.

Among the things I discovered was the etymology of our surname. The name Kalantri is believed to derive from kalan — rooted in the Sanskrit and Hindi kaal (काल), that most profound of words, which carries within it the entire sweep of human existence. In Hindi, kaal unfolds across all three dimensions of time: bhootkal (भूतकाल) — the past, what has already been; vartamankal (वर्तमानकाल) — the present, this very moment; and bhavisykal (भविष्यकाल) — the future, what is yet to come. The suffix tri denotes a profession. Somewhere in the distant past, our ancestors were the people who kept time for others — who told the farmer when to sow, when to harvest, when the season had turned.

It is a meaning I find quietly fitting for a family that has spent generations in medicine. A physician, too, lives at the intersection of all three dimensions of kaal — reading the past of a patient's history, attending to the present of their suffering, and trying to shape the future of their survival.

Our great-great-grandfathers came from Phalodi, in the Marwad region of Rajasthan. Sometime in the last 150 years — the exact decade unknown, the reason unrecorded — they left the desert and came to Maharashtra. What brought them here, how they survived the journey, what they carried and what they left behind: none of this was ever spoken of at home. My father never told us where we came from. And I, absorbed in the forward motion of my own life, never thought to ask.

That silence is one of the reasons I am writing this memoir.

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The Morning of Two Births

I have always envied those who can summon their earliest days with cinematic precision — the exact shade of a wall, the scent of a room long gone. My own beginnings resist such clarity. They survive only as a soft haze, stitched together from family hearsay and the occasional unreliable memory that surfaced years later.

I made my entry at 6:26 in the morning on Thursday, August 15, 1957. It was India's tenth Independence Day. While a thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer was busy unsettling chess masters halfway across the world and the silver screens glowed with Mother India, I arrived quietly in Wardha. I never mistook this coincidence for grand symbolism. It felt simply like a private signal from fate — gently tethering my life to the country's celebration before either of us knew what we were celebrating.

I was the last of six children born to Parvati and Gokuldas. My mother, married at fourteen after only four years of schooling, had filled our home with children by the time she was thirty-two. My father's formal education had ended at the seventh standard. Orphaned at three, he had started with nothing, drifting from his village to Wardha in 1932 in search of a foothold. Through sheer, stubborn duty — the kind that does not announce itself — he eventually rose to lead the local Bajaj group.

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The Old Way of Coming Into the World

When I recently asked my eldest sister Asha — fifteen years my senior and possessed of the inconvenient gift of remembering everything — how exactly I was born, she answered as if she had been waiting decades for the question.

She reminded me of the old way.

The eldest siblings had been born in our grandmother's house in Barshi, amid ancestral walls and women who knew their business. The middle brigade and I, however, were born at home in Wardha. There were no hospital beds, no sterile green curtains, no nurses barking orders in a corridor. I was delivered by the local dai — a woman Asha spoke of with genuine respect. She was a professional without a degree, her authority derived from experience rather than textbooks.

It was a year that cared little for the precision of medicine. A pregnancy was not a project; it was simply a fact of life. There were no blood tests to fret over, no antenatal appointments to schedule, and certainly no ultrasounds to ruin the surprise. Halfway across the world, Virginia Apgar had recently designed her famous scoring system for newborns, but word of this medical revolution had not yet reached our doorstep. No one clipped a monitor to my toe or calculated my score with clinical solemnity.

I was just another cry in a house already full of them, held together by my mother's quiet, unacknowledged strength.

An hour after I arrived, India woke up. It was a morning of unfurled flags, long speeches, and the sticky sweetness of laddoos. My life began in that sliver of time between a personal cry and a national anthem — unscored, unmonitored, and blissfully unaware that a date, like a birthplace, is often just a matter of convenience.

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The Golden Age of Administrative Fiction

The trouble began in June 1973.

I was desperate to enter Government Medical College, Nagpur, but I was eight months too young. The rule was rigid: you had to be seventeen. To a teenager, losing a whole year to a calendar felt less like a regulation and more like a personal injustice administered by the universe.

Fortunately, this was the pre-digital age. Long before Aadhaar cards and iron-clad databases, reality was negotiable. It was the golden age of administrative fiction, where inconvenient facts were quietly managed with a straight face and a modest fee. Half my generation seemed to have arrived on the first of July — a date neatly packaged for the school inspector. Even today, I notice on Facebook that twenty of my friends share a July 1st birthday. It is a grand collective victory of the pen over the womb.

In my case, a clerk at the Nagar Parishad performed a similar miracle. Fuelled, perhaps, by a few rupees, he backdated my birth to August 15, 1956, with a single stroke. Suddenly, I was eligible for medical school. I had also achieved a biological impossibility: on paper, I was now born three months before I had even been conceived.

That ink-stained lie made me the youngest student in my medical class. Decades later, it forced me into an early official retirement. In August 2021, I received a letter informing me that my regular service was over — because the records showed I was sixty-five, even though I was actually only sixty-four. I had entered medicine a year early, and now the rules insisted I leave a year early.

But I have not gone anywhere. The Institute graciously asked me to stay on as Emeritus Professor. I am still here in Sevagram, still working in the Department of Medicine. My official status in the register may have changed. My work with patients and students has not.

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What's in a Name?

My birth chart was prepared by a well-known astrologer, Mr. Chimniram Shastri. After much mathematical squinting, he announced I was to be Devendra Kumar — a name destined for health, prosperity, and the world's respect. It was an impressive forecast. It lasted exactly until it met my father.

My father was a man unmoved by the stars. He listened to the astrologer politely, then set the horoscope aside the way one might set aside an old newspaper. What mattered to him was not the alignment of planets but the symmetry of sound. My elder brothers were Omprakash and Jaiprakash. It stood to reason that my name should join the family rhythm. He settled on Shriprakash. It pleased his ear, and in our house, that was reason enough.

Like many long Indian names, Shriprakash soon shrank to SP. Everyone used it — my wife, my colleagues, my siblings, eventually my patients. The name suits me: brief, efficient, and intimate. Only my mother softened it to YesPi — a tender twist she alone used, and which I have never heard from anyone else.

Today, Shriprakash exists only on paper — on mark sheets, licences, and tax returns. In the real world, I have always been SP. I sign my notes this way. Whether my father named me after Sri Prakasa, the famous parliamentarian, I never thought to ask him. Perhaps he did. It hardly matters. Two small letters became my identity, and an identity, once worn long enough, becomes the person.

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The Rituals of Childhood

At one, I had so little hair it became a matter of family concern. The few strands I possessed lay flat and silky, earning me the nickname Khrushchev from Professor Ramkrishna Vora, a neighbour with a keen eye for world affairs who saw a resemblance to the Soviet Premier's famous dome. My eyebrows were faint then and have not thickened much since. In short, I was a remarkably under-furnished child.

By four, politics gave way to mythology. My sisters still laugh remembering how I would demand a dhoti and a tilak to lead solemn pujas around the house. I informed my mother, Parvati, that she was merely a substitute — my real mother was the Goddess Parvati in the Himalayas. I devoured the Mahabharata and Ramayana with a passion that would eventually, gradually, and somewhat reluctantly, give way to anatomy textbooks.

Birthdays were quiet affairs in those days — no balloons, no candles, no midnight calls from friends. Yet they carried a weight that modern celebrations, for all their noise, rarely do. My mother followed her own ritual. She would wake me before dawn to rub a paste of turmeric and milk into my skin — a golden guard against ill fortune. She would dress me in a new shirt and shorts, fresh from Hedau Tailor, who ran a shop near Durga Talkies. He had an annual contract with our household. My father would hand him yards of cloth; Hedau would glance at us, estimate our size without a measuring tape, and return with shorts that were invariably oversized — optimistically stitched to fit next year's growth.

Then she would press a single homemade pedha into my hand — shaped with a small iron weight, the kind that sat permanently on the kitchen shelf, sweet and dense and smelling of cardamom. She never remembered her own birthday. No one ever celebrated it. Perhaps that is why she marked mine with such care, investing the day with a tenderness that required no audience and no applause.

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The Houses We Lived In

My childhood unfolded across three houses, each marking a different chapter of growing up.

The first was a rented home in the Bajaj Electrical premises near Gandhi Chowk. Life there was spartan: no telephone, no scooter, no refrigerator. A flush toilet was a luxury we had only heard about. We lived, as most of Wardha lived, on the honest side of simplicity. That house was eventually flattened by a bulldozer, carrying away the bricks that held my earliest memories. Nothing remains of it now but what I can recall — and memory, as I have learned, is a selective and unreliable archivist.

From Gandhi Chowk, we moved to the Bachhraj Cotton Factory quarters, sandwiched between the bus stand and the railway station near Bajaj Square. The factory provided a constant soundtrack — the steady, mechanical clatter of ginning machines running through the day. The air was thick with the smell of raw cotton, and fine white fibres settled on everything: chairs, clothes, hair, the surface of a glass of water left out too long. Cotton seeds scattered across the floor made every step a minor adventure.

It was a noisy, textured, entirely alive sort of childhood.

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Jaishree Bhavan

In 1965, my father did something that caused a small stir in Wardha's drawing rooms: he bought a girls' school.

The Kesrimal Kanya Shala, built in 1936, had vacated its premises to relocate to a new campus on Nagpur Road near Shivaji Statue Square — where it still stands today. My father purchased the old building for forty-four thousand rupees. In those days, that sum invited raised eyebrows and long pauses.

He renamed it Jaishree Bhavan — an affectionate compound of Jaiprakash and Shriprakash, the two brothers whose names graced the gate. There is a pleasing irony in this: neither of the brothers for whom the house was named ended up owning it. In the family partition, decades later, the house went to our eldest brother, Ashok.

The geography of Jaishree Bhavan defined my adolescence. A simple hedge separated us from Mr. Lulay, the town's leading advocate, who owned a bustling chawl home to twenty-odd people. The open ground near his home served as the venue for the local RSS evening drills. I can still see myself there in ninth grade — standing in regulation khaki shorts and belt, reciting Namaste Sada Vatsale as the evening settled in around us.

To our right lived Dr. M.K. Pawar, whose son Sunil was my classmate. The intersection outside our gate was known as Wanjari Square, named after a humble cycle repair shop owner nearby. It is a small testament to the man's local standing that while the British names on the map have long since faded, his has endured. The square is still called Wanjari Square today.

Turning a school into a home is no simple matter. My father hired a Nagpur-based Padma Shri-winning architect, Mr. Shivdanmal, whose initial advice was blunt: demolish the thirty-three-year-old building entirely and start again. My father found the idea too radical and the cost too large. A compromise was struck. Shivdanmalji agreed to renovate the existing shell — coaxing a home out of a school with a patience that the building rewarded. The real foreman, however, was often my father himself, who was at the site daily, correcting measurements and questioning workers until the school shed its old skin. By the early 1970s, the house, with its generous porch, had become a subject of quiet admiration in the town.

We moved in during 1968. A year later, my brother Ashok brought home his seventeen-year-old bride, Kanta. She had passed her matriculation before the wedding, but my father insisted she continue her education. For the next three years, she attended Yeshwant Arts College, a mile away. On the days my father sent her to class in his Ambassador car, it was an event — a daughter-in-law being chauffeured to college was unusual enough in our town to rarely pass without comment.

My brother Ashok died on Christmas Eve, 2025. The house has outlived him, as it has outlived my parents.

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The Permanent Address of Memory

I often think of the Zen tale of the monk who called a king's palace an inn. When the king took offence, the monk asked who had lived there before him. My father, the king replied, and his father before him. And where are they now? They are dead. The monk smiled. A place where people arrive, stay a while, and leave — what is it but an inn?

We call them permanent addresses. But we are all just guests.

In the end, the only address I truly carry is what I remember — and what remembers me.

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My education began not with a love for books, but with a visceral hatred for school. In the late 1950s, I was enrolled in the Jamnalal Bajaj Bal Mandir—a cluster of huts behind Maganwadi that looked more like a quiet backyard than a temple of learning.

Every morning, a tonga arrived with a clip-clop that sounded to me like a police escort. Other children climbed in with the resignation of the doomed; I treated it like a moving jail. I cried, I protested, and on two memorable occasions, I bit the poor tonga-wallah. Whatever the saintly Mirabai Mundra and Yamunatai Jajoo tried to teach me has long since evaporated. What remains is the memory of the art of refusal.

By age five, I was sent to the Nagar Parishad school. We went barefoot, hauling heavy cotton bags like laborers transporting grain. Inside, there were no benches. We sat on a thin mat—a dari—in neat, cramped rows where our entire world began and ended at the edge of that woven strip. Our teacher, Mr. Champalal Chaubey, ruled from a desk that served as his throne. When the room grew too cheerful, he would crack his palm against the wood, a sound that brought an immediate, clinical silence. On hot afternoons, he would stretch his legs across that same desk for a nap, leaving us to scratch at our slates while the King slept.

I was twelve before I finally mastered the bicycle—a sleek, shining creature I had previously only admired from a distance. My salvation was Sunil Pawar, a neighbor and classmate at Craddock High School. Sunil had mastered the "small push." He would hold the seat firmly as I wobbled like a newborn calf, running beside me until, without warning, he let go.

For a few seconds, I wouldn't realize I was moving on my own. The road would slide under me, the wind would rise, and I would feel a freedom that was both thrilling and terrifying. My landings were less poetic. I had a talent for collapsing in a heap with the machine, a scene Sunil watched with the tolerant amusement of an elder brother. Eventually, the bicycle became a habit. By medical college, I rode with the reckless confidence of the young and unhurt, taking corners with no hands on the bars, believing I was the king of Wardha’s quiet streets.

Sunil’s last decision was a "small push" of a different kind. Like his father and wife before him, he donated his body to the Anatomy department at Sevagram. In the same halls where I once learned the map of the human body, Sunil offered himself as the final lesson. He held the seat steady for the next generation of doctors, and then, at the right moment, he let go.

***

The Final Lesson of Sunil Pawar

Years have a way of reversing our roles. I became a physician; Sunil returned to the earth, managing the family farm. Life was not gentle with him. He lost his son to a spinal tumour and his wife to a brain tumour — blows that leave a man quiet, even when he continues to smile.

In 2021, our childhood arrangement turned itself around. The boy who once held my bicycle seat now lay in a hospital bed, and I became his doctor. He was battling laryngeal cancer. A tracheostomy had taken his voice, but we spoke through signs and the steady understanding of a lifetime.

He did receive some radiation and a few cycles of chemotherapy, but decided against interventions that made his life difficult. He bought a new car, drove a thousand kilometres across Maharashtra, and was always smiling — even though he knew his days were numbered. I would often go to his home in Wardha and spend time with him. Having lost his voice, he communicated in sign language. I saw him the day before he passed away and could not meet his eyes. The next morning, the news arrived that he had died in the early hours.

Sunil had already directed that his body be donated to the anatomy department of our medical college, where students could learn human anatomy. He was not the first from his family to make this choice — his wife, who had died of a brain tumour fifteen years earlier, and his father, who had died of old age, had wished the same. When we took Sunil's body to the anatomy department, and it was filled with formalin and returned to its place among the preserved, a tinge of sadness enveloped me.

A part of the childhood memory was deleted.

The Hindi Mandir Pustakalaya

My early world was bounded by the smell of old paper and the quiet authority of the Hindi Mandir Pustakalaya. This library sat on the Bajaj Electricals campus, near Durga Talkies. Inside, the librarian Mr. Madanlal Purohit reigned over rows of Hindi classics. At an age when other children were perhaps chasing hoops, I was chasing the prose of Mahadevi Verma, Bachchan, Prasad, and Nirala.

English had not yet invaded my small private world. I became an addict of the Hindi printed word, copying the flourishes of Acharya Chatursen in my school notebooks. The Rashtra Bhasha Prachar Samiti, founded by Jamnalal Bajaj, turned my hobby into a series of hurdles. I climbed the ladder of their examinations: Prathmik, Prarambhik, Pravesh, and Parichay. I remember taking the Kovid exam alongside my bhabhi — a shared family effort under the lamp. I might have reached the heights of Visharad or Sahitya Ratna, but science began to compete for my attention. Science eventually won the battle for my career, but Hindi kept the keys to my heart.

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The Monthly Magic — Parag and Chandamama

Every month, the arrival of Parag, Champak, and Nandan felt like a national holiday. These were not just magazines; they were windows out of our small town. Nandan brought the scent of Indian mythology, while Champak gave us animal fables that taught morals without the boredom of a sermon.

But the king of the shelf was Chandamama. Its pages were filled with sages, deities, and demons, all rendered in simple, translucent language. I spent hours lost in the Vikram and Vetal stories, fascinated by the king who never gave up and the ghost who never stopped asking riddles. It was a world where imagination was the only currency that mattered.

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Swaraj Bhandar and the Open Tab

In middle school, Radhakrishnji Bajaj opened the doors of the Swaraj Bhandar library for me. It stood near the Sabzi Mandi — a place now so crowded you can barely park a scooter, but back then a quiet outpost of knowledge. When Radhakrishnji saw my hunger for books, he gave me an extraordinary open tab. I was told to take any book I liked, and he would foot the bill. I walked away with hundreds of volumes in Hindi and Marathi, reading them cover to cover.

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The Smuggled Pages in Medical College

By the time I reached medical college, my literary palate had expanded, but the addiction remained. Like all teenagers and medical students of that era, we developed a desperate interest in Debonair. At the time, it was edited by Vinod Mehta, who would later produce such sophisticated work as The Lucknow Boy. Back then, however, we were not reading it for the political commentary.

Procuring a copy was a feat of high-stakes espionage. None of us had the courage to simply walk up to a magazine vendor and ask for it. Only the bravest among us would volunteer. He would approach the stall, wait until no one was around, and whisper "Debonair" into the vendor's ear, then stand nonchalantly several feet away, keeping a sharp eye out for anyone who knew him.

Once the transaction was done, the magazine was quickly tucked inside a shirt, hidden against the skin until he reached the safety of the hostel. Back in the room, the door would be bolted. A single copy was often shared among three or four friends, hidden under a mattress when not in use. In our curiosity and our clumsiness, we were no different from teenagers anywhere else in the world.

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Chacha Chaudhary and the Medical Resident

The love for the printed word followed me even into the gruelling years of residency. Buried under the weight of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, I found a secret sanctuary in comic strips.

Chacha Chaudhary was a favourite. He was a sprightly old man in a red turban whose brain was sharper than a needle and faster than a computer. When things got too heavy, his giant friend Sabu from Jupiter would provide the muscle. Even as a busy junior resident, I managed to find time for Pinki, the mischievous five-year-old created by Pran. I still have a vivid memory of being caught red-handed, tucked into a corner at my father-in-law's house, reading a Pinki comic instead of a medical journal.

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The Tongue-Tied Boy

Despite this vast internal world of stories and grand vocabulary, I remained a remarkably quiet child. By the time I entered medical college, I was too shy to string a single sentence together for my teachers or strangers. I was a tongue-tied boy — a creature of the library who had learned to think in the style of the classics but had not yet learned to speak to the world.

As my training progressed, the glossy pages of Sarika, Kadambini, Dharmyug, and Dinman gradually gave way to the Illustrated Weekly of India and the blunt, scotch-soaked wit of Khushwant Singh. I still remember the specific thrill of buying the inaugural copy of Sunday in May 1976. Edited by a young, sharp M.J. Akbar, it cost just one rupee and felt like the dawn of a new, faster-paced era of journalism. We would pore over his editorials, convinced we were reading the future.

Four decades later, the man behind those editorials would face a different kind of headlines. In 2018, Akbar was accused by Priya Ramani and several other women of predatory conduct. The reputation he had built over years of high-profile editing was dismantled by the testimonies of journalists who accused him of abuse. It was a sobering postscript to the magazine we once admired. Back in the seventies, however, we were oblivious — we just knew that for one rupee, Sunday offered a window into a world far beyond our hospital wards.

These books did more than pass the time. They built the foundation of how I see the world. They taught me that every patient has a story as complex as a Russian novel. I eventually found my voice, but the echoes of those Hindi classics and the silent corridors of the Swaraj Bhandar stay with me — a reminder of a simpler Wardha where the only technology we needed was a well-thumbed book and a bit of imagination.

When I was eight years old, my family made a big decision. To them, it was about giving me a better education. to me, it felt like moving to a foreign country. They decided to pull me out of my comfortable Hindi school and plant me in the tougher, stricter soil of a Marathi school. My father found Craddock High School nearby. It had a fierce reputation. It promised not just to teach you to read, but to build your character—usually by putting you through the fire.

Looking back now, from the twenty-first century, I wonder if I was scared. Did I worry about learning a new language? Did I fear making new friends? Honestly, I think I had the blessed ignorance of an eight-year-old. Worries about culture and language belong to adults. As a child, my only real worry was the weight of my school bag and what my mother had packed in my tiffin.

***

Ghosts in the Walls

To understand my school, you have to understand the ground it stood on. Wardha is a city that wears its history loosely. Back in the 1850s, it was just a small part of Nagpur. But by the 1860s, the British administrators Sir Bachelor and Sir Reginald Craddock decided to turn it into a proper district headquarters. They designed the city with straight lines and order.

It is a funny twist of history that while we eventually renamed the school, the British ghosts never really left. The school was named after Sir Craddock, and my childhood home was on Bachelor Road. In 1969, to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s hundredth birthday, a wave of pride swept the country. Long before Bombay became Mumbai, our school shed its British skin and became Mahatma Gandhi Vidyalaya. But names are tricky things. For those of us who walked its halls in the late sixties, it remained, stubbornly and affectionately, Craddock.

***

Ink-Stained Fingers

Walking through those gates today feels like stepping into a time machine. The air in Wardha still carries the heavy, rhythmic rumble of passing trains—the background music of our childhood. If the wind blows just right, you can smell the raw, earthy scent of the nearby cotton ginning press. That smell is the scent of memory.

I can still picture my elder sister, Pushpa, walking down these corridors. She walked among future giants. The merit list of 1967 wasn’t just a list of names; it was a prediction. Dr. Abhay Bang, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo, Dr. Prasad Trivedi—men who would go on to define medicine in our region—once roamed these halls, probably worrying about homework just like we did. When I walk through the empty school now, the silence feels heavy with their footsteps.

Typing this on a fast computer feels almost wrong, a betrayal of those days. We lived in a world you could touch. In the late sixties, technology wasn’t a screen; it was wood, glass, and metal. We didn’t have ballpoint pens—teachers looked at them with suspicion. We certainly didn’t have felt pens. And fountain pens? Strictly forbidden. They were considered too fancy, or perhaps too messy, for our clumsy hands.

We wrote like clerks from a hundred years ago. We had wooden desks, glass inkwells, and nibs that you had to dip into the ink every few seconds. My friends Santos Kekre, Ravindra Chawade, and I sat squeezed together at desks with sloping tops. They were terrible for your back, but great for sliding things across. Writing wasn’t smooth; it was a rhythm. Dip, write, dip, write. It taught us patience. Those inkwells were little black lakes waiting to spill, always threatening to ruin a clean white shirt.

***

The Math Master

If the school buildings were old-fashioned, the teaching was ancient. And the king of this old world was Mr. Dhage, our Mathematics teacher.

Mr. Dhage wasn’t just a teacher; he was a force of nature. He dressed like a man who didn't care about mirrors. He wore an oil-stained cap, a collar that refused to sit flat, and sleeves rolled up as if he were ready for a fistfight rather than algebra. His trousers were a faded grey, held up by an old leather belt. He wore worn-out sandals, but he marched in them like a general.

He didn't wear glasses, but his eyes were terrifying. They swept across the room like searchlights hunting for a prisoner. To Mr. Dhage, math wasn't a subject; it was a religion. He believed in the old rule: "spare the rod and spoil the child." He followed this rule with great enthusiasm. My classmate Vilas Thakur calls it "tough love." I remember it simply as terror.

Mr. Dhage wanted us to memorize everything—the steps, the logic, the ritual. If he saw a mistake in your notebook, his face would twist in genuine pain, as if your bad math physically hurt him. For big mistakes, he would snatch the notebook, tear out the page, crumple it up, and throw it away. "What nonsense is this?" he would shout, his face turning red. "You call this math?"

He had a talent for insults. Abrar Alvi, a student who was a bit slow to answer, was a favorite target. Dhage would sigh, look at the class, and say, "Our train has reached Itarsi junction. We all know the train stops there for thirty minutes to change engines. Abrar is the Itarsi of this class. We must wait." It was cruel, but if you weren't Abrar, it was hard not to laugh.

His punishments were strange. If a boy couldn't solve a problem, Dhage would call on a girl. If she got it right—which they often did—he would order her to lightly slap the boy or twist his ear. The shame was unbearable. The boy would whisper desperately, "Hit me lightly, please!" while the class tried not to giggle. It was a bizarre way to teach, using our awkwardness against us.

***

The Cloud and the Storm

Mr. Dhage’s surname means "Cloud" in Marathi. It was ironic because he loved to make students stand on their benches. I had a very tall friend who, when standing on the bench, would almost touch the ceiling. The class would whisper, "He’s gone into the clouds."

Dhage’s power didn't end when the bell rang. Mr. Mankar, our gentle Hindi teacher, had the bad luck of having the class right after Math. Dhage would often keep teaching past his time, lost in a difficult problem or a scolding. We would watch with glee as the two teachers argued at the door—the fierce mathematician refusing to make way for the poet. It was the only time we ever saw Dhage on the defensive.

***

The Drill Sergeant

If Mr. Dhage ruled our minds, Mr. N.D. Kshirsagar—known to everyone as NDS—owned our bodies. He was the Physical Training instructor, built like a rock, with a voice that could shake the walls.

PT class wasn't playtime; it was military drill. NDS would march us to the ground and line us up by height. We weren't children to him; we were numbers stitched onto our shirts. "Number 42, straighten up!" he would bark. Under his watch, not even a bird dared to fly across the school grounds without permission.

He was obsessed with precision. He demanded that the National Anthem be sung in exactly fifty-two seconds. No more, no less. He told us to sing from the "umbilicus"—a medical word that confused us, but ensured we shouted with all our might. "Let your voice show pride!" he would command.

I will never forget one morning assembly. The sun was beating down on us when NDS stepped up to announce a punishment. The student in trouble was Deepak Kalode, a senior. The punishment was a public caning. NDS raised the thin stick and brought it down on Deepak’s legs. Deepak took the first few hits in silence.

Then, in a moment that stopped time, Deepak reached out. He grabbed the stick from the teacher’s hand, broke it over his knee into two pieces, then four, then eight, and threw the splinters on the ground. He walked away without a word.

The whole school stood frozen in shock. Even the terrifying NDS didn't move. It was a rare, electric moment where the wall of discipline cracked, and we saw the fire of youth burning underneath.

If the classroom was a cage of rules, rulers, and flying inkwells, the world outside the school gates was a wild, open sky.

The geography of my childhood wasn't just defined by the school, but by the Bachhraj Factories. My father was the manager of the cotton ginning press there, which meant I had the golden ticket to an industrial playground. To a modern parent, a factory sounds dangerous. To us, it was a kingdom.

I still remember the cotton season. Trucks would groan under the weight of the "white gold," bringing the harvest in from the fields. The machines would roar to life, separating the seeds from the fibre, a mechanical heartbeat that thumped through the ground. But the real magic happened after the work was done.

The cotton was pressed into massive bales, wrapped in wire, and stacked in towers that seemed to touch the clouds. These stacks were our mountains. My friends—Shekhar Deshkar, Suhas Jajoo, Chandu Fattepuria, and the rest—would climb these soft, white cliffs. We would run and jump across the gaps, sinking into the deep, pillowy cotton. We would emerge looking like snowmen, covered in white lint, standing on top of the world, surveying Wardha from our soft, high throne. We went home dirty, tired, and absolutely happy.

***

The Box Man

In that group of friends, Santos Kekre was the one you couldn't miss. He was a thin boy with a smile that could light up a dark room. While most of us carried our books in simple cotton bags slung over our shoulders, Santos was different. He arrived every day carrying a distinctive aluminium box.

It was shiny, sturdy, and unlike anything else in the school. Naturally, because schoolboys are cruel geniuses, we named him "Petiwala"—The Box Man.

But Santos was tougher than he looked. In 1958, a terrifying fever called encephalitis swept through our region. Santos caught it. He spent three months in Mayo Hospital, hovering between life and death, enduring painful spinal taps. He was one of only two people in the entire region to survive without brain damage. Maybe that brush with death gave him his courage.

I remember one day in English class. A teacher wrote the word "Seing" on the blackboard. Santos raised his hand. "Madam," he said, "the spelling is wrong. It is S-E-E-I-N-G."

The room went deadly quiet. Correcting a teacher was a crime. She turned on him. "So, you are teaching me now?" she snapped. "How do you spell 'going'? You add 'ing' to 'go'. So 'see' becomes 'seing'. Sit down!"

Most boys would have crumbled. Santos didn't. He marched straight to the Headmaster, Mr. Deshmukh. The Headmaster was horrified by the teacher's mistake and scolded her. It was a small victory for spelling, but a huge victory for Santos. The boy with the aluminium box had a backbone of steel.

***

Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Friend

One of the most beautiful things about growing up in Wardha in the sixties was that money existed, but it didn't matter.

Our class was a strange mix. Chandu Fattepuria came from a wealthy family of cotton traders. Vilas Thakur lived in a massive British bungalow with guards at the gate because his father was the police superintendent. Baban Sonwane’s father was a government minister.

Then there were the rest of us. My father was a manager; others were sons of teachers. But once we crossed the school threshold, or climbed onto those cotton bales, the differences vanished. The rich parents of that era were different. They were humble. They never flaunted their wealth or asked for special treatment. In fact, they told the teachers to be stricter with their sons.

We shared our food, we shared our punishments, and we shared our secrets. There was no VIP section in our childhood. We were just boys.

***

The Invisible Wall

But if money didn't divide us, gender certainly did. Our school was "co-ed" on paper, but in reality, an invisible wall ran down the center of the hallways.

Shubha Thatte, Lina Wele, and Suhas Jajoo might have been family friends who played together at home on Sundays. But inside the school? They were strangers. Boys spoke to boys. Girls spoke to girls. Crossing that line was social suicide.

If a boy accidentally brushed past a girl in the corridor, the other boys would scream, "Contaminated!" The poor soul would be teased for days. It seems funny now—the idea that talking to a girl was a dangerous act—but those were the rules. We found small ways to show off, of course. During the break, we would rent bicycles for ten paise an hour. We would ride frantically fast, doing tricks, secretly hoping the girls were watching from their side of the invisible wall.

***

Music and Mayhem

Amidst the noise of school, there was one voice that could stop time. Vikas Kale was our musical prodigy. He had a voice that sounded too mature, too perfect for a schoolboy.

On school picnics, when the chaos settled down, Vikas would sing. I remember him singing songs from the Geet Ramayana. The rowdy boys would stop shouting. The teachers would stop scolding. For a few minutes, the dusty picnic spot felt like a temple. He didn't just sing; he cast a spell. We all knew he would become a star, and he did, becoming a renowned classical singer years later. Vikas lives in Wardha.

But for the rest of us, the real music was the sound of the recess bell.

The twenty-minute break was pure chaos. We would explode onto the field. Footballers claimed one corner, cricketers claimed another, but mostly we just ran. We didn't have teams; we had mobs. A boy might be fielding for a cricket match while standing in the middle of a football game. The ball would fly, bodies would collide, and the noise was deafening. It was glorious. We played with the desperation of prisoners let out into the yard, trying to squeeze a whole day’s worth of fun into twenty minutes.

***

The Sweetest Memory

I want to end with a memory that smells like chocolate.

In the fifth grade, someone brought a box of chocolates to school. I don’t remember who, and I don’t remember why. But in a moment of pure, innocent generosity, we decided to give them to our teachers.

We tracked down Mrs. Amte, one of our strictest teachers. She was walking towards the staff room. We swarmed around her, a gang of ten-year-olds holding out chocolates like they were gold coins. "For you, Madam!" we chirped.

She stopped. She looked at this group of messy, noisy boys blocking her path. And then, her stern face cracked. She laughed—a warm, genuine laugh that we had never heard before. She took the chocolate.

It was a small thing. But it stays with me. It was the moment we realized that our teachers were not just rule-books with legs. They were people. And just like us, they liked chocolate.

That was the magic of those days. The stinging slaps of the math teacher faded, but the taste of that chocolate, the softness of the cotton bales, and the sound of my friends laughing—those things stayed. We were young, we were equal, and the world was just waiting to be explored.

If the classroom was a cage of rules, rulers, and flying inkwells, the world outside the school gates was a wild, open sky.

The geography of my childhood wasn't just defined by the school, but by the Bachhraj Factories. My father was the manager of the cotton ginning press there, which meant I had the golden ticket to an industrial playground. To a modern parent, a factory sounds dangerous. To us, it was a kingdom.

I still remember the cotton season. Trucks would groan under the weight of the "white gold," bringing the harvest in from the fields. The machines would roar to life, separating the seeds from the fibre, a mechanical heartbeat that thumped through the ground. But the real magic happened after the work was done.

The cotton was pressed into massive bales, wrapped in wire, and stacked in towers that seemed to touch the clouds. These stacks were our mountains. My friends—Shekhar Deshkar, Suhas Jajoo, Chandu Fattepuria, and the rest—would climb these soft, white cliffs. We would run and jump across the gaps, sinking into the deep, pillowy cotton. We would emerge looking like snowmen, covered in white lint, standing on top of the world, surveying Wardha from our soft, high throne. We went home dirty, tired, and absolutely happy.

***

The Box Man

In that group of friends, Santos Kekre was the one you couldn't miss. He was a thin boy with a smile that could light up a dark room. While most of us carried our books in simple cotton bags slung over our shoulders, Santos was different. He arrived every day carrying a distinctive aluminium box.

It was shiny, sturdy, and unlike anything else in the school. Naturally, because schoolboys are cruel geniuses, we named him "Petiwala"—The Box Man.

But Santos was tougher than he looked. In 1958, a terrifying fever called encephalitis swept through our region. Santos caught it. He spent three months in Mayo Hospital, hovering between life and death, enduring painful spinal taps. He was one of only two people in the entire region to survive without brain damage. Maybe that brush with death gave him his courage.

I remember one day in English class. A teacher wrote the word "Seing" on the blackboard. Santos raised his hand. "Madam," he said, "the spelling is wrong. It is S-E-E-I-N-G."

The room went deadly quiet. Correcting a teacher was a crime. She turned on him. "So, you are teaching me now?" she snapped. "How do you spell 'going'? You add 'ing' to 'go'. So 'see' becomes 'seing'. Sit down!"

Most boys would have crumbled. Santos didn't. He marched straight to the Headmaster, Mr. Deshmukh. The Headmaster was horrified by the teacher's mistake and scolded her. It was a small victory for spelling, but a huge victory for Santos. The boy with the aluminium box had a backbone of steel.

***

Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Friend

One of the most beautiful things about growing up in Wardha in the sixties was that money existed, but it didn't matter.

Our class was a strange mix. Chandu Fattepuria came from a wealthy family of cotton traders. Vilas Thakur lived in a massive British bungalow with guards at the gate because his father was the police superintendent. Baban Sonwane’s father was a government minister.

Then there were the rest of us. My father was a manager; others were sons of teachers. But once we crossed the school threshold, or climbed onto those cotton bales, the differences vanished. The rich parents of that era were different. They were humble. They never flaunted their wealth or asked for special treatment. In fact, they told the teachers to be stricter with their sons.

We shared our food, we shared our punishments, and we shared our secrets. There was no VIP section in our childhood. We were just boys.

***

The Invisible Wall

But if money didn't divide us, gender certainly did. Our school was "co-ed" on paper, but in reality, an invisible wall ran down the center of the hallways.

Shubha Thatte, Lina Wele, and Suhas Jajoo might have been family friends who played together at home on Sundays. But inside the school? They were strangers. Boys spoke to boys. Girls spoke to girls. Crossing that line was social suicide.

If a boy accidentally brushed past a girl in the corridor, the other boys would scream, "Contaminated!" The poor soul would be teased for days. It seems funny now—the idea that talking to a girl was a dangerous act—but those were the rules. We found small ways to show off, of course. During the break, we would rent bicycles for ten paise an hour. We would ride frantically fast, doing tricks, secretly hoping the girls were watching from their side of the invisible wall.

***

Music and Mayhem

Amidst the noise of school, there was one voice that could stop time. Vikas Kale was our musical prodigy. He had a voice that sounded too mature, too perfect for a schoolboy.

On school picnics, when the chaos settled down, Vikas would sing. I remember him singing songs from the Geet Ramayana. The rowdy boys would stop shouting. The teachers would stop scolding. For a few minutes, the dusty picnic spot felt like a temple. He didn't just sing; he cast a spell. We all knew he would become a star, and he did, becoming a renowned classical singer years later. Vikas lives in Wardha.

But for the rest of us, the real music was the sound of the recess bell.

The twenty-minute break was pure chaos. We would explode onto the field. Footballers claimed one corner, cricketers claimed another, but mostly we just ran. We didn't have teams; we had mobs. A boy might be fielding for a cricket match while standing in the middle of a football game. The ball would fly, bodies would collide, and the noise was deafening. It was glorious. We played with the desperation of prisoners let out into the yard, trying to squeeze a whole day’s worth of fun into twenty minutes.

***

The Sweetest Memory

I want to end with a memory that smells like chocolate.

In the fifth grade, someone brought a box of chocolates to school. I don’t remember who, and I don’t remember why. But in a moment of pure, innocent generosity, we decided to give them to our teachers.

We tracked down Mrs. Amte, one of our strictest teachers. She was walking towards the staff room. We swarmed around her, a gang of ten-year-olds holding out chocolates like they were gold coins. "For you, Madam!" we chirped.

She stopped. She looked at this group of messy, noisy boys blocking her path. And then, her stern face cracked. She laughed—a warm, genuine laugh that we had never heard before. She took the chocolate.

It was a small thing. But it stays with me. It was the moment we realized that our teachers were not just rule-books with legs. They were people. And just like us, they liked chocolate.

That was the magic of those days. The stinging slaps of the math teacher faded, but the taste of that chocolate, the softness of the cotton bales, and the sound of my friends laughing—those things stayed. We were young, we were equal, and the world was just waiting to be explored.

Among the sea of boys at Craddock, Santosh Kekre was an aristocrat of hardware. He was a lean, wiry boy, possessed of an infectious smile that seemed far too large for his modest frame. However, it was his school bag—or rather, the lack of one—that defined him. Every morning, Santosh arrived clutching a distinctive aluminum box. It was a sturdy, rectangular affair that clattered rhythmically against his thigh as he walked. To the rest of us, this was an invitation to mischief, and we promptly christened him "Petiwala." Most boys would have withered under such a title, but Santosh wore the nickname like a medal of office.

There was a quiet gravity to Santosh that we didn't quite understand until we heard of the Great Encephalitis Outbreak of 1958. In a time when medicine was more a matter of prayer than penicillin, Santosh had been one of only two children in all of Vidarbha to survive the brain fever. He had spent three months in the cavernous wards of Mayo Hospital, Nagpur, enduring the terrifying ritual of the lumbar puncture—a needle to the spine that would have broken the spirit of a grown man. The Nagpur newspapers had hailed him as a medical miracle. We looked at him with a new kind of awe; the virus had spared his sharp mind, leaving only his lean frame and that indestructible smile as a testament to his victory.

***

The Battle of the Double 'E'

Our schoolroom was a place where the teacher’s word was Law, even when the Law was wrong. I remember a particularly stifling afternoon when our teacher—a woman of formidable certainties—scrawled the word "Seing" on the blackboard. "Memorize it," she commanded. "S-E-I-N-G." The room was silent, save for the scratching of nibs. Then, from the middle row, the Petiwala’s hand went up. With the reckless honesty of a survivor, Santosh pointed out the missing 'e'.

The teacher froze. She turned from the board, bestowing upon Santosh a look so withering it should have reduced him to ash. "So," she hissed, "the student has become the master? You add 'ing' to 'go' to make 'going,' do you not? Therefore, 'see' becomes 'seing.' Do not try to teach me my own tongue!" Trembling but undeterred, Santosh did not retreat. He took the matter to the Headmaster, Mr. M.J. Deshmukh, a man whose authority was announced by the rhythmic thump-drag of his noticeable limp. The teacher was reprimanded, the 'e' was restored, and Santosh returned to his desk, utterly unaware that he had just committed the ultimate sin of embarrassing a person in power.

***

The Ritual of the Mathematical Slap

In the gallery of masters, Mr. Dhage, our Mathematics teacher, occupied a pedestal all his own. He was a striking figure, dressed in an oil-stained Gandhi topi and sleeves rolled up as if he were about to move a mountain. Mr. Dhage did not merely teach mathematics; he performed it. He poured his heart and soul into the intricate rituals of simple and compound interest, and the mysteries of time, work, and speed.

Whenever he spotted a blunder, his face would undergo a dramatic transformation. His features would contort with a sorrow so deep one might think he had been personally betrayed. If the mistake was particularly egregious, he would snatch the notebook with a sudden movement, tear out the offending pages, and toss the crumpled remains aside with a sigh of absolute frustration. "What nonsense is this?" he would roar. Perhaps the most dreaded of his rituals involved the rare presence of the opposite gender. If a boy failed to solve an equation, Mr. Dhage would turn to one of the girls. If she provided the correct step, he would command her to walk over and strike the boy on the head while he held his own ear in penance. It was an exquisite humiliation.

***

The Song of the Dug-Dugi

If the aluminum box was Santosh’s trademark, his father’s car was the town’s entertainment. Mr. Kekre senior was a man of unimpeachable honesty who served the Zilla Parishad. His pride and joy was a second-hand Morris Eight, a temperamental beast that seemed to view the streets of Wardha with deep suspicion. It groaned, it wheezed, and it frequently gave up the ghost in the middle of the busiest intersections. We called it "Dug-Dugi" because of the peculiar, rhythmic thumping sound its engine made—a sound that resembled a folk drum more than a combustion engine. Whenever we heard that familiar dug-dug-dug echoing down the road, we knew the Kekre family was approaching. Eventually, the family moved away to Panaji, but in the corridors of Craddock, the ghost of the Petiwala and the missing 'e' remained.

***

The Republic of Equals

In our class, Chandu Fattepuria came from wealth; Suhas Jajoo had an enviable pedigree; Santosh Kekre’s father was a senior administrator. Three students had politically active fathers: Baban Sonwane’s father was a State Minister; Ashok Gode's father was the President of the Zilla Parishad. Despite the hierarchy of the town, the school was a perfect republic of equals. The sons of Ministers sat on the same splintered benches as the sons of teachers. Wealth provided no shield; our parents gave teachers a simple mandate: "Do not spare the rod if they stumble."

During the break, we found our true freedom. The ultimate luxury was a rented bicycle. For the princely sum of 10 paise per hour, we could hire a heavy, black Hercules cycle. We took turns wobbling across the grounds, the wind in our faces and the rattling of the chain providing the soundtrack to our liberation. For those sixty minutes, we weren't just students—we were masters of the road.

***

The Coffee at Two A.M.

Decades passed, as they inevitably do. I ran into my old bench-mate Shekhar at a Thane railway platform long after our paths had diverged. That night, in a city far from Wardha, Shekhar brewed coffee at two in the morning. We sat and talked until the sun rose. When his wife emerged, she found two middle-aged men chatting with the feverish intensity of those two boys who had once been separated by a math teacher's whim. She wondered who this stranger was who hadn't even attended their wedding, unaware that in the world of Craddock, time and weddings are secondary to the bond of a shared bench.

A Leap Across Wardha

By the eighth standard, Craddock High School had become a second skin. The classrooms, the playground, the familiar faces — together they formed a small, reassuring world. I was comfortable there. That was precisely the problem.

I could see, dimly but unmistakably, that the road ahead would demand a command over English and science that Craddock could not give me. Not because the school was poor — it was not. But it was teaching me in Marathi, and I had begun to sense that the world I wanted to enter would not wait for translation.

If I stayed, I would remain safe. I would also remain limited.

———

The Friends I Would Leave

What made the decision harder were the friendships I would have to abandon. My days at Craddock were built around people: Suhas Jajoo, Chandrakumar Fattepuria, Chandrashekhar Amte, Narendra Gharpure, Avinash Bhagwat, Kiran Chawade, Vijay Ashtankar, Ravindra Chawade, Namdev Vaidya, Dipak Kalode, Anil Fadnavis, Vishweshwar Mohnapure, and Charudatta Shirpurkar. Among the girls: Asha Fulambarkar, Bharti Deshpande, Lalita Pendsey, Sushma Mondhe, and Mira Pendsey.

Their names were woven into the ordinary fabric of my days — shared lunches, whispered jokes, the easy companionship of adolescence. To leave Craddock was, in a sense, to leave all of them.

Only two came with me to Swavalambi Vidyalaya: Shekhar Deshkar and Sunil Helwatkar. Two doctors in Wardha — Dr. M.K. Pawar and Dr. C.W. Warhadpande — also moved their children, Sunil and Vasanti respectively, to the same school around that time. But the rest stayed behind.

---

A note on the names: a reader might wonder how a man of sixty-nine recalls them with such precision. The answer is not elephantine memory. My friend Laxminarayan Sonwane — Babya to those who know him, a twist from Baban — gave me a copy of an old Craddock register that carried the names of students from those years. A WhatsApp group of former Craddock friends filled in the rest.

Memory is rarely individual. It survives in groups.

———

The School Across Town

Six years before I arrived, in 1963, Swavalambi Vidyalaya had taken a bold and unusual step: it began teaching science in English. In a town like Wardha, this was not a small decision. It was a declaration.

At thirteen, I understood none of this consciously. I only knew, instinctively, that this was where my future lay.

On 4 June 1969, I joined its sixth batch. I did so quietly, without discussion, and without seeking my parents' permission. It was not courage. It was conviction — which is a quieter thing and, in the end, more reliable.

Six weeks later, Neil Armstrong would step onto the moon. I knew nothing of destiny or metaphor at the time. I only knew that I had crossed the town of Wardha to enter a new school. Yet, in its own modest way, that crossing marked the beginning of everything that followed.

———

I walked through the big gate of Swavalambi with my eyes forward. To the right stood the Headmaster's office — a room of great quiet and respect. The Biology section opened onto a sprawling, sun-drenched courtyard. The school smelled of possibility, which is a smell you recognise only in retrospect. I did not look back at Craddock. There was nothing to be gained by it.

***

Of Masters and Mitigated Math

The Headmaster was Mr. Parshuram Bhajekar. It was a delightful irony that a man named after the fiery, axe-wielding legend of Hindu mythology was, in reality, the most mild-mannered and soft-spoken of souls.

In the ninth grade, I reached a crossroads: Mathematics or Biology. I found the former to be a thorny, unyielding thicket of logic that I simply did not enjoy. I approached Mr. Bhajekar with my desire to switch. He listened with a curious, scholarly patience, and after hearing my plea, he granted me passage into the world of living things. It was a risky choice, perhaps, but that day, standing alone in the corridor, I felt the immense, quiet relief of a boy who had finally chosen his own path.

My school leaving certificate preserves the dates—June 4, 1969, to April 30, 1972—but my memory holds the atmosphere. I remember the scorching May of 1969, oscillating between my old life and the new, just after my elder brother’s wedding. On that first day, I was a stranger among forty-five students. Only four were girls—Kishori Ghirnikar and Rekha Sapkal, who would both go on to join me in the medical profession, and Vasanti Waradpande.

The boys formed a sprawling tribe: Avinash Joshi, Baba Chutke, Bansod, Brijmohan Rathi, Dilip Joshi, Deshpande, Jabbar Khan, Kaushal Mishra, Kuldhariya, Mohan Dubewar, Pandey, Rajendra Phadke, Ravindra Vaidya, Shekhar Deshkar, Sunil Farsole, Sunil Helwatkar, Sunil Pandit, Suresh Singhania, Swarn Singh, Vijay Pawar, Vinod Adalakhiya, Virulkar, and Yeole. We lost Sunil Pawar to throat cancer in 2022, but I still see him clearly at the school’s 25th-anniversary science fair. He was a master of his craft, single-handedly constructing an electric heater on a small brick while I stood by, a mere observer who nevertheless basked in the reflected glory of the prize he won.

***

The Khadi Cap and the 10-Paise Prayer

Education was a modest expense then; tuition was Rs 7.20 per month. However, because my brother was studying commerce in the same halls, I was granted a "brother’s concession." My parents paid a mere Rs 3.60—exactly the fare for a third-class train ticket from Wardha to Nagpur.

Our mornings began with a prayer by the poet Ramnaresh Tripathi. But the true ritual of the morning involved the white khadi cap. It was mandatory, a symbol of our school’s heritage that we viewed with a mixture of reverence and deep teenage embarrassment. Students from other schools, liberated from such headgear, would mock us. Consequently, we developed a strategic habit: the cap remained stuffed in our pockets until we reached the very threshold of the school gate, at which point it was perched upon our heads with a resigned sense of duty.

That prayer stayed with me for fifty years. Decades later, when my friend Dr. V.K. Gupta visited from Lucknow and gifted me Harivanshray Bachchan’s autobiography, I found a startling echo of my childhood. On page 125, Bachchan writes of reciting that very same prayer at the Mohtashim Ganj Municipal School in Allahabad in 1915. Five decades and a thousand miles could not dim the resonance of those words.

***

The Hitler Diversion and the Botany Models

We were guided by a dedicated assembly of masters. Mr. Ramkrishna Pande and Rajendra Singh Thakur oversaw our English; Mr. Shambhusharan Gupta taught Hindi; and Mr. Chintaman Hetre handled Marathi. In the sciences, we had Mr. C.D. Zamvar for Botany, M.J. Gandhi for Zoology, and Mr. Vinayak Zope for Physics. Chemistry was a shared labor between Messrs. Rayalkar, Band, Dattatraya Chitale, and Chaudhary, while Mr. Ambulkar marshaled us for PT.

Mr. Ramkrishna Pande, though our English teacher, possessed a heart that beat for History. We students, ever-opportunistic, discovered that a well-timed question about World War II or Hitler’s tactics would derail the entire lesson. Mr. Pande would forget the English grammar on the board, sit cross-legged on his desk in his dhoti, and lose himself in the ruins of 1940s Europe. By the time the bell rang, he would realize with a start that the German army had advanced, but our English had remained precisely where it started.

Then there was Mr. Chitrakumar Zamvar, a young man in his mid-twenties who brought the microscopic world to life. With models ranging from the humble amoeba to the malarial parasite, he bridged the gap between the textbook and the eye. Even when he was replaced by Mr. Madanlal Tiwari, the fascination remained.

***

The Library and the Drawing Exam

I was a creature of the library. I spent my afternoons at the Rashtra Bhasha Pustakalaya on the Bajaj Electricals campus, where Mr. Purohit would suggest new worlds to explore. I devoured the giants of Hindi literature—Munshi Premchand, Jaishankar Prasad, Mahadevi Verma, and Acharya Chatursen—and eventually the modern prose of Mohan Rakesh and Manu Bhandari.

I even harbored artistic ambitions. In 1969, I sat for the Government Drawing Exam. I was famous among family and friends for my chalk portraits of Shivaji Maharaj and Lord Ram, but the government examiners were less impressed than my aunts; they awarded me a "C" grade.

By the summer of 1972, the Board exams arrived. I found my stride, earning a distinction in Chemistry and solid marks across the board: 72 in Marathi, 70 in Hindi, and 69 in English. My confidence was buoyed, though I still hadn't fully grasped that these numbers were the keys to a medical life.

***

The Miracle of the Machine

In 1970, when I was in the eighth grade, the domestic peace of our home was shattered by my mother’s illness. At forty-five, she was besieged by the "shadows" of menopause—hot flashes, palpitations, and sleepless nights. Our local physician, Dr. Warhadpande, was stumped.

My father’s concern grew into a quiet desperation until Dr. B.C. Chandak, an intern in Nagpur, arranged for a visit from the renowned Dr. K.L. Jain. The arrival of a Nagpur physician in Wardha was an event of local significance, but what followed was legendary.

Dr. Jain arrived with a bedside ECG machine—a rare, mystical device in those days. As he recorded the electrical signature of my mother’s heart, the news spread through Wardha like wildfire. People spoke in hushed tones of the doctor who could see inside the body with a machine. Whether it was the medicine or the profound "placebo effect" of such a grand investigation, my mother improved almost overnight. For months afterward, my father celebrated her recovery by having fresh fruits delivered from Nagpur, a sweet, seasonal testament to the day the "miracle of the machine" came to our home.

Section D and the Botany of Business

At fifteen, I walked into Jankidevi Bajaj Science College with the singular, heavy-hearted purpose of a boy whose life rested on a single exam. To get into the Government Medical College (GMC) in Nagpur, one had to conquer the BSc Part One. I was assigned Roll Number 562 in Section D.

In the campus hierarchy, Sections A and B were the "good" sections—the academic aristocrats. Section D was a different republic altogether. Many boys came from local business families; they could calculate the profit margins of their fathers’ shops with their eyes closed, but they viewed Zoology with a deep, suspicious apathy. The classroom was a hundred-strong sea of sweating shirts and a low, untamable hum of gossip. Two small wall fans labored heroically against the cruel April heat, but they only succeeded in shuffling the hot air from one side of the room to the other.

***

The Winter of Iron and Mercy

That winter, I traded my books for a bicycle and a sudden obsession with fitness. I loved the reckless speed, pedaling across the college grounds with my hands off the handlebars, tasting a freedom that had no syllabus. Along with three classmates, I spent my mornings running in circles, doing squats, and gripping the iron double bars until my fingers went numb in the biting cold.

I might have physically strengthened myself into academic ruin if my friends hadn't shown a rare, selfless clarity. Eight weeks before the finals, one of them looked at me and said, “We are boys with no future, but we won’t spoil yours. You’re the youngest and the brightest. Go home. Study. We don’t want to see you on the ground again.”

I listened. I left the bars and retreated to my desk.

***

The Guardians of the Green

The college was governed by Principal Vasudeo P. Damle, a man of sharp blue eyes and a French beard, topped by a Gandhi cap that sat with geometric precision on his head. When the seven o’clock bell rang, Damle appeared as if the sound itself had materialized him. No one dared to be late.

He and his wife, Mrs. Kamla Damle, turned Botany into a theatrical event. Principal Damle could spend ten lectures on photosynthesis, treating the transformation of light into energy as a miracle. Mrs. Damle taught us Algology with a memory so sharp it seemed to defy time; she lived to be 102, passing away only in 2020.

The department was a microcosm of India. Kamalnayan Bajaj had wanted Wardha to have that intellectual mix. There was Mr. Sathianathan from Chennai, whose booming voice filled the lecture hall when he spoke of mosses and ferns. Mr. R.S. Acharya, another Craddock alumnus, taught Plant Morphology; he was a quiet man who believed the classroom was a sacred space and private tuitions were a sacrilege. In the practical lab, Mr. C.D. Zamvar presided. I could never master the sunflower stem; my blade was always blunt, my sections always slanted. Zamvar Sir would look at my messy diagram and dryly remark, “Kalantri, is this a microscopic stem or a cricket pitch—with a bowler at one end and a batsman at the other?”

***

Right and Wrong

Principal Damle’s vigilance extended beyond the morning bell to the very souls of his students. He policed the invisible line between the sexes with the zeal of a frontier guard. During our annual dramas, the stage was a place of strict segregation—there were "All-Boys" plays and "All-Girls" plays, a theatrical apartheid that forced us to find our leading ladies among classmates in wigs and borrowed saris. To Damle, a mixed cast was a script for social ruin.

This rigid code once collided with the cosmopolitan winds of the seventies. A Malaysian girl, perhaps oblivious to Wardha’s unwritten laws, arrived on campus in a skirt. In the sari-clad stillness of the college, it felt like an accidental revolution. Damle did not see a garment; he saw a breach in his cultural fortress. He commanded her to trade the skirt for a "formal dress" at once. In his kingdom, modernity was always expected to bow to tradition.

***

The Longest Word

Our English master, Mr. V.K. Pande, treated the language like a playground. He could take a turgid editorial from The Times of India and make it sing. Once, when I asked for the longest word in English, he beamed and gave me floccinaucinihilipilification—twenty-nine letters signifying the act of treating something as worthless. To a schoolboy, it was a mountain of a word, and I spent days climbing it.

In those days, a teacher earned roughly 633 rupees a month—enough for a new bicycle and little else. Only two professors owned scooters—one being Professor Maheshwari from Zoology. The rest of us, masters and students alike, pedaled the same dusty roads of Wardha under the same unrelenting sun.

***

The Veranda of 1972

I recently sat with my old classmate Dr. Kishor Dubey, who retired from JB Science after teaching Botany there for four decades. He pulled the past back into the present. In our time, the college was the center of the world. Every year, forty students arrived from Sirpur Kagaznagar, and five or six traveled all the way from Malaysia. The hallways were crowded and alive. The Biology division had four sections (A to D) with 100 to 120 students each, while the Mathematics sections (A and B) were packed with 80 to 100 students.

Our monthly afternoons were spent in the "Rescue Debates." We would imagine a burning house with five people trapped inside; the challenge was to argue who should be saved. Murthy and Dubey were the masters of these fierce arguments. Occasionally, Avinash Joshi, Bharti Deshpande, and Sharma would join in, their voices filling the room. When the shouting stopped, Bhagat would sing, his voice so clear it was no surprise he later became a Professor of Music in the Yeshwant Arts College.

On the playground, Shaikh and his partner—both giants at six-and-a-half feet—dominated the kabaddi patch, while Murdiv led the cricket team as captain. Rathod Sir, our Games Incharge, watched us like a hawk. If he saw a student slouching, he would bark: "Why are you standing there like a dead body? Act alive!"

Our laboratories were guided by legends: Ronghe, Supe, Maradwar, and Deshpande in Physics; Galkar, Naigaonkar, Kulkarni, and Sarode in Chemistry; and Maheshwari, Kardar, and Varma in Biology. Mr. Mashankar kept a watchful eye over the library.

“Do you remember the cost?” Dubey asked. “Sixty rupees for the entire year.” Five rupees a month to learn the secrets of the universe.

***

The Withheld Miracle

The university exams in April 1973 were a crucible of heat. I walked out of the hall feeling a rush of confidence, that dangerous certainty that I had cleared every hurdle. But student confidence is a fragile thing; it can vanish in a single morning.

The university exams in April 1973 were a crucible of heat. I walked out of the hall feeling a rush of confidence—that dangerous certainty that I had cleared every hurdle. But student confidence is a fragile thing; it can vanish in a single morning.

In those days, the university didn't send letters; the results simply appeared in the local newspaper. My father was an early riser, a man who treated the morning paper with the devotion of a ritual. He would scan it from the first headline to the last advertisement as soon as it hit the porch. One June morning, at six o’clock, his eyes chanced upon the BSc Part I results. His excited call broke the silence of the house, pulling me from a deep sleep.

I came running from the house, still half-awake, to the front lawn where he sat in his chair. The morning was quiet and the air was still cool. He opened the newspaper, his eyes scanning the tiny columns of print, and asked for my roll number.

"562," I said. My voice was calm; I expected to see my name among the toppers.

We looked once. Then again. The number was not there.

The world seemed to go silent. That cool morning air suddenly felt heavy. I felt a cold, hollow knot tie itself in my stomach. My father stared at the paper with a look of pure bewilderment, as if the ink had betrayed him. He had never imagined I could fail, and seeing that empty space where my number should have been felt like a physical blow. The shame was sudden and sharp.

We searched one last time, our eyes stinging, until we found it at the very bottom under a different heading: “Withheld.” I hadn’t failed, but I hadn’t passed either. I was a ghost in the system. A simple clerical error had trapped my entire future in a dusty university file cabinet, leaving me in a state of agonizing limbo for weeks.

The following weeks were a blur of university counters. When the envelope finally arrived, my hands shook. Seventy-three percent. It was the magic number. I had my seat at GMC Nagpur.

The house erupted in laughter and the scent of sugar. My mother made kilos of pedhas. I was to be the first doctor in the family. As I packed my bags to join Suhas Jajoo, Rekha Sapkal, Avinash Joshi, Rajan Bindu, Narayan Dongre, Pramod Mahajan, Prabhakar Patil, Laxmikant Rathod, Ashok Gambhir, Nandkishor Taori, and Maya Khati, I felt a rush in my chest. We were young, sure of ourselves, and blissfully unaware of the long nights ahead.

My entry into medicine was not preceded by visions or vocations. It arrived in a far less heroic manner—through my steady inability to make peace with mathematics.

By the ninth standard, mathematics and I had signed a quiet ceasefire. I stopped pursuing it; it stopped humiliating me. Around the same time, biology walked in like a friendly neighbour—patient, familiar, and never in a hurry to prove a point. Engineering drifted out of sight without a quarrel. Medicine stayed behind, calm and unhurried, as if it had been waiting for me all along.

In 1973, still sixteen, I applied to three medical colleges: Government Medical College, Nagpur; MGIMS, Sevagram; and JIPMER, Pondicherry. In those days, admissions were governed by a single entrance test common to MGIMS, AIIMS Delhi, and BHU Banaras. Gandhian thought had not yet entered application forms, and no one asked you to write an essay on rural service. I did well in the MGIMS examination and was invited for an interview at Sevagram. It had much to recommend it: it was close to home, and home-cooked meals were quietly assured.

Yet, when the time came, I chose Government Medical College, Nagpur. I did not know then how decisively this choice would shape my life.

My father sent Shri Champalalji Fattepuria to submit my admission form at the Dean’s office. He returned home visibly animated, as if he had personally negotiated my entry into the medical profession. According to him, the Dean had been deeply impressed by my marks, had examined them himself, and had immediately instructed the clerk to prepare my admission papers. The story delighted my parents. In truth, the Dean had neither seen my marks nor spared the time to be impressed by them. But Shri Champalalji’s version—lavishly embellished—was far more enjoyable. We let it stand.

Soon after, the acceptance letter arrived. It felt heavier than paper deserved to feel.

***

The Long Road to Nagpur

As the day of my departure drew near, my mother turned anxious in the only way she knew—by packing. She attacked my suitcase as if she were sending me to the North Pole. Woollens appeared from nowhere. So did mufflers, sweaters, bedsheets, steel thalis, teaspoons, and enough soap to scrub the whole of Nagpur clean.

I tried to stop her gently. “Only one uniform,” I said. “White shirt. White trousers. Black shoes.”

She nodded, but her hands did not slow down. What I did not tell her—because I wanted peace in the house for at least one more day—was what waited for me in Nagpur: the famous welcome, the seniors, the rules. “Look at the third button,” they would say. Not the face. Not the eyes. Only the third button. My mother, innocent of these rituals, kept packing as though she could protect me with extra towels.

I left Wardha alone. There was no family car, no grand send-off, no sentimental photograph at the gate. I went to the Wardha bus stand near Thackeray Market with a heavy suitcase in one hand and my bicycle in the other. A local coolie helped me lift the cycle onto the roof of the bus. He tied it down with rope that looked older than both of us. I watched him knot it twice, then once more for luck, and decided not to ask questions.

When the bus moved, something inside me sank. Sixteen is a brave age in stories. In real life, it is mostly fear dressed up as excitement. I sat by the window, my mouth dry, my stomach tight. I was leaving the shelter of my parents for the “good life.” At that moment, the good life felt suspiciously like exile.

The road to Nagpur in those days was not a journey; it was an endurance test. The bus rattled and groaned like an old man climbing stairs. Dust entered through every crack. We had crossed Seloo and Kelzar when the shouting began. Farmers on the roadside waved their arms as if the bus had stolen something. The driver braked hard. The conductor leaned out.

“The cycle!” they shouted. “It fell off—four furlongs back!”

For a second I did not breathe. That bicycle was mine—my only vehicle in the city of my dreams. Without it, Nagpur would become too large, too expensive, too far away.

The bus did something I did not expect. It reversed. In a rare moment of MSRTC kindness—or perhaps simple curiosity—the driver backed the bus down the road. And there it was: my bicycle lying in the dust, like a small wounded animal. The handle was twisted. The mudguard had surrendered. It looked offended, as if it had been betrayed by rope and destiny.

They helped me lift it back onto the roof. This time, the conductor tied it down with fresh rope and the seriousness of a man securing a coffin. By the time we reached Nagpur, I carried a suitcase, a dented thali, and the uneasy pride of someone who had survived his first crisis.

***

Roommates and Rationing

My father had arranged a room for me at the Bachhraj Factory. It was a D-Group quarter—eight feet of discipline. A cot, a table, a chair, and not much space left for a growing boy’s dreams. The walls were bare, and the air smelled of work. Yet Mr. Bhagirathji Laddhad, the cashier, and Mr. Sonbaji, the attendant, watched over me the way adults sometimes watch over young boys who have been sent away too early.

Food, however, was another matter. It was always potatoes, dal, and rice. The potatoes returned in different disguises—fried, boiled, spiced, mashed—but always potatoes. After a week I began to suspect there was a secret potato factory behind the kitchen.

Then, as if the city decided I had suffered enough, luck arrived in the form of a building across the street—Habib Manzil.

Three of my classmates had moved in: Vijay Kherde, who would become an ENT surgeon; Kailash Murarka, who would choose orthopaedics; and Nandkishore Salampuria, who would go into plastic surgery. After postgraduation, all three practiced their craft in Akola. Tragically, the pandemic broke our quartet; we lost Salampuria to COVID-19. But back then, we became a quartet without effort. Every morning, we stepped out in starched white clothes and with palpitating hearts. We each had our own bicycles. I had managed to get mine repaired by a roadside mechanic near Baidyanath Chowk, and the four of us would pedal together to Government Medical College.

Four boys in white, wobbling through Nagpur, heading towards a life we could not yet imagine.

***

The Ceiling Fan and the Ledger

My admission process itself was a lesson in chaos theory. Mr. Shriram Adepawar and my brother-in-law Tarachandji Chandak accompanied me to the Dean’s office. The room was crowded with fathers in dhotis and umbrellas that dripped quietly onto the floor. At the centre was a large table where documents were stacked in a fragile order.

Then a clerk hurried in and switched on the ceiling fan.

The fan did not start politely. It came alive with monsoon energy. A gust swept across the table, and the top sheets lifted, fluttered, collided, and dropped to the floor like startled birds. The room froze. The clerk lunged forward, scooped the papers up, and rebuilt the pile with the confidence of a man pretending nothing had happened. But the original order was gone.

My file, which had been near the top, drifted somewhere deeper into the stack. Manik Khune’s file landed on top, earning him Roll No. 1.

So, on a humid July afternoon—assisted by a ceiling fan and pure chance—I became Roll No. 49.

For the next decade, this number would define my existence more than my surname ever could. “Roll Number 49!” would be barked out in attendance, whispered in exam halls, and searched for frantically on result boards. To the system, I was a statistic. To myself, that number became a kind of starting line.

***

The Arithmetic of Nostalgia

Looking back, what surprises me is not the roll number, but the cost of the dream.

In the mid-1970s, medical college demanded diligence more than money. Tuition was ₹175 per term. A hostel bed cost ₹78. The mess bill was ₹372. A student who joined GMC in 1973 spent roughly ₹5,600 to earn an MBBS degree—classes, a roof, and three meals a day included.

Today, even after adjusting for inflation, the arithmetic has changed sharply. A student entering a not-for-profit college like Sevagram in 2023 faces a bill crossing ₹7,10,000. Medical education has become nearly twelve times more expensive.

In 1973, a medical resident earned ₹450 a month. Today, it is closer to ₹90,000. But looking at that dented bicycle and the stark room that launched my career, I realise that some things cannot be calculated. I walked into GMC as Roll No. 49, a boy created by an accident of paperwork, ready to be shaped by whatever came next.

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IIt was a warm evening in Nagpur, and I had just finished my anatomy class. Eager to get back, I walked briskly to the spot where I had parked my cycle. It was not there.

At first, I assumed I had made a mistake. I walked up and down the stretch, looked behind trees and pillars, retraced my steps. Slowly, reluctantly, the truth dawned on me. The cycle was gone.

My heart sank. Beads of sweat gathered on my forehead. That cycle was my prized possession—my only reliable means of getting around the city. To lose it felt like a personal calamity.

As I stood there, unsure of what to do next, Anil Sharma happened to pass by. He noticed my expression and stopped. At the time, I was shy, timid, and painfully awkward in social situations. English came to me haltingly; sentences rarely emerged intact. Anil, by contrast, seemed to belong easily to the world. He was the son of a professor, educated in an English-medium school, and carried himself with a quiet assurance.

Yet what struck me immediately was not his confidence, but his warmth.

He understood the situation without my having to explain much. Putting his arm gently around my shoulder, he spoke reassuringly and led me to the Ajni police station. He sat beside me patiently as I struggled to file a complaint. When words failed me, he filled the gaps. The officer listened, noted the details—the make, the colour, a few distinguishing marks—and asked us to wait.

The cycle never returned.

What stayed with me was something far more enduring. Anil’s calm presence, his unhurried kindness, and his ability to make a frightened, homesick student feel less alone. His words were gentle and steady. They eased my agitation and soothed a mind stretched thin by unfamiliar surroundings.

Soon after, Anil left Nagpur. His father was transferred to Mumbai, and Anil moved with him. Life took us in different directions, as it often does.

Years passed.

In the winter of 1994, I found myself at Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai. My father-in-law had been admitted for bypass surgery, and I was walking through one of its long, confusing corridors when I ran into Anil.

After MBBS, he had gone on to earn his MD and then a DM in Cardiology. By then, he was a cardiologist at Hinduja—well known, well regarded, very much at home in that world. Yet the moment he saw me, he smiled and recognised me instantly.

That evening he took me out to dinner at a nearby restaurant. Over a simple meal, we spoke of Nagpur, of medical college, and of a stolen bicycle that had quietly introduced me to friendship. It was deeply moving.

Anil faced his final years with remarkable courage. Even as he battled metastatic prostate cancer, he refused to indulge in self-pity. He joked about his illness, laughed easily, and lived fully—just as he had practised medicine, and just as he had once walked a shaken student to a police station.

He passed away on 17 August 2018.

Some people enter our lives briefly, but leave behind a lasting warmth. Anil was one of them..

***

August 1973 was when our life at Government Medical College began in earnest. Two hundred of us stood together for the first time—newly admitted, freshly ironed, and trying hard to look as though we belonged. We knew, in a vague and solemn way, that we would spend the next five years in one another’s pockets: in lecture halls, dissection rooms, exam queues, and hostel corridors.

A few students joined later, and the final count rose to 204—45 women and 159 men, pulled in from towns and villages across Vidarbha. Even among the women, the distribution had its own odd imbalance: eleven in Batch A, sixteen in Batch B, and nine each in Batches C and D. I don’t know what invisible logic produced those numbers. We accepted them the way we accepted everything else in those days—without question.

Looking back, the figures feel almost antique. Today, women make up more than half of medical admissions. At MGIMS, I have watched them take the lead with quiet certainty—topping merit lists, collecting medals, and walking away with prizes that once seemed reserved for the loudest boys in the room. Whether this is long-delayed justice or a slow retreat of young men from medicine is a question I leave hanging.

Most of us had come from small vernacular schools. English was not our natural language; it was something we wore like a new shirt—stiff, uncomfortable, and slightly ill-fitting. A handful spoke it easily, as if they had been born into it. The rest of us spoke in fragments, hoping confidence would fill the gaps.

Only about a tenth of the class had a parent who was a doctor. Nearly a fifth came from farming families. The backgrounds were as varied as the accents. Fifty-eight were day scholars who could go home each evening to proper food and familiar voices. The remaining 146—including me—were scattered across hostels, shared rooms, and relatives’ houses, learning early that independence is often just another name for loneliness.

We arrived carrying notebooks, lunch boxes, and ambitions shaped by very different worlds. We did not yet know who would become our closest friends, who would turn into rivals, who would disappear quietly, and who would shine. We only knew that we were now inside the gates—and that the college, without any hurry, would begin to sand down some differences and sharpen others.

***

Bruised and Battered

A month before our batch formally entered Government Medical College, ragging was still treated as a sacred tradition—like dissection, viva voce, and the occasional humiliation that came free with the syllabus. Seniors called it “toughening up.” Juniors called it “just survive.” Humiliation was routine, abuse was common, and a slap or two was not considered newsworthy. It wasn’t so much approved as inherited.

One afternoon in July 1973, I was walking past Medical Square when a group of seniors intercepted me. There was no anger in their faces—only that casual confidence of people who know the rules favour them. They steered me towards Shri Ram Dharamshala and into a room. The door shut behind me with a soft finality. I had heard enough hostel stories to know this was not a social call.

The room filled quickly—with laughter, cigarette smoke, and the sharp excitement of an audience waiting for entertainment. I stood in the middle, unsure where to place my eyes. Words came at me from all sides—mocking, coarse, unnecessary. Someone asked me something. Someone else repeated it louder. The rest laughed, as if volume improved the joke.

I tried to move away. There was nowhere to go.

What I remember most is the feeling of being exposed—like a specimen held up for inspection, except the examiner was drunk on power and the questions had no right answers. Their gestures were crude, their language uglier. I was sixteen, new to the city, new to the college, and suddenly aware that decency was not guaranteed inside a room full of medical students.

At some point I cried. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet, involuntary leaking of fear and helplessness. It was the sort of crying that embarrasses you even as it happens.

Then one senior intervened.

Indra Kumar Mohta—from Hinganghat. I don’t know what moved him. Perhaps I looked too young; I still hadn’t grown a moustache. Perhaps he simply got bored of the spectacle. He told the others to stop. The room cooled by a degree. Relief arrived, but it brought no joy—only a dull wish to leave.

They let me go.

I walked back to my room—nearly a kilometre away—slowly, as though I had forgotten how to walk normally. The city looked unchanged. People went about their business. A tea stall steamed. A bicycle bell rang. The world, annoyingly, continued.

That afternoon, I felt a kind of vulnerability I had never known before.

Much later I learnt that vulnerable comes from the Latin vulnerare—to wound. In 1973, I did not need Latin. I understood the meaning perfectly. I had moved from a small town where everyone knew everyone, to a large city where strangers could do what they liked and call it tradition.

For weeks, the memory lingered. Shri Ram Dharamshala—meant to shelter anxious relatives of patients—had briefly turned into a private theatre of cruelty for first-year boys. I could not reconcile it with a profession that spoke endlessly of compassion. We were training to heal. Yet we seemed oddly skilled at hurting.

Change came from an unlikely source: Vinod Sawaitul (Roll No. 173), a classmate who later earned a quiet place in GMC folklore. Within a fortnight of joining, he too was ragged. Hurt but resolute, he protested and filed a formal complaint. It triggered a strike, forced the administration to act, and—miracle of miracles—ragging was abolished. For a while. Even the rigid dress code for first-years disappeared, as if someone had finally admitted that white trousers did not produce better doctors.

Time, however, is the most experienced administrator of all. It dilutes every order.

***

The English Test

The early days of the 1970s remain vivid in my mind. Ragging had returned to the campus, but in a milder avatar, playing out like a scene from an old film. The stage was usually the dusty stretch of road connecting the Anatomy Dissection Hall to the Dental College. It was lunchtime; the sun was high, and we would be walking back, ravenous after hours of standing over cadavers, when a senior would step in. He would single me out and draw me aside with a conspiratorial grin.

"SP," he would command, nodding toward a female Parsi classmate walking ahead in her pristine white coat. "Go and ask that girl's name. In English."

It sounds trivial now, but back then, the gender divide was a chasm. We were mostly boys from small towns—I was fresh from Wardha—and the English language felt as foreign and formidable as the anatomy we were struggling to memorize. Fluent conversation was as uncommon as a cool breeze in a Nagpur May. The simple sentence, "May I know your name, please?" felt as daunting as crossing the Nag River in full flood.

Heart racing, palms still clammy from the formalin of the dissection hall, I would approach her. I would freeze, then stammer, "N-name... please?"

She would blush and look at her feet; I would retreat in haste, my face burning. The seniors would erupt in laughter, slapping my back in approval. "Cleared, Kalantri. Go eat."

It seemed harmless at the time, a clumsy rite of passage. Yet, looking back through the lens of decades, I realize those afternoons imparted a subtle lesson we later had to unlearn: the idea that embarrassment could pass for camaraderie, and that authority often disguised itself as tradition.

Learning a New Language—of Words and Bodies

Coming from a vernacular school, the early months of medical college felt like being dropped into unfamiliar waters. Subjects such as Anatomy and Physiology were taught entirely in English, and the language itself seemed to stand between us and understanding. Words were long, unfamiliar, and stubborn. Compared to classmates from English-medium schools, I felt slow, uncertain, and quietly intimidated.

Textbooks made no concessions. They assumed fluency—not only in English, but in a vocabulary that belonged neither to school nor to daily life. Reading a single page could take an inordinate amount of time. Often, comprehension lagged behind effort.

So we improvised. English–Marathi dictionaries became constant companions, carried as faithfully as notebooks. We spent extra hours speaking, reading aloud, writing, correcting one another. Progress was slow, almost invisible, but it was steady. We learned not only the language of medicine, but the patience it demanded.

It took nearly a year. Somewhere along the way, the words lost their menace. Concepts began to settle. To our quiet satisfaction, some of us began to perform as well as—and occasionally better than—our classmates from convent schools. The fear receded. Confidence, tentative at first, found its footing.

---

The First Teachers and the Anatomy Hall

During the first year and a half, we were taught by a formidable group of teachers—many of whose names remain etched in memory. Anatomy was taught by Dr. P. N. Dubey, Dr. Shakuntala Navgiri, Dr. Sathe, Dr. Mrs. Mahajan, Dr. Saxena, Dr. Shah, Dr. Gavhale, Dr. Jacob, Dr. Koranne, and Dr. Shegaokar. Physiology came alive under Dr. P. S. Vaishwanar, Dr. J. N. Deshpande, Dr. Rajwade, Dr. S. K. Ganeriwal, Dr. Kher, Dr. Mrs. S. A. Patwardhan, and Dr. Usha Joshi. Biochemistry was taught by Dr. Mrs. Indu Vaishwanar, Dr. Harihar Tiwaskar, Dr. R. D. Shukla, Dr. C. N. Kowale, Dr. Parate, and Dr. Govind Verma.

Passing the First MBBS examination loomed over us as the first major milestone. The syllabus was vast, the pace relentless. Memorisation was unavoidable, understanding indispensable.

The anatomy dissection hall left a particularly lasting impression. Situated on the ground floor of the main building, it was dimly lit and perpetually serious. Marble tables held preserved human bodies, each covered with a cloth that did little to soften the reality beneath. The smell of formalin was overpowering. It clung to our clothes, our hair, our skin, and followed us into lecture halls and dining rooms.

Working in groups of eight, we took turns dissecting organs—the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys—and later, the brain, muscles, tendons, and nerves. Standing face to face with a motionless human body was unsettling at first. Curiosity competed with hesitation. Some approached the task eagerly; others stood back, watching, unsure when courage would arrive.

---

The work demanded precision. Instructors expected accuracy and attention to detail. There was little room for carelessness. After hours in the hall, lunch was a challenge. Appetite was dulled by the persistent smell of formalin. A few students felt faint; some collapsed briefly. We learnt to recover quickly and return the next day, as if nothing had happened.

Anatomy itself was unforgiving—dense with facts, names, and relationships. The viva voce examinations were an ordeal. Examiners questioned relentlessly, probing for weaknesses. We approached the viva table with apprehension, hearts racing, aware that confidence could evaporate at the first poorly answered question.

For anatomy, many of us relied on D. K. Kadasne’s two-volume textbook, known for its hand-drawn illustrations. It was a constant presence. Certain mnemonics offered small mercies. One, in particular, stayed with us: “Sadhana Looks Too Pretty; Try To Catch Her”—a reliable guide to recalling the eight carpal bones. In moments of panic, it never failed.

Looking back, those early struggles taught us more than anatomy alone. We learnt perseverance, humility, and the quiet satisfaction of mastering what once seemed impossible. Medicine, we discovered, required not only intellect, but endurance—and a willingness to learn, again and again, from the beginning.

---

Shyam Bawage teaching us Anatomy

Imagine walking into the dissection hall of the GMC in 1974, where the smell of preserved cadavers lingered in the air and the sound of metal instruments clinking against each other could be heard in the distance. Amidst the chaos and confusion of students trying to navigate their way through the human body, there stood Shyam Bawage, Roll No 7, who knew Anatomy like the back of his hand.

Bawage was our classmate, hailing from a small town and having studied in a Marathi school. Despite this, he possessed a remarkable talent for teaching Anatomy and had the ability to keep his classmates spellbound with his lectures. In fact, just a couple of months after he had entered the portals of GMC and even before he took his first MBBS examination, he taught Anatomy to his classmates in the dissection hall, effortlessly guiding them through the intricacies of the human body.

With confidence and ease, Bawage took centre stage and began his lecture. His classmates gathered around him, eager to soak up his knowledge and expertise. As he spoke, he guided them through the intricate web of nerves, muscles, tendons, vessels, and viscera that made up the human body. His explanations were clear and concise, and his passion for the subject shone through in every word he uttered.

The students listened in awe as Bawage brought the body to life, painting a vivid picture of the inner workings of human anatomy. They watched in amazement as he deftly dissected the cadaver before them, revealing the secrets hidden within. They hung on his every word, captivated by his enthusiasm and expertise.

And so it went, day after day, as Bawage's classes became legendary among his classmates. They made a beeline for the dissection hall, eager to learn from the young man who knew Anatomy like no other. And in the process, they came to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the human body, thanks to Bawage's expert guidance and unwavering passion for the subject.

---

Of Wright, Wrath, and Warmth

Physiology arrived as a formidable subject. At an age when we were still learning how to manage our own lives, we were handed the twelfth edition of Textbook of Applied Physiology by Samson Wright, a book written in 1926 by an author who was only twenty-seven at the time. It was revered across the world and treated, in our classrooms, as nothing short of sacred.

I bought my copy from S. Bhattacharya and Company in Dhantoli, a bookshop that seemed to exist solely for the benefit of medical students. With Wright as our guide, we set out to understand how the heart pumped blood, how the lungs breathed life into us, how food turned into energy, how nerves sensed the world, and how muscles obeyed intention.

Progress was slow. One page could take hours. Concepts resisted easy understanding. Worse still, venturing beyond Wright into other textbooks was regarded as an act of heresy. Doing so invited the displeasure of our professor, as though one had strayed from the only true path.

Examinations reflected this severity. Questions were difficult, marking unforgiving. Passing demanded relentless effort, stamina, and—if truth be told—a measure of good fortune.

Not all learning, however, followed solemn lines. In theory classes, some of my more mischievous classmates occupied the back benches. Paper arrows flew. Movie songs were sung—one student taking the male part, another the female. The lecturer’s appeals for silence went largely unheeded. The young teacher appeared earnest but helpless, and the class unfolded in parallel streams of physiology and mischief.

Biochemistry proved no kinder. The Krebs cycle became our constant companion—and tormentor. We memorised every step: acetyl-CoA meeting oxaloacetate, citrate forming and breaking down, ATP emerging, carbon dioxide escaping, electrons finding their way. We were expected not only to understand this cycle but to reproduce it faultlessly in theory papers and viva voce examinations.

---

The Vaishwanars

One incident from 1974 remains vivid. Pramod Bhise was scheduled to present a seminar on the autonomic nervous system. He had prepared diligently, using a textbook by C. C. Chatterjee. Unfortunately for him, Professor P. S. Vaishwanar believed that only Samson Wright was worthy of trust.

The seminar began badly and deteriorated quickly. Professor Vaishwanar interrupted Bhise repeatedly, firing questions in the manner of Wright himself—an approach later noted by Alex Sakula in Wright’s obituary. Bhise faltered. When the professor discovered that Chatterjee, not Wright, had been Bhise’s source, his patience vanished. In a moment of fury, he struck Bhise’s name off the attendance register, tore out the page, and declared that he would never pass.

Bhise left the classroom humiliated and frightened. His father—a farmer from a small village in Akola district—was equally bewildered. He knew nothing of Wright or Chatterjee, only that his son had offended a powerful teacher. Summoning courage, he accompanied Bhise to the professor’s office and offered a heartfelt apology in simple Marathi.

This, however, did not have the desired effect. Professor Vaishwanar was incensed that a parent had been brought into the matter. It took time for his anger to subside. Eventually, it did. Bhise was forgiven, passed his examination on the first attempt, and went on to build a distinguished career as a microbiologist and professor.

If Professor Vaishwanar embodied awe and authority, Mrs. Vaishwanar represented its gentle counterbalance. She was an outstanding teacher of biochemistry, but more than that, she radiated kindness. Many of us called her “mummy,” not out of flippancy, but affection.

When her husband’s temper left students shaken, she was there to reassure us. She explained his strictness with a quiet smile, reminding us that even great teachers had their moods. Her presence softened the classroom. Her words restored confidence. She listened.

Together, the Vaishwanars taught us more than physiology and biochemistry. One instilled discipline through fear and exactitude; the other through warmth and understanding. Between them, we learnt not only science, but something of human nature—how authority can wound, and how kindness can heal.

And perhaps that, too, was part of our medical education.

In Nagpur, my day began on two wheels, from Baidyanath Chowk, before the city had properly opened its eyes. So did my friends—Chandrashekhar Meshram from Kamal Chowk, Gagan Panjwani from Jaripatka, Chandrashekhar Jambholkar from Indora Chowk, Murtaza Akhtar from Itwari, Aziz Khan from Gitti Khadan, and a few others whose faces I can still see, even if their names sometimes slip away. None of us cycled for fitness. We cycled because we had to.

The roads were gentler then, especially in the mornings. Shops were still lifting their shutters. Vegetable vendors were arranging their baskets. A tea stall would hiss and spit as the first kettle boiled. We pedalled through this half-awake city in white shirts and black shoes, trying to look like future doctors and not like boys who still missed home.

The bicycle gave us speed, but it also gave us cover. In those first months, it helped me slip past the places where seniors liked to loiter. I rode fast, kept my eyes ahead, and reached the campus without inviting attention. Ragging taught me one skill early: how to stay invisible.

For nearly six months my lunch box opened not in a hostel or canteen, but at a small roadside eatery in Ajni, near the TB ward. It had a few benches, a tired-looking counter, and tea that tasted the same every day. I didn’t go there for the food. I went because it felt safe. It became my small refuge in a city that still felt too large.

Years later, Chandrashekhar Meshram summed it up in one line: life was simple then, but never dull. Aziz remembered the rides more than the lectures—how the road, the effort, and the shared silence stitched us into a group without anyone announcing it.

Students today arrive on scooters and cars, sealed off from the city behind glass and helmets. I arrived slower and more exposed—dust on my trousers, sweat at the collar, and a mind that was still learning how to be brave. Yet those rides, with their small fears and small freedoms, remain one of the gentlest adventures of my first year.

But the bicycle was only one half of my Nagpur transport story. For many of us—especially those living in western Nagpur—the real institution was the city bus.

* * *

The Medico Bus

If you lived far from the college, the city bus was not public transport. It was a lifeline.

The ride to Government Medical College was about fifteen kilometres, and it took close to ninety minutes each way. It was slow, crowded, and stubbornly long. Yet it carved a deep groove in memory. Between 1973 and 1978, hundreds of medical students rode that route through summers that scorched the skin, monsoons that soaked you through, and winters that turned Seminary Hills unexpectedly cold and crisp. We boarded that bus for one reason: to reach the 8 a.m. class before the professor arrived.

I did not ride that bus every day, but in my first year I heard enough about it to feel as if I had. The stories travelled faster than the bus itself. And many of the details I remember now come from Sharad Jaitly—told over years, with the kind of affection that only old bus rides can earn.

Sharad and Rajiv Garg lived at Seminary Hills. Their day began with a bus that originated from Vayu Sena Nagar—Route No. 76 or 77, an irony no one could explain. Laxmi Rao was usually the first passenger. At six in the morning she would climb in, alert and upright, as if she had already attended one lecture.

By the time the bus reached the CPWD Type 4 colony around 6:20 a.m., Laxmi finally had company. Sharad and Rajiv would board—Lambu and Chhotu, as they called themselves—and declare that the day was blessed. Goddess Laxmi had arrived.

The bus then descended from Seminary Hills through air that felt unusually pure and cold for Nagpur. That was the luxury of the route—a brief stretch of freshness before the city woke up and turned noisy.

At Civil Lines, Harish Motwani joined, ready to start the party. At Ravi Nagar Square came Ashok Badhe, and then Tillya—late Vivek Kulkarni—who carried a booming laugh and a talent for turning even a sleepy bus into a debating society. Sharad said the moment Tillya entered, the bus woke up—driver, conductor, passengers, everyone.

From Ramnagar, Mohan Gupte and Ravindra Jharia boarded, sometimes with a couple of seniors. Jharia later recalled his own small daily pilgrimage. He would walk nearly a kilometre from Yogiraj Flats at Hindustan Colony on Amravati Road to Ravi Nagar Square just to catch this bus coming from Vayu Sena Nagar to GMC. The direct ticket cost twenty paisa—“a princely sum,” he would say, smiling. Seniors and even a few lecturers rode the same route, which meant jokes were carefully measured until the bus had moved on.

By the time the bus reached Laxmi Bhavan, the crowd thickened. Sanjay Gadre, Sanjay Chandorkar, Vinayak Sabnis, Hema Deoras, Avinash Deshmukh, Uday Gupte—our classical vocalist and instrumentalist—and, if memory serves, Renu Solanki. From that stop onward, the bus stopped being a city bus. It became a medico bus.

White coats began to dominate. Most students carried them folded over their arms, protected like examination hall tickets. Other passengers watched with mild curiosity—some as secret admirers, some as future aspirants.

After a month or two, the medical students bought monthly bus passes. Conductors began to recognise faces. There was a quiet mutual agreement: no questions asked. A nod was enough. The pass sat tucked safely inside textbooks—Hutchinson, Satoskar, or Thorpe—sharing space with underlined paragraphs and folded corners. Sharad joked that he would still pat his bag once in a while, not to check the pass, but to ensure he was carrying the right book—just in case the conductor suddenly became diligent.

Inside the bus, a small class system formed on its own. Medical students occupied the front half as if it were first class. The conductor did his rounds mostly in the rear half—the economy section. After a few months, he stopped bothering altogether. He would sit in a corner seat at the back, enjoying the same bumpy, sultry ride like everyone else. Even authority, it seemed, could grow tired.

At Shankar Nagar Square, there was one checkpoint that mattered. The bus passed Dr. B. S. Chaubey’s majestic bungalow on West High Court Road. But what reassured students was not the bungalow. It was his blue Fiat parked in the porch. If the Fiat was there, the bus was on time. If it wasn’t, the bus suddenly felt slower and the jokes became shorter.

The bus picked up the studious Dua brothers from the 1972 batch and moved towards Mor Bhavan at Jhansi Rani Square terminus, collecting more company on the way—Vandana Kamdar, Kishore Kedar, and others. By Mehadia Square, Dhantoli, the orchestra was almost complete. Ajit Pradhan, Harsha Sheorey, Jayant Pande, Ramesh Mundle, and Sriram Kane climbed in to complete what Sharad fondly called the ’73 Symphony.

From Seminary Hills to Ajni Chowk, the trip took about ninety minutes. Not bad for a four-cylinder, stick-shift ST bus making thirty stops in light traffic. They would disembark with the smug satisfaction of men who had extracted full value from a ticket.

By then it was usually around 7:30 a.m. White coats were pulled on—still carefully protected all through the ride—and the last kilometre to the amphitheatres was done on foot, briskly, in a respectable posture, led by Tillya, who still could not suppress his laughter.

There was one last ritual before the first lecture: an urgent visit to the toilet. Then they entered the hall, sat down, opened notebooks, aligned pens, and tried to look as if they had arrived effortlessly. The professor would begin with the “medical news” of the day—some new discovery, some warning, some current excitement in medicine—and the day would start.

Those mornings feel unreal now. They felt surreal even then. But I understand why Sharad remembers that bus route with such affection. It was not just a commute. It was a moving hostel, a daily parade through Nagpur, a small training in endurance—and, without anyone calling it so, a lesson in belonging.

Entering medical school is demanding for any student. For those of us who came from vernacular schools, it felt doubly so. Overnight, English became the language of instruction. It was like being pushed onto a steep hill and told to climb—without being warned how breathless it would make you. Anatomy and physiology arrived with vocabularies of their own. For a while, it seemed we were learning medicine and learning English at the same time, both at full speed. The distance from family only sharpened the strain.

The first few months at Government Medical College, Nagpur passed in a blur. I missed home—its ease, its familiar rhythms, the soft safety of Wardha. The food in Nagpur did little to console me: regular, plentiful, and nearly tasteless. And hovering over everything was the lingering threat of ragging. I did not know how to confront these small but persistent anxieties. I only knew how to endure them.

Homesickness settled in quietly but firmly. My friend Suhas Jajoo and I began to long for Wardha the way one longs for shade in May. Each weekend we found our way back, as if the train could carry us not just across distance, but back into comfort. To make these journeys easier, we bought a three-month railway pass. For the princely sum of ₹37, it gave us unlimited travel in a third-class compartment between Nagpur and Wardha. It was a small expense that bought an immense kind of relief.

Every Saturday evening we boarded a train bound for Wardha. By Monday morning—before the city had properly woken—we were back at Wardha station, waiting for the 4 a.m. Dadar–Nagpur Express. The ride to Ajni took about ninety minutes. From there we walked the last mile to the hostel, bags light, minds slowly bracing themselves for another week.

We followed this ritual for nearly three months. Gradually, without noticing exactly when it happened, Nagpur began to feel less alien. The corridors grew familiar. Faces stopped looking like strangers. The days became predictable. Homesickness loosened its grip.

Looking back, those early weeks taught me something simple: resilience does not arrive with a drumbeat. It grows quietly, like a habit. And it grows faster when you are not alone. More than textbooks or lectures, it was friendship that helped us learn to belong.

* * *

The First-Year Grind

After a year in a non-ventilated room at the Bachhraj factory’s ginning press, I finally moved to a better place—with Suhas. Our new home was a modest two-room flat on the first floor at 484, Hanuman Nagar, and it felt like an upgrade in dignity. It was only half a mile from the medical college—close enough to walk without feeling punished.

Hanuman Nagar was a favourite among medical students for the same reason: it was near the college, cheap enough, and full of flats that landlords were willing to rent to boys who lived on optimism and mess food. Years later, during batch reunions, we discovered that the families of our classmates Sujata Sawangikar and Sanjay Warhadpande also lived in Hanuman Nagar. At the time, we had no idea. We were too busy surviving.

To make life easier, we hired a cook—Parasnath Sharma Chaturvedi—who cooked for the five of us sharing the flat. He was a Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh: short, slender, and equipped with a nasal twang that could cut through any conversation. We were vegetarians then, and remain so now, and Parasnath cooked simple meals that felt, to us, almost perfect.

Once a month, Suhas and I would cycle to Itwari to buy grains, oil, and spices. We brought the bags back balanced on our cycles, as if we were transporting treasure. We also took turns bringing ghee from our respective homes—a small luxury that made even ordinary dal taste like a reward.

Ulhas, who was doing his MD residency, lived with the seriousness of a man guarding a national secret. We were only months away from our first MBBS exams, and Suhas and I had developed a fondness for newspapers—the Indian Express and Tarun Bharat. Ulhas considered this a dangerous hobby.

“Waste of time,” he declared.

And in those days, we did not debate such orders. We obeyed them. We followed Ulhas the way soldiers follow a general—no discussion, no rebellion, no “this is our right.” If he said stop the newspapers, we stopped them.

We shared meals with Dr. Suresh Chhajed and Prakash Gupta, Ulhas’s classmates from the GMC Class of 1968. Those dinners—simple food, tired bodies, and talk that drifted from medicine to life—quietly turned into friendships that lasted far beyond Nagpur.

As the first MBBS exam came closer, we grew serious. Money was always tight, and paper was not something you wasted on repeated mistakes. So we bought a slate and chalk and practised anatomy diagrams on it—draw, erase, draw again. The slate made perfect sense: economical, reusable, and unforgiving. If your diagram was poor, you wiped it out and tried again.

We studied wherever we could, whenever we could. Even bathing became a shared academic exercise. One of us would stand under the tap while another read aloud from a textbook outside, the bathroom door slightly ajar. We revised muscles and nerves with soap in our eyes and cold water on our shoulders. It sounds absurd now, but at the time it felt like discipline.

We were tired, often anxious, sometimes lonely—but we persisted. And we cleared the first year.

In retrospect, those months did not just teach us anatomy and physiology. They taught us how to manage scarcity, how to live with uncertainty, and how to keep going when you had no choice. They made us tougher, yes—but more importantly, they made us resourceful.

Not everyone in our class began medical college in Nagpur. Four of our batchmates arrived by detour, each carrying a different geography—and a different story—into the first-year dissection hall. Transfers were rare in those days; when they happened, they were noticed, remembered, and quietly admired.

Ravindra Jharia’s journey began close to home and then wandered far before circling back. He chose St. Francis De Sales College, Nagpur, for his pre-medical education and was selected as a Central Government nominee under the All-India Defence quota, his late father having served in the armed forces. The system sent him to S.S. Medical College, Rewa, in Madhya Pradesh. Ravi completed his First MBBS there and, in 1975, moved to Government Medical College, Nagpur.

By then, the Class of 1973 had already reached its sanctioned strength of two hundred students. To accommodate him, the Dean created an additional seat and assigned Ravi Roll Number 201. It was a small administrative adjustment, but a significant moment nonetheless—the first recorded inter-state transfer into a Maharashtra government medical college. Ravi arrived quietly, without ceremony, carrying with him the distinction of being an exception made official.

Pradeep Deshpande’s route to Nagpur began much farther north. Born in Hyderabad, his schooling traced a familiar Vidarbha arc—Buldhana Aided High School, Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya in Amravati, and Dharampeth College in Nagpur. When medical college admissions were announced, Pradeep found himself wait-listed at Number One for GMC Nagpur. Two options lay before him: Indira Gandhi Medical College, Nagpur, or Government Medical College, Srinagar.

He chose Srinagar.

Pradeep completed his First MBBS there and returned to GMC Nagpur in 1975. With hindsight, it proved a wise decision. Transfers between government medical colleges were administratively feasible; movement from a corporation-run institution was not. Had he chosen IGMC, he might have remained permanently anchored there. Instead, Pradeep glided back from Srinagar, his choice rewarded by the quiet efficiency of the system.

Vilas Mulay arrived from Warangal, carrying the easy confidence of someone used to moving across states. Born in Hyderabad to a father in central government service, Vilas studied at Kakatiya Medical College, Warangal, under Osmania University, before migrating to GMC Nagpur. He joined the EFGH batch of the Class of 1973 and was assigned Roll Number 203.

Vilas would later earn recognition well beyond medicine. As Lions Governor in 2002–2003, he oversaw activities across twenty-two districts of Maharashtra. He also nurtured a love for flying and travel, collecting continents with the same enthusiasm others collected degrees—Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States all found a place in his logbook.

C. P. Augustine’s transfer was the quietest—and the most puzzling—of the four.

He came to Government Medical College, Nagpur, after completing his First MBBS at MGIMS, Sevagram. Beyond that, almost nothing was known about him. No one could say where he came from, who his parents were, or what became of him after MBBS. Even today, no classmate claims any enduring connection with him.

Augustine, however, was impossible to miss. He was tall, powerfully built, with thick curly hair and spectacles that bore an uncanny resemblance to those Amitabh Bachchan wore in those years. In Hostel No. 2, his heavy, shuffling gait made him instantly recognisable. His presence inspired unease more than familiarity.

A recluse by temperament, he kept to himself—in the hostel, classrooms, laboratories, and wards. He spoke little, avoided questions about his past, and offered no explanations. In the silence he cultivated, rumours flourished. Stories followed him, and mystery clung tightly to his persona. Known to be quick-tempered, he was feared for his readiness to pick a fight.

After MBBS, Augustine did not complete his internship at GMC Nagpur.

He simply vanished.

C. P. Augustine remains the lone ranger of the Class of 1973—a man who passed through our years briefly and left behind more questions than memories.

Together, these four arrivals reminded us that medical education was not always a straight road. Some reached Nagpur by design, others by circumstance, and a few by the benevolent flexibility of a system that occasionally bent its own rules. They joined us not as outsiders, but as classmates, carrying with them stories that would, over time, blend seamlessly into the shared memory of our batch.

***

Paths That Diverged

Four students from the Class of 1973 left Government Medical College, Nagpur, after the First MBBS examination. Each went on to shape a life in medicine that began elsewhere, but remained linked to that early departure.

Rajan Bindu (Roll No. 50) was a man of the soil long before he became a man of the microscope. His roots in Wardha ran deep; his father served as the city’s Civil Surgeon in the early 1970s. Before GMC Nagpur beckoned, Rajan and I shared the benches of Jankidevi Bajaj Science College in Wardha.

Eventually, Rajan swapped the GMC Nagpur for the pathology labs of GMC Aurangabad. He completed his MD and eventually rose to head the Department of Pathology. He retired in 2019, having spent decades in a windowless world of slides and stains.

Hari Paranjpe (Roll No. 71) pursued an MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at KEM Hospital, Mumbai, and continues to practise in Chembur.

Anil Sharma (Roll No. 81), the son of Dr K. D. Sharma—then Professor and Head of the Department of Pathology at Government Medical College, Nagpur—left GMC soon after clearing First MBBS and moved to Grant Medical College, Mumbai. He went on to specialise in cardiology, earned a DM, and built a distinguished private practice at Lilavati Hospital. Over his career, he performed more than 20,000 angiographies and 8,000 angioplasties, witnessing at close quarters the rapid evolution of cardiology in Mumbai.

Though Anil spent barely two-and-a-half years in Nagpur—one at the Institute of Science and eighteen months at GMC—he never lost touch with old friends. He shared a particularly close bond with Shashikant Khaire, and many from his batch remained in regular contact with him.

Gifted with sharp wit and an infectious sense of humour, Anil wore his heart on his sleeve. He once defended the older generation of cardiologists with a line that captured him perfectly: “Good reasoning, like fine wine, may even improve with age.”

Four years before his death, when I called to wish him on his birthday, he spoke candidly—and comically—about his metastatic prostate cancer, describing how the disease was “merrily wandering” through his body. There was no trace of self-pity. He joked, laughed, and lived fully.

Anil fought his illness with courage, humour, and grace until his death on 17 August 2018—leaving behind admiration, affection, and laughter that outlived him.

Jaya Seolekar (Roll No. 89), or Jayashree Apte as she is known post-marriage, took the standard medical route: an MD in Anaesthesiology from BJ Medical College, Pune. She found her niche in Neuroanaesthesia and her life partner in Dr. Charudatta Apte, a neurosurgeon with a formidable reputation.

For years, Jayashree held the reins as CEO of the Sahyadri Group of Hospitals, a position she navigated with quiet authority. Her professional arc reached a corporate crescendo in July 2025, when Manipal Hospitals acquired Sahyadri in a massive ₹6,400 crore deal—one of the largest handovers in Indian healthcare.

But fame is a fickle beast. Despite her boardroom victories and medical degrees, Jayashree has discovered that in the public eye, she has been demoted to a secondary title: Radhika’s mother. Her daughter, Radhika Apte, has traded the sterile white of the hospital for the arc lights of cinema, becoming a versatile star in films like Andhadhun, Pad Man, Badlapur, and Parched. It is a classic irony—the CEO of a hospital empire eclipsed by a daughter who decided that acting, not anaesthesia, was the better way to get under people's skin.

As I write these lines, a quieter, heavier thought intrudes. Twenty-five of my classmates are no longer with us. When we entered medical college in 1973, each of us carried promise—some clearly defined, others still unformed—and time, which rearranged our roll numbers so casually, has been far less gentle in its final accounting.

Their absence is felt not in dramatic moments, but in small ones: in reunions where a familiar face does not appear, in conversations that end with a pause, in memories that now belong only to those who remain. Careers were cut short by cancers, heart attacks, strokes, accidents, and suicides, and yet when I think of that batch I still see them as they were then—young, noisy, invincible—walking into the dissection hall, unaware of how quickly life can change.

In the early 1970s, my days at Government Medical College, Nagpur, ran on a strict timetable—lectures, dissection hall, hurried meals, and long evenings bent over thick textbooks. I was new to the city and still learning its pace. Nagpur felt bigger than Wardha in every way: louder, faster, less forgiving. Hostel life had its own discipline too—early mornings, tired eyes, and an unspoken competition to see who could study the longest and complain the least.

Through the week, one thought kept me steady: Saturday evening, and my sister’s home. Pushpa and Tarachandji lived near Shankar Nagar Square, close to Hadas High School, with their children, Mamta and Manoj. Those visits became my small reward for surviving another week of anatomy, physiology, and the relentless pressure to keep up.

The moment classes ended on Friday, I would set out for Shankar Nagar Square, about eight kilometres from the hostel. I rode my bicycle along a route I could have taken with my eyes half-closed—through Dhantoli, past Panchsheel Square, along Canal Road, and then North Ambazari Road. By late afternoon the streets were often quiet, and Nagpur seemed to slow down, as if it had decided to let me pass without fuss.

I looked forward to that ride. The wind on my face, the soft whirr of the cycle chain, a birdcall from a tree I never stopped to identify, a stray dog trotting across the road—small things, but they made me feel free. For those few kilometres, I was not a medical student chasing lectures and deadlines. I was simply myself, riding home.

At my sister’s house, the welcome never changed—and it never grew old. The door would open to a burst of voices, and in moments the children would surround me, speaking at once, eager to report everything that had happened in the week. My sister’s face lit up the way only an elder sister’s face can. The tiredness of the hostel and the strain of the week fell away without being announced.

Tarachandji would join us soon after, and the conversation would find its own pace—easy, unhurried, and pleasantly ordinary. No one asked me what chapters I had finished. No one tested me on anything. For a few hours, I did not have to prove that I deserved my place in medical school.

Meals in that house were never modest. My sister cooked as if I had returned from a long famine, not a hostel. The kitchen smelled of ghee, jeera, and ajwain, and the table filled up quickly—dal baati churma, gatte ki sabzi, ker sangri, panchmel dal, bajre ki roti with a thick smear of homemade white butter, khichdi with kadhi, and a bowl of chaach that always tasted better at home. There would be papad, achar, and something sweet—moong dal halwa, or churma laddoos—as if she didn’t trust dinner to do its job alone.

Evenings slipped by in card games—Rummy, Teen Patti, and Bluff (I Doubt It)—with small jokes, family gossip, and laughter that came without effort. In that home, time did not race. It rested

Leaving was the hardest part. Sometimes the children tried their best to delay it—hiding my shoes, running off with my cycle keys, or inventing some urgent story just as I stood up. Their mischief was obvious and affectionate, and I played my part by searching slowly and pretending to be mildly fooled. It made me stay a little longer, and I was grateful for the excuse.

The ride back to the hostel was always quieter. I felt a small ache at leaving, but I also carried something back with me—steadiness, warmth, a sense of being held in place. I returned to my books less burdened, as if those few hours had repaired something that the week had worn down.

When I look back now, what I remember most is not the food or the games, but the ease of that love. It did not demand anything from me. It simply made room for me. My sister’s home was not a break from medical school—it was my refuge from becoming only a medical student.

Those weekends are still with me. Today, Shankar Nagar Square, North Ambazari Road, and West High Court Road are so crowded that even walking there feels like a battle. In the 1970s, my five-year-old nephew Manoj could run along those same roads while we watched him with easy confidence, not fear. Life moved slowly then; now the streets are packed—honking vehicles, restless traffic, and a blur of shops and restaurants. Yet the feeling remains unchanged: the warmth, the simplicity, and the quiet certainty that, in Nagpur, for two days each week, I belonged.

At our class reunion in 2014, we spoke of a classmate who had been a star in school—the kind teachers held up like a warning: Study like him, or suffer like the rest. In First MBBS, he fell short on attendance and the college did not allow him to sit for the exam. That one decision flattened him, and after that something in him seemed to loosen. In internal tests he began scoring seven or eight out of fifty—marks that looked less like failure and more like surrender.

He tried again and again, but the first year would not let him through. After five attempts, the college asked him to leave. He stepped out of medicine and settled somewhere else, carrying a quiet defeat that none of us quite knew how to speak about. That is what First MBBS could do: it was not merely an examination, it was a gate, and once it shut, it did not open easily.

In November 1974, all 204 of us sat for it.

By then my address had changed, as student addresses do—without ceremony, but with the faint sense that life was moving ahead whether you were ready or not. I had spent a year in a cramped room at Bachhraj Factory’s ginning press. In July I moved to Hanuman Nagar, and the new address—484, Hanuman Nagar, Nagpur—felt oddly reassuring, as if the number itself promised stability, at least until the exams were over.

Suhas Jajoo and I shared a modest flat owned by Mr Ishwar Deshmukh. We hired a cook—Pandit Parasnath Sharma Chaturvedi—a short, wiry Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh who ran our kitchen like a temple. His food was simple, clean, and always on time, and he spoke in a nasal twang that made even dal sound like an instruction.

Three seniors from the 1968 batch joined us for lunch and dinner—Ulhas Jajoo, Suresh Chhajed, and Prakash Gupta—and with them entered something we hadn’t known we needed: discipline. Ulhas, especially, had a gift for order. He wasn’t trying to play headmaster; he simply knew what worked, and believed firmly that time, like money, should not be squandered.

Once a month, Suhas and I cycled six kilometres to Itwari market for provisions—wheat, rice, tur dal, moong, groundnuts, oil, salt, spices—everything weighed carefully, tied in brown paper parcels, and loaded onto our bicycles like a travelling ration shop. Ghee arrived from home in steel tins, carrying the smell of kitchens we missed but never spoke about.

Cooking was done on an indigenous cooker Ulhas had brought from Kolkata. It needed only a few glowing coals, and once the lid was shut, the food stayed warm for hours. It was our microwave of the seventies—slow, silent, faithful.

Then came Ulhas’s most decisive reform: he banished newspapers.

Suhas and I read The Indian Express and Tarun Bharat with the seriousness of boys who believed the world would collapse if we missed the morning headlines. Ulhas saw it as a leak in the dam. “Too many distractions,” he said, and spoke to the newspaper vendor. The man stopped coming, just like that, and our day began without news, without politics, without the comfort of printed words that were not medical.

We did not argue. In those days, juniors did not debate orders. We followed them the way soldiers follow a general—quietly, without questions, and with the strange relief that comes when someone else takes charge of your chaos.

Paper was precious, so we drew anatomy diagrams on slates. Chalk squeaked, slate dust clung to our fingers, and muscles and nerves slowly began to sit in the mind where they belonged. We cross-questioned each other like examiners. There was no indulgence, no “later,” no “tomorrow.”

Even bathing became part of the syllabus. On winter mornings, Suhas would leave the bathroom door slightly ajar and I stood outside with a book, reading aloud—biochemistry pathways, physiology definitions, lines that sounded dead on paper but could decide your fate in a viva. He listened between shivers, soap and fear doing their work together. Later, we exchanged roles, as if knowledge could pass through steam.

It sounds absurd now, but at the time it felt normal, even necessary. November arrived, and the exams came like a storm you could see from far away—and still not feel prepared for.

***

We passed in the first attempt, and the relief was physical, sitting in the chest, warm and steady. But the results were harsh: nearly a quarter of the class did not cross the line. I entered the anatomy viva with dread and came out barely intact—107 out of 200.

We held our teachers in awe: Dr P. N. Dubey, Dr Gawhale, Navgirti madam. And then there was Dr P. N. Vaishwanar—the physiology professor with the temperament of a thundercloud. He insisted we read Samson Wright, a book that felt written for boys who spoke English at breakfast, while most of us had grown up on Marathi. If he sensed you had relied on Chandi Charan Chatterjee, his face changed. His anger was not theatrical; it was personal—like a man who had caught you cheating in a matter of faith.

So we learnt to keep our books in pairs: Gray with Cunningham, Kadasne with Gray, Samson Wright with Chatterjee, Harper’s Biochemistry beside whatever simplified text we could afford. We lived with these contradictions the way students always do—trying to look serious while simply trying to survive.

Among us was Abhimanyu Kapgate, the son of a farmer from Khandala, twenty-five kilometres from Bhandara. In anatomy, he did something close to unbelievable: he scored 303 out of 400 and took honours, something that happened once in a hundred cases. The examiners came at him like a fast-bowling attack. They tried everything—obscure arteries, nerve pathways, fetal maturation, insertions no sane person should remember at nineteen—but Kapgate stayed calm and answered as if the body had been drawn inside him.

Years later, on his birthday, I wrote on Facebook that he walked through muddy paddy fields with the same ease with which he once walked through the dissection hall. He went back to village life, practised medicine in Navegaon in Bhandara district, farmed wheat and cotton, and cared for people who had little money but endless need. He was the only one among us to take honours in Anatomy and still stop at MBBS—not out of lack of ability, but out of contentment. For him, that degree was not a stepping stone; it was enough.

Weeks passed before results were declared. When the news finally came, smiles appeared and refused to leave. Jayant Pande stood first in the class, taking honours in both Anatomy and Physiology. Kapgate followed with honours in Anatomy. Sharad Jaitly distinguished himself in Physiology and Biochemistry.

Passing First MBBS did more than move us into second year. It gave us confidence—the quiet belief that we might endure what lay ahead—and for a brief while, before the next syllabus rose like another wall, life felt light again.

Freedom, friends, and hostel food

In the spring of 1975, the gates of the GMC hostel finally creaked open, offering us a liberation that felt suspiciously like a coronation. For the top twenty rankers, the rewards were aristocratic: single rooms in the wings, a luxury of privacy that most first-year students could only contemplate with envy. The rest of us, the hoi polloi of the medical meritocracy, were content to share rooms in what we considered the promised land. We sold our rickety chairs and bruised tables, rolled up our mattresses, and marched toward the hostel buildings with the fervor of pilgrims reaching a holy site.

Suddenly, the suffocating oversight of landlords and the nervous scrutiny of electricity meters vanished. I was allotted Room 99 in Hostel No. 4, on the third floor. Whether by some cosmic design or a mere administrative fluke, that number attached itself to me like a second skin. For the next seven years—migrating from Hostel 4 to 3, then 2, and finally the postgraduate quarters—I would inevitably find my trunk parked outside a door marked "99." In the world of cricket, ninety-nine is a state of high anxiety, a "nervous" threshold where batsmen freeze. For me, it was a sanctuary; Room 99 became my personal 10 Downing Street, a fixed point in a shifting world.

Liberty is a dangerous thing in the hands of nineteen-year-olds. We used our newfound freedom to explore the nocturnal geography of the city. We would glide through the sleeping streets on our bicycles, pedaling toward Panchsheel Square for a late-night snack, or marching seven kilometers to Saroj Talkies to catch a midnight show. On one particularly absurd night, ten of us walked the entire distance to watch Ujala—a film nearly two decades old—reveling in the sheer pointlessness of the expedition. The hostel wardens, usually clinical registrars far too exhausted by the day’s rounds to play policeman, simply looked the other way.

However, the hostel had its own internal hierarchy, policed by "permanent residents"—men who had failed their finals so frequently they had become part of the architectural furniture. These veterans felt a pedagogical duty to "educate" us. Every night at nine, we were summoned like fresh recruits to a tawdry cabaret. We were made to parody popular songs, tell jokes, or act out scenes for their bored amusement. It was a tyranny of the mundane. Eventually, as with all autocrats, they grew weary of their own cruelty. The ragging ceased as abruptly as it had begun, leaving us with a strange sense of relief and a repertoire of stories we would polish for years to come.

Inside those walls, life was less about textbooks and more about the art of the distraction. We discovered the seductive, obsessive pull of Teen Patti. It was a game played with a religious intensity that saw us huddling over cards in sessions that bled into the dawn. I too was drawn into the orbit of the bluff, fueled by the irrational hope that luck would eventually recognize my merit and tilt the pile of small coins in my direction. We played until our meager pockets were emptied or sleep finally claimed us; fortunately, this particular flirtation with ruin was short-lived, as the glamour of the gamble eventually faded.

When we weren't losing coins at cards, we were losing our dignity in the Table Tennis hall on the second floor. Most of us possessed the athletic grace of a wounded hippopotamus; we had not so much "acquired skills" as we had developed a rudimentary ability to ensure the ball landed somewhere—anywhere—on the opposite side of the table. It was a game of frantic scurrying and hopeful lunges, played with a seriousness that was entirely inversely proportional to our actual talent. If the ball stayed on the table for more than three seconds, it was considered a sporting miracle.

Yet, the memory that remains most vividly etched in the mind is the sensory assault of the morning bath. In those days, geysers were a decadent fantasy and buckets were non-existent. The bathroom doors had been beaten to death by generations of impatient students and could no longer be closed, meaning one simply learned to abandon modesty. We would sit beneath the cold tap, eyes squeezed shut against the chill, and surrender to the flow. Our relationship with water was one of unthinking trust; we drank directly from the washbasin taps, blissfully ignorant of RO systems or the modern fetish for sterilization. There was no "safe" water then—only water—and aside from the occasional, character-building bout of dysentery, we remained remarkably, perhaps stubbornly, healthy.

The hostel mess provided a different kind of training: an education in endurance. We were served a democratic misery of pale brinjal-potato curries, rotis as dry as ancient parchment, and a dal so watery it could have been used as a laboratory reagent. Sundays, however, were a festival of gluttony. When the news of unlimited gulab jamuns broke, a strange expectancy would settle over the wing. I watched in horrified admiration as boys challenged each other to feats of athletic consumption, swallowing dozens of syrup-soaked balls without a hint of a burp.

Most rooms were a chaotic sprawl of books and film star posters, but I took a pride in my own quarters. Room 99 was an island of order. It was always clean and tidy. Those years shaped us in ways the lecture halls never could. We learned the high art of shared survival, how to tolerate a neighbor’s snoring, and how to forgive the small trespasses of communal life. We were young, we were invincible, and we were perfectly happy to drink from the tap and hope for the best.

---

Our world was a triangle of the library, the ward, and the hostel. The "scholars" in our batch walked the corridors with thick, heavy copies of Goodman & Gilman’s Pharmacology cradled in their arms like holy relics. They seemed to believe that if they carried the weight long enough, the knowledge would enter through their skin by osmosis. The rest of us, seeking clarity over bulk, found our savior in Dr. R.S. Satoskar. He wrote the way a good teacher speaks—simple, direct, and determined to keep you sane while you memorized the half-life of diuretics.

But it was Pathology that truly stole our hearts, and we had one man to thank for it: William Boyd. To us, Boyd wasn't a dry academic; he was a storyteller who happened to hold a scalpel. He didn't just list symptoms; he painted them. He could describe a diseased gallbladder as if he were writing a Gothic novel: “graceful, fragile gossamer folds of the mucosa… loaded down by dense yellow opaque masses, much as a delicate birch tree might be weighed down by a load of snow.” He wrote that influenza could cross a continent as fast as an express train, and he famously compared the lesions of syphilis to “the list of the ships in the Iliad.” We didn't just read Boyd to pass; we read him to see the poetry in the tragedy of disease.

***

The Anatomy of a Prank

Life in the hostel was a delicate balance of intense study and high-velocity nonsense. Among us was Abhimanyu Kapgate, a boy from a small village in Bhandara whose English was hesitant but whose memory was a biological miracle. Kapgate knew Gray’s Anatomy with the devotion of a priest. You could point to any obscure nerve or a minor muscle in the palm, and he would recite its origin, insertion, and nerve supply with rhythmic precision.

However, Kapgate’s expertise ended at the human body. Cricket was, to him, a baffling foreign ritual. One humid evening in Room 99, Narayan Dongre decided to test the limits of Kapgate’s literal mind. We were all obsessed with eponymous syndromes—Guillain-Barré, Cushing’s, Conn’s. With a perfectly straight face, Dongre asked Kapgate about the “Greg Chappell and Andy Roberts Syndrome.” He followed it up with the “Tony Greig Syndrome,” discussing them as if they were rare tropical conditions found only in the most advanced textbooks.

Kapgate’s pride was his undoing. He didn't admit ignorance. That night, while we stifled our laughter, he went to the library and searched the medical indexes like a man possessed. He spent hours turning pages, hunting for a pathology that only existed on a cricket pitch. He returned late, looking defeated and weary. When we finally broke the news—that these were cricketers, not diseases—he was furious. He vowed a revenge that, like most hostel threats made before the lights went out, was forgotten by breakfast.

***

The Sudden Silence

But the mid-seventies in a medical hostel weren't just about Boyd’s prose or locker-room pranks. There was a shadow that lived in the corners, born of a system that was rigid, hierarchical, and often indifferent to the human cost of failure.

The afternoon of April 21, 1975, is a memory that remains frozen in time. Chandrabhan Chattani—Chandar to all of us—was a quiet, reliable boy from a business family in Yavatmal. He was the person you played table tennis with to unwind, or the one you shared a quick, oily breakfast with in the canteen. But the Second MBBS University exams had turned into a monster he couldn't outrun.

Just before the Forensic Medicine paper, while we were all frantically reciting toxicological formulas in the corridors, Chandar retreated to his room in Hostel 4. He had been reading Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End—a grim, desert-toned mystery. Perhaps its themes of inevitable endings offered a dark comfort to his own despair. Fearing he could never meet the expectations of his family, he took an overdose and chose a permanent exit.

The hostel let out a collective, ragged gasp as the news spread. The crushing irony arrived a month later when the results were posted: Chandar had passed the paper he feared with a 58. He was qualified to move forward, but he wasn't there to see the notice board.

A year later, the silence returned when we lost Pramila Khapre in the girls’ hostel. She was a girl of impeccable grace and beautiful handwriting, but she, too, found the weight of the white coat too heavy to bear. We moved on because the system demanded it. Classes continued, and the wards beckoned. But the corridors of the GMC hostel never felt quite the same again. Some absences don't leave quietly; they remain as a soft, persistent echo in the back of your mind, reminding you that in medicine, the most fragile thing we ever handle isn't the patient—it’s often ourselves.

The Verdict

The university is indifferent to grief; the machinery grinds on. When the results were finally pinned to the notice board, we crowded around, searching for our names. For some, the marks were a source of relief; for others, they were a heartbreaking reminder of what might have been.

My own marksheet is a yellowing relic now. It isn't the transcript of a genius, but of a student who had finally found his footing in the world of clinical logic.

Looking at these numbers decades later, I don't see the marks so much as I see the hours spent under a dim hostel lamp. These figures were our ticket out of the "middle overs" and into the real game. We had survived the grind and the silence. Ahead of us lay the hospital wards and the patients who would eventually teach us more than Boyd ever could.

June 1975: When the air changed

In June 1975, while we were wrestling with Pathology and Pharmacology—trying to understand how disease invades the human body—the country fell ill in another way. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency.

Until then, Delhi felt far away from us medical students, like a radio play in a language we did not fully speak. But the Emergency did not stay on the front page. It entered the air. A hush settled over the country, as if someone had lowered the volume of India.

On the morning of June 26, the radio announced it in a calm voice.

“The President has proclaimed Emergency. There is nothing to panic about.”

For a day or two, we floated in confusion. We did not know what it meant, or where it would lead. The meaning arrived not through a speech, but through the morning newspapers.

When Tarun Bharat and The Indian Express reached the hostel, we stared at them as if someone had tampered with the print. The pages were scarred with black ink. Where headlines should have been, there were gaping voids—blank columns printed as protest. A silent scream.

Only later did we learn what had happened in the night: power supplies cut, presses raided, editors threatened. Words were being arrested before people were.

***

Silence, Rumours, and the Hostel Mess

We were medical students. We were insulated from the worst of it. But you did not need to be an activist to feel fear. It seeped into ordinary life—into pauses, into lowered voices, into the way people stopped speaking mid-sentence.

The press was gagged. Leaders who had fought for freedom were jailed. Even Wardha, usually content to mind its own business, felt the tremors. We watched with quiet dread as Suman and Thakurdas Bang—the Gandhian parents of Abhay Bang, my senior from the 1968 batch—were imprisoned. Authoritarianism had acquired a local address.

We heard whispers of forced sterilisations and demolition drives. The “midnight knock” stopped being a phrase and became a possibility.

In the hostel mess, where debates usually began with watery dal and ended with Sunil Gavaskar, voices dropped.

“Did you hear who was picked up in Bombay?”
“Is it true about forced sterilisations?”

We traded rumours like contraband, and looked over our shoulders as we did it.

I was not an activist. I did not march or distribute pamphlets. My rebellion was quieter. I read.

We hunted for what the state wanted hidden—pieces by Kuldip Nayar, C.R. Irani, A.D. Gorwala, and Arun Shourie; the fearless columns of Kamleshwar in Sarika; the editorials of M.G. Vaidya in Tarun Bharat. We read the way thirsty people drink water—quickly, greedily, and with a faint guilt, as if reading itself could be overheard.

The censorship was suffocating. Newspapers were forced to submit copy for clearance. Editors were threatened. Dissent invited trouble. Yet a few publications found quiet ways to protest—leaving blank spaces where editorials should have been, printing careful lines that still carried a sting, refusing to pretend that everything was normal. In those days, even a small truth printed in black and white felt like an act of courage.

Hostel rooms turned into debating societies. Late into the night, I would sit with friends, speaking in hushed tones, dissecting the difference between order and tyranny, between discipline and fear. One of us had a family member jailed. That brought the Emergency out of the newspaper and into the room.

***

March 1977: The transistor vigil

The suffocation lasted twenty-one months. Then, in early 1977, as we slogged through Final MBBS, came the surprise announcement: elections.

The fear did not vanish, but it stepped back. In its place came a nervous, electric expectancy—the feeling that something might finally move.

On the evening of March 20, 1977, Hostel No. 4 was not a place of study. Textbooks lay abandoned. Stethoscopes hung like tired ornaments. We had no television. No live visuals. No flashing tickers. Only transistor radios—Bush, Murphy, Philips—small crackling boxes that carried the fate of the country in a thin voice.

We huddled around them as if warmth would improve reception. We adjusted antennae with the seriousness of surgeons. The corridors were dim. Cigarettes glowed. Somewhere a ceiling fan complained.

Then the results began to come in.

Indira Gandhi was trailing.
Sanjay Gandhi was losing.
The Congress, which had felt invincible for as long as we could remember, was slipping.

When it was confirmed that the Prime Minister herself had lost her seat, the hostel erupted. Doors flew open. Boys poured into corridors. There was shouting, laughter, dancing, hugging—people embracing classmates they had never even greeted properly.

It was not merely politics. It felt personal. As if a heavy hand had lifted from our shoulders.

***

Three buckets of freedom

In the middle of this joy, my friends Nandkishor Chandak and Omprakash Bohra decided that cheering was not enough. A moment like this needed food. A feast. A ritual.

The mess was closed. But young men, when determined, can cook democracy out of anything.

They found three large plastic buckets—usually meant for bathing—scrubbed them clean, and made an enormous batch of kaccha chiwra: puffed rice, roasted peanuts, raw onions, green chillies, coriander, salt, and oil. Simple, sharp, honest food. Like the mood of the night.

They carried the buckets up to the terrace of Hostel 2 like priests carrying offerings. Everyone was invited—seniors, juniors, toppers, backbenchers, saints, sinners.

We stood under a star-filled sky, eating with our hands, mouths burning from chillies, hearts strangely light. We talked late into the night, not as future doctors, but as young citizens tasting something we had missed without fully knowing it.

Freedom.

***

After the cheer, the books returned

By morning, the radios fell silent. The buckets were washed. The terrace emptied. And the academic calendar returned, stern and unmoved.

Final MBBS still waited.

The next day, we went back to Pathology, Pharmacology, and thick textbooks that did not care who won elections. But something had shifted inside us. We had seen a nation hold its breath—and then exhale.

Years later, I would forget many details of those months. But I would never forget the blackened newspaper columns, the whispered hostel conversations, and that night when a crackling transistor told us that fear had limits.

And on a hostel terrace, three plastic buckets tasted like democracy.

Heat, Harrison, and Hotel thali

The euphoria of the election season faded quickly, as such excitements always do, and the academic calendar resumed its indifferent march. Revolutions could wait; examinations could not.

By the time summer settled over Nagpur in 1977, the city felt less like a place to live and more like something to endure. The sun did not merely shine but pressed down with a steady, exhausting force that softened the tar on the roads and turned the afternoon air into something you pushed aside with your hands. By noon the loo began to blow, hot and gritty, as though someone had opened the door of a furnace.

Most students escaped as soon as they could. Trunks were packed, bicycles loaded, tickets booked. They returned to homes where there were verandas, shade, and mothers who insisted on second helpings of food. Hostel No. 2 emptied within days. Footsteps grew rare. A closing door echoed down the corridor longer than it should have, like a sound reluctant to die.

I stayed back.

The final MBBS examinations were only weeks away, and I told myself that the silence would help me study. Without chatter, card games, or late-night gossip, the days would belong to the books.

Silence, I discovered, has its own weight.

To fight the heat, I bought a second-hand desert cooler from a scrap dealer near the bus stand. It was a dented metal contraption that rattled and coughed when switched on and demanded buckets of water every hour. It cooled nothing with conviction. Mostly it exhaled damp air that clung to the skin. By evening my room felt less like a hostel and more like a cave with a leaking roof.

At night I sprinkled water on the bedsheet and lay down carefully, hoping to borrow a few minutes of coolness before sleep slipped away. The days settled into a routine of reading, sweating, and turning pages. Harrison lay open beside Love and Bailey, their thick spines propped like small walls around me, while a thin line of sweat travelled slowly down my back and gathered at the edge of the chair.

Just when the stillness began to feel oppressive, there was a knock on the door.

I opened it to find Omprakash Singhania standing outside with a small suitcase in one hand and that familiar half-smile on his face, the expression of someone who knows the situation is unpleasant but has decided to endure it anyway.

“You’re here too?” I asked.

He nodded. “Couldn’t study at home.”

That was explanation enough.

We were an unlikely pair. I came from a middle-class household in Wardha where money was counted carefully and nothing was wasted. Singhania belonged to a prosperous family and carried himself with an ease I envied. He owned a Lambretta scooter, which in those days was as good as a badge of privilege.

But the final MBBS examination has a way of flattening such differences. Under that pressure, everyone looks the same—tired, anxious, hopeful.

We settled into a rhythm without discussing it. Through the day we studied in our separate rooms, emerging occasionally to test each other.

“What are the signs of mitral stenosis?”
“How will you manage an acute abdomen?”
“Causes of fever with rash?”

The questions came quickly, like table tennis shots. Somewhere between asking and answering, the fear lost its sharp edges. Speaking things aloud made them manageable.

By early evening the heat softened slightly and the sky turned a dusty orange. That was our signal. Singhania wheeled out the Lambretta, kicked it alive with two firm strokes, and I climbed on behind him. As we rode out of the hostel gates, the wind hit our faces and for a few minutes the day’s fatigue dissolved into that simple, boyish pleasure of movement.

We usually headed to Sitabuldi, to a modest place called Alankar near Anand Talkies. It had metal chairs, scratched Formica tables, and a ceiling fan that squeaked in protest, but to us it felt like a small refuge. For two rupees and fifty paise we could order the special thali—dal, rice, two chapatis, a vegetable, and a little curd served in a steel katori.

The food was ordinary and always the same, yet after a day of heat and revision it tasted generous. We ate slowly and talked about everything except what frightened us most. Families, teachers, rumours from the wards, plans for the future. Sometimes we laughed at nothing in particular. Sometimes we simply sat without speaking, grateful for the company.

I tried to pay my share. He waved it away as if it were a trivial matter, and we settled accounts later in ways that neither of us kept track of. What mattered was not the arithmetic.

Looking back, what I remember most from that summer is not the cooler’s rattle or the weight of Harrison in my hands, but those evening rides through warm air and the quiet comfort of a friend who had chosen, like me, to stay back and face the same anxiety.

Examinations test knowledge, but they also test endurance. And endurance, I learned that summer, becomes easier when it is shared—when someone sits across the table, tears a chapati in half, and asks you one more question before the night begins.

That summer, between the heat, the textbooks, and those evening rides, I learnt a lesson that was not in any syllabus:

Success is rarely a solo journey.

Ambition is heavy. But it becomes bearable—sometimes even enjoyable—when a friend carries it with you, along with a thali.

The Final MBBS curriculum was a hydra-headed beast. Five major subjects, each demanding a different variety of stamina — Medicine with Paediatrics, Dermatology, and Psychiatry trailing in her royal wake; Surgery with Orthopaedics and ENT tucked under its wing; Obstetrics and Gynaecology; Ophthalmology; and the often-neglected stepchild of the whole enterprise, Preventive and Social Medicine, which we called PSM with the casual contempt that only the young and ignorant can manage.

But a medical college is not built on syllabi. It is built on teachers.

In the seventies, Government Medical College, Nagpur was not merely an institution. It was a galaxy of stars — men and women of formidable calibre, frighteningly disciplined, and completely devoted to the hospital in a way that people born into a later era of private clinics and consulting fees will find almost impossible to imagine. They did not treat teaching as a job. They treated it as a duty, and the distinction mattered more than any salary scale could reflect.

They were full-time. No professor rushed through a lecture because an afternoon appointment was waiting across town. Their world began at the college gate and ended in the wards. That single-mindedness gave them a moral authority that we did not question and could not have dismantled even if we had tried. We simply obeyed, learnt, and made every effort not to look foolish.

***

Bhande Plot: Our 'Posting' and Our Picnic

PSM arrived in final year, perhaps to remind us that India did not live only in wards and operation theatres. We were posted to the Urban Health Centre at Bhande Plot, Bapunagar — barely three kilometres from the college. Each student had to 'adopt' five families, monitor their health, understand their living conditions, and function as a kind of primary doctor who was in practice still several examinations away from the right to that title. Usually Dr. Khobragade accompanied us, translating the community into something our ward-trained eyes could understand.

The diseases of the seventies were different, too. Diabetes and hypertension had not yet become the daily background noise of Indian medicine. Instead, we encountered the older enemies — polio, tetanus, rabies, diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis, leprosy. Scabies was everywhere, persistent and unglamorous. Jaundice came and went like a seasonal visitor, unremarkable to the families it afflicted.

These visits should have made us humble. They should have taught us that the real India lived not in the teaching hospital's gleaming corridors but in these lanes, in cramped rooms where five people shared a single charpoy and the water supply was a shared tap that ran for two hours a day.

But we were twenty.

For us, Bhande Plot was not a lesson in social medicine. It was a sanctioned escape from the suffocation of college — an excuse to walk in the open air, talking and laughing, with the sun on our faces and no senior registrar to impress. I confess I do not now remember the advice I gave those five families, or whether anything I said made a lasting difference to a single one of them. Public health felt slow and ordinary, while the wards felt urgent and heroic. We preferred heroic. We were twenty.

Only later, much later, did I understand that we had been walking through the very heart of Indian healthcare — and calling it a picnic.

***

The PSM Paper: An Ambush

Our Final MBBS examination opened with PSM, which we had prepared for with the casual confidence of soldiers expecting a small, manageable skirmish.

Then the question paper arrived.

The mood in the hall changed within minutes. The questions were obscure, oddly specific, and designed with what felt like a personal vendetta against anything we had actually studied. They came at angles we had not anticipated. They demanded precision about things we had treated as background reading — the kind of facts one files away under 'probably not important.' We wrote what we could, driven by panic and momentum, filling pages with confident-sounding sentences whose foundations were considerably less confident than their tone suggested.

We walked out stunned. Back at the hostel, the atmosphere was funereal. The usual post-examination chatter — the relief, the post-mortem, the cheerful argument about whether answer B or answer C was correct — had entirely vanished. From the girls' hostel, we heard someone crying. Then more than one. The sound travelled across the campus in the still evening air and sat in our chests like something solid.

That evening, we gathered in the common room in what amounted to a council of war, dressed in pyjamas. We did not study. We consoled. We reassured one another. We made a pact, unspoken but understood: one bad paper cannot ruin five years. And without resorting to any lofty language, we discovered something that no curriculum had formally taught us — that the first duty of a doctor is to offer hope, even when he has none himself to spare.

The remaining papers passed in a blur of nervous energy, fractured sleep, and the peculiar discipline that comes from having no alternative to continuing. Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics. We wrote, revised, drank too much tea, slept in fragments, woke anxious at four in the morning, and wrote again. When the last bell rang and the last answer book was collected, relief arrived not as a thought but as a physical sensation — something in the muscles, something behind the eyes.

***

Two Practicals and a Small Miracle

Theory tests memory. Practicals test nerve — and the difference, when you are standing at a patient's bedside with two senior examiners watching your hands, is not a small one.

Medicine was my sanctuary. I had loved its logic from the beginning — the detective work of it, the satisfaction when a constellation of signs resolves into a diagnosis that clicks into place like a key in a lock. My long case was Malabsorption Syndrome. My examiners were Dr. S.M. Patil and Dr. Mrs. Lata Patil, both strict, both fair, and both entirely capable of detecting uncertainty at twenty paces.

But at the bedside, something steadied inside me. The history flowed without hesitation. The signs made sense, each one pointing in the same direction. The differential diagnosis lined up in order. Even the viva questions, which can ambush you in unexpected directions, arrived gently that day. I walked out of the examination hall feeling lighter than I had felt in weeks, as though a physical weight had been lifted from somewhere behind my sternum.

I scored 141 out of 200 — a distinction-level score that would later, though I did not know it yet, open the door to my MD.

Obstetrics and Gynaecology was an entirely different story.

I had never been comfortable with the mechanics of labour. The instruments terrified me — the forceps with their confident curves, the entire choreography of a managed delivery that more experienced hands performed with such apparent ease. I still remembered, with a clarity that discomfort preserves better than pleasure, a labour room posting in which I had been asked to conduct a delivery. My hands shook so badly that the slippery newborn almost slid entirely out of my grasp. A nurse caught the baby with reflexes faster than my career had yet managed to develop.

I entered the Obstetrics and Gynaecology practical carrying all of that history, and considerably more dread than I was showing.

And then, as if the gods of examination halls had decided to be merciful for once, I received a case of Placenta Praevia — a textbook diagnosis, heavy on conceptual understanding and blessedly light on the kind of mechanical prowess that had always defeated me. No confusing rotations. No forceps. No instruments to fumble with under the quiet, watchful gaze of a superior.

I spoke with a confidence I did not entirely feel. I explained antepartum haemorrhage, I described the danger signs with appropriate gravity, and I set out clearly why Caesarean section would be the necessary management. The examiners — Dr. Mrs. Dubey and Dr. Sule — listened with the particular attentiveness of people who have heard every version of this explanation and are deciding whether this one is genuinely understood or merely memorised.

When the marks arrived, I looked at the number for rather longer than was strictly necessary.

141 out of 200. Again.

I still call it a miracle, plain and simple, and I see no reason to revise that assessment.

***

The Notice Board

Six weeks after the last paper, the results were pinned to the notice board. A crowd gathered the way crowds always gathered around that board — pushing, craning, some calling out numbers, somebody laughing too loudly, somebody else going very quiet in the particular way that means the news is not good.

I found my roll number.

1031 out of 1600. Sixty-four point four per cent.

In the era of inflated marks and carefully curated academic profiles, it may not look extraordinary. But in those rigorous halls of Government Medical College, Nagpur — where the examiners signed their names to your competence and meant it — it felt like a triumph. I had cleared Medicine theory with 59 and practicals with 62. My examiners — Dr. Mohgaonkar, Dr. Bharaswadkar, Dr. Doifode, Dr. Dekate, and the Patils — had looked at what I knew and decided it was sufficient. That decision, I understood even then, was not a formality.

I looked at the mark sheet for a long time. Not because I needed to read it again. But because I wanted to fix it, to be certain it was real and not some examination-season hallucination born of too little sleep and too much anxiety.

A deep, quiet peace settled somewhere in the chest.

I had done it.

I was no longer a student. I was Dr. S.P. Kalantri.

And in those simpler times — before the feverish race for postgraduate seats began before the finish line was even in sight, before every result became a stepping stone to the next competition rather than an achievement in its own right — we were content. We had climbed the mountain. We had not yet started looking for the next one.

The view, for a moment, was beautiful. And we were young enough to know it.

District Hospital, Yavatmal

After passing the final MBBS examination, the next step was a compulsory year-long internship—six months in an urban setting and six in a rural one. At that point, I faced a choice that appeared simple on paper but carried its own weight: should I remain within the familiar walls of Government Medical College, Nagpur, or should I step out into the districts of Vidarbha?

Staying back meant comfort—known corridors, familiar faces, predictable routines. Yet, somewhere within me, a quieter voice suggested otherwise. It urged me to leave what I knew and test myself elsewhere. I listened to it.

And so, I chose the district hospital at Yavatmal, over seventy kilometres from Wardha. I do not recall the precise reasoning that led me there, but I remember the feeling clearly—a pull towards the unknown, and a belief that medicine, if it was to teach me anything lasting, would do so away from convenience.

Yavatmal was not entirely unfamiliar. My elder brother Ashok lived there, which softened the edges of relocation. For meals, we depended on a mess run by a Jain lady, Mrs. Lodha, whose simple vegetarian food sustained us through long days and longer nights. It was not memorable cuisine, but it was dependable, and that mattered.

Each morning, after breakfast, I walked to the district hospital, prepared—though not fully aware—for what awaited me.

Three of my classmates also chose Yavatmal: Atiya Mamdani, Mohan Gupte, and Omprakash Singhania, all of whom had family homes there and were day scholars. Together, we stepped into a hospital that was busy, under-equipped, and relentless in its demands.

We worked under Dr. Phalke, the Civil Surgeon, and alongside a dedicated group of medical officers—Dr. and Mrs. Dharmadhikari, Dr. and Mrs. Ranade, Dr. Bhalme, Dr. Gadekar, Dr. Tayade, Dr. Kedar Rathi, and Dr. Baheti. For a young intern, the pace was unforgiving. Patients arrived continuously, and the hospital never truly rested. Neither did we.

The outpatient department began each day with consultants who were experienced clinicians but far removed from academic medicine. Prescriptions reflected the era: tetracycline, sulfadiazine, and anti-amoebic drugs were commonly used. Quinolones had not yet appeared; cephalosporins were unknown. In the wards, injection procaine penicillin and strepto-penicillin were the mainstay for a wide range of fevers.

Facilities were rudimentary. There were no ECG machines, no ultrasound, no CT or MRI scans. The hospital had no ICU, no NICU, and no dedicated accident unit. Specialists were absent—no cardiologist, no neurologist, no cardiac surgeon. Dr. Belsare, a BAMS physician, doubled as the anaesthesiologist, a role he performed with calm confidence.

The hospital catered to a vast catchment area—Pusad, Darwha, Digras, Umarkhed, Kelapur, Ralegaon, and Wani—places with little or no access to medical care. The flow of patients was constant. We worked almost round the clock, learning quickly that fatigue was a luxury we could not afford.

What the hospital lacked in technology, it compensated for in lessons. Diagnosis depended entirely on history-taking, physical examination, and judgement. There were no investigations to hide behind. We relied on our senses, our reasoning, and sometimes our instincts. It was here that medicine shed its academic polish and revealed its bare essentials.

Over time, my dedication did not go unnoticed. The medical officers grew fond of me. The Dharmadhikari couple often shared their tiffin with me—a gesture that meant more than the food itself. Gradually, I was entrusted with more responsibility.

I learnt to perform lumbar punctures and venesections with growing confidence. I assisted in several surgeries and once came close to performing an appendicectomy on my own—a thought that would alarm me today, but thrilled me then.

Diarrhoea was among the most common—and dangerous—conditions we encountered. Patients arrived dehydrated, with sunken eyes, feeble pulses, and collapsing blood pressure. Renal failure was an ever-present threat. Establishing intravenous access was often impossible. Venesection became the only option.

I performed it repeatedly, so often that my hands learnt the procedure before my mind did. Eventually, I could do it with ease—even in newborns, where precision mattered immensely. With each successful attempt, my confidence deepened, not arrogantly, but steadily.

One skill I took particular pride in acquiring was the writing of patient progress notes. Every morning and evening, I carefully documented vital signs and clinical changes, paying close attention to clarity and handwriting. Slowly, my notes began to stand out. Colleagues noticed. I felt, for the first time, that diligence itself could be a form of competence.

Looking back, the Yavatmal internship was neither comfortable nor glamorous. But it was honest. It taught me how to practise medicine when resources are scarce and expectations immense. It shaped my clinical instincts and my resilience.

More than anything else, it confirmed what I had suspected when I chose to leave Nagpur: real learning often begins when comfort ends.

Learning the Art of Lumbar Puncture

During my internship at the district hospital in Yavatmal in 1978, I encountered a moment that remains sharply etched in memory. A twenty-six-year-old man was admitted with classical features of bacterial meningitis—high fever, altered sensorium, and neck stiffness. A lumbar puncture was essential.

I had never performed one before.

I approached a medical officer for guidance. He was a surgeon, senior to me, and technically responsible for supervising interns. Without even looking up, he refused. There was no explanation, no reassurance, no alternative offered. I was left alone—with the patient, the needle, and my own uncertainty.

I had little choice. I reviewed the steps carefully, positioned the patient, identified the landmark, and paused for a moment. A brief prayer escaped my lips—not out of ritual, but necessity. Then I advanced the needle.

When clear cerebrospinal fluid began to drip, I felt a quiet surge of relief—not triumph, but gratitude. I sent the CSF for cytology and biochemistry and started the patient on penicillin. Over the next several days, I followed him closely, recording his temperature, level of consciousness, and neurological signs with care. Slowly, steadily, he improved. On the tenth day, he walked out of the ward.

Only later did the larger question surface: how does a medical officer entrusted with patients and trainees refuse to teach a life-saving procedure? Such indifference was not unusual in government hospitals of that era, where poverty often dulled expectations and neglect passed quietly as routine.

The incident disturbed me, but it did not deter me. If anything, it reinforced a belief that would guide me throughout my career—that medicine demands responsibility not only to patients, but to those who are still learning its craft.

---

An April Fool’s Lesson

Memory has a way of softening embarrassment. Over forty years later, I can now recall a foolish prank I played during my Yavatmal internship with a mixture of amusement and unease.

It was April Fool’s Day. In what I believed to be harmless fun, I wrote a short note asking Dr. Dharmadhikari to report to my chamber, signing it with a careful imitation of the civil surgeon’s signature. At the time, the forgery seemed impressive; the consequences did not.

Dr. Dharmadhikari, unsuspecting, presented the note to the civil surgeon himself. The reaction was immediate and bewildered. The civil surgeon denied writing it—but could not deny the signature, which matched his own alarmingly well.

Realisation dawned quickly. Dr. Dharmadhikari traced the mischief back to me and led me quietly to a corner of the hospital. There was no shouting. Only a firm instruction: I was to apologise at once.

As I walked into the civil surgeon’s room, my imagination ran ahead of me. I expected anger, humiliation, perhaps even disciplinary action. Instead, he spoke calmly. He told me, gently but firmly, never to repeat such behaviour.

That was all.

At the time, I felt relieved. With distance, I felt chastened. What I had considered harmless amusement was, in fact, a breach of trust. Medicine leaves little room for frivolity masquerading as wit.

The lesson stayed with me. Professionalism is not learned only from textbooks or wards; sometimes, it arrives quietly, in the aftermath of one’s own foolishness.

Primary Health Centre, Bhadravati

After completing my urban internship, I faced the next decision—choosing a rural Primary Health Centre for the second half of my training. At that time, PHCs were available in four districts: Nagpur, Chandrapur, Bhandara, and Wardha.

Suhas Jajoo and I chose Bhadravati, then known as Bhandak. The village lay nearly a hundred kilometres from Wardha. Reaching it required patience rather than planning. The only mode of transport was a slow passenger train that took over three and a half hours. Buses did not exist, and private cars were beyond imagination.

Bhadravati carried stories older than its name. Local lore spoke of dense forests that once surrounded the town. In the nineteenth century, a Scottish missionary bishop is said to have stumbled upon ancient idols of Chandrika Devi and Parshwanath, half-buried in the jungle east of the village. The district administration fenced the site with barbed wire, and the archaeology department dated the idols to nearly two thousand years.

In 1921, the Kesariya Parasnath idol was reinstalled by Mr. Hiralalji Fattepuria, secretary of the Jain temple and grandfather of my schoolmate Chandra Kumar. He was also a close friend and business associate of my father. The temple maintained a dharamshala, and Mr. Fattepuria ensured that we had accommodation for the entire six months.

Suhas Jajoo from Wardha, Omprakash Singhania from Yavatmal, and I shared a room in the temple premises. Suresh Batra chose to stay with relatives in the village.

Singhania’s inclusion was accidental. He had fallen ill and missed the PHC allotment session at GMC Nagpur. When he arrived two days later, Bhadravati was the only vacancy left. Suhas and Batra did not know him. I intervened, assuring Suhas that Singhania and I had known each other since our hostel days and had worked together during the Yavatmal district hospital internship. That was enough. Singhania joined us.

Life at the temple followed strict customs. Dinner was served before sunset; food after dark was forbidden. By eight in the evening, our stomachs protested loudly. We debated the logic of eating with the sun, but hunger soon found its own reasoning. At nine each night, we slipped out quietly to a roadside stall and restored balance with hot samosas and kachoris.

Work at the PHC was absorbing. We participated fully—in the OPD, vaccination drives, school health surveys, and outreach camps. Dr. Badwaik, the Medical Officer in charge, taught us lessons that textbooks never could—about rural realities, administrative constraints, and clinical decision-making with minimal resources.

Although the Emergency had ended, PHC doctors were still expected to meet targets for tubectomies and vasectomies. Dr. Badwaik led these peripheral camps, and I became his regular assistant. My role was simple but precise—administering antibiotics and analgesics through venipuncture.

I discovered that I enjoyed venipuncture immensely. The moment when the needle entered the vein cleanly and blood appeared felt deeply satisfying. I accompanied Dr. Badwaik to every family-planning camp I could, happy to practise the skill repeatedly.

Despite long hours, we thrived in Bhadravati. Dr. Badwaik noticed our commitment and, one evening, invited us home for dinner. A team from GMC later arrived unannounced to inspect the interns. Dr. S. M. Patil and his colleagues were pleased to find us hard at work in the OPD.

Today, Bhadravati is barely an hour and a half away by road or train. Then, it took three hours by passenger train, followed by a two-kilometre walk from the station to the temple. Roads were rough, trains infrequent, journeys deliberate.

Those evenings, after work had ended and hunger had been temporarily settled, another ritual took over.

---

During my six months at Bhadravati, I wrote long letters to Narayan Dongre, my GMC Nagpur classmate, who was doing his internship in Wardha. Distance mattered little; letters travelled reliably. There were no mobile phones, no television, no internet to interrupt thought.

Every letter carried only one subject—cricket.

Dongre was passionately devoted to the game. I can still recall his ecstasy when India chased down 403 runs to defeat the West Indies in Port of Spain in April 1976. From Bhadravati, I followed cricket through memory and correspondence. From Wardha, Dongre followed it through statistics.

We debated what ailed Indian cricket, compared Kapil Dev with Ian Botham, and worried about how Anshuman Gaekwad might survive the West Indies’ fearsome fast bowlers. Dongre once wrote, “Prasanna is like a chess player in the guise of an off-spinner—he outthinks his victims before delivering the ball.” He had never played cricket himself, but he knew every score, every wicket, every turning point.

Those letters filled quiet evenings and bridged long distances.

On weekends, I sometimes travelled to Sirpur Kagaznagar, where my elder sister Pushpa lived. Her daughter Tina had just been born. The campus colony felt like another world. Pushpa cooked home food, fussed over me, and gave me the comfort I did not know I missed. We played cards, talked late into the night, and rested.

Looking back, Bhadravati shaped me profoundly. The lessons of rural healthcare, the friendships forged in shared rooms and long clinics, the discipline of work, and the comfort of letters—all stayed with me.

It was a time of learning, not only medicine, but how to live with simplicity, purpose, and companionship.

The first week of my house job left me perpetually alert. Adrenaline carried me from bed to bed—recording vitals, escorting patients, assisting procedures, scribbling notes. We house officers did everything. We clerked patients, accompanied our teachers on rounds, and ran a small side laboratory that was as much a classroom as it was a workplace.

Every patient admitted to the infectious disease wards needed urine sugar estimation. Disposable strips were unheard of. We relied on Benedict’s test—a ritual of sorts. Eight drops of urine, two millilitres of Benedict’s reagent, a flame beneath the test tube, and then the slow watching: green to yellow, yellow to orange, orange to brick red. Colour, we were taught, was diagnosis.

On the third day of my house job, that ritual turned on me.

I was working in the side lab of Wards 37–38 when I lit the Bunsen burner, unaware that spirit had spilled and pooled around it. The flame leapt instantly. I was too close. My face felt the heat before my mind registered danger. Instinctively, I raised my hands to shield myself. My shirt caught fire. There was a brief, terrifying confusion—fire where there should not have been fire.

Ramesh Mundle, Harish Baheti, and Nandu Chandak were nearby. They acted without hesitation—doused the flames with a bucket of water and rushed me to the hospital.

I was admitted to the surgical ward on the second floor. My burns were dressed and bandaged; antibiotics prescribed. News travelled fast. House officers and classmates began to arrive in small groups, filling the ward with familiar voices and quiet concern. They stood by the bed, offered words of reassurance, stayed longer than necessary.

Among them was Archana Srivastava, from my own batch—Batch D. Until then, I had barely interacted with her. Yet she came, sat by the bed, and spoke with a gentleness that surprised me. She told me not to worry, that these days would pass, that I would soon be back on my feet, with no scars worth remembering. There was no formality in her concern, no obligation—only an instinctive warmth. In that moment, I saw in her not a classmate, but a sister.

That bond, formed quietly in a hospital ward, endured. Over time, friendship deepened into kinship. She became my Rakhi sister. Years later, when she married Vinod Srivastava—a neurosurgeon trained at NIMHANS—I attended her wedding in Allahabad. Four decades have slipped by since that visit to the surgical ward, but we remain in constant touch, the connection unbroken by time or distance.

My parents arrived soon after my admission. My mother wept openly. My father stood by the bed for a few moments, pale and shaken, then turned away, unable to stay. My classmates lingered, speaking softly, steadying my parents when I could not.

After two days, I was discharged—with bandaged hands and a temporary dependence I found harder to accept than the pain. An intern helped me record blood pressures, write case sheets, and prepare discharge summaries. Ramesh, Harish, and Nandu took turns filling in the gaps, reassuring my mother that I would be fine. Their quiet loyalty carried me through those weeks.

The burns healed slowly. The scars lingered for years and remain faintly visible even four decades later. In those days, leprosy was common, and my father worried that my scarred hands might be mistaken for something else. Relief came from an unexpected source—a family friend who ran Rambharose Hotel in Wardha prepared a special ointment for burns. My mother applied it daily. She also brought home-cooked meals and, since I could not use my hands, fed me herself for two weeks.

I had entered medicine through fire—quite literally.

***

The infectious disease wards were a daily education in suffering. Cholera, amoebic diarrhoea, and dysentery arrived in a steady stream. Tetanus, rabies, and diphtheria followed with grim regularity. Watching patients with rabies die was especially harrowing—fully conscious, terrified, struggling for breath. Once, I accidentally touched the saliva of a rabies patient. The price of that momentary lapse was fourteen injections of anti-rabies vaccine into my abdominal muscles over a fortnight.

Tetanus was common in the late seventies. Patients arrived with locked jaws and rigid bodies, muscles arching in painful spasms. Convulsions came without warning. Many required tracheostomy just to breathe. Treatment meant tetanus antitoxin, heavy sedation, and weeks of endurance—for the patient and for us. There was little we could offer beyond vigilance and hope.

The ward itself reflected the limitations of the time. Dimly lit, sparsely equipped, it had no monitors, no ventilators, no infusion pumps. We relied on clinical judgment, hands-on care, and constant presence. The air carried the sharp smell of antiseptic, layered over groans of pain. It was medicine stripped of technology, leaving only skill and resolve.

Diphtheria was another feared visitor. The white, leathery membrane over the tonsils was unmistakable. A swab would be sent to microbiology, and the report would return, almost ceremonially: “KLB-like organisms seen.” The membrane could spread rapidly, choking the airway. Isolation was strict, fear pervasive.

Alongside these wards, we spent long hours in the outpatient department of Skin and Venereal Diseases. Our consultant was Dr. B. S. Gowardhan. Scabies dominated the clinic, treated uniformly with benzyl benzoate, applied generously from neck to toe.

What disturbed me more than the diseases was the atmosphere.

Patients with genital ulcers were subjected to comments that crossed the line between humour and humiliation. Privacy was casual, confidentiality fragile. Questions about sexual behaviour were asked openly, sometimes flippantly, without any attempt at education or counselling.

At the time, we did not protest. We did not even recognise the violation clearly. Ethics was not yet a language we spoke. We learned by imitation—absorbing not just clinical skills but also attitudes, with fear and awe mixing freely. A few teachers, brilliant in their medical knowledge, treated patients with condescension, sometimes ridicule. It was accepted as tradition.

Only much later did I understand how deeply such moments shape a young doctor—and how important it is to unlearn them.

Looking back, that posting taught me more than diagnosis and treatment. It taught me about risk, vulnerability, suffering—and about friendship, compassion, and the kind of doctor I did, and did not, wish to become.

Six months passed quickly. By August 1979, I began my second house job—Internal Medicine, Ward 23. The department was headed by Dr. B. S. Chaubey. The thought of working under him made me feel two things at once: thrilled and slightly afraid. His reputation arrived before he did.

Mondays were sacred—and dreaded. OPD began at eight sharp. Dr. Chaubey lived in a palatial bungalow on West High Court Road, a few metres from Shankar Nagar Square, and drove a blue Fiat. My classmate—and then co-registrar—Ramesh Mundle still remembers the registration number: MH 32–8829. We had trained our eyes to spot it the way a sentry watches the road. The moment that Fiat turned into the parking lot, we knew the grace period was over. Dr. Chaubey arrived a few minutes before eight, unhurried and exact. He tolerated many things in life, but not lateness.

So Monday mornings began before dawn. We dressed fast, often skipping tea and breakfast, and rushed to the hospital with one aim: to be inside the OPD before Dr. Chaubey. The waiting area would already be overflowing. Patients came from all over Vidarbha—and even neighbouring Madhya Pradesh—having travelled overnight for a consultation. Many were examined by interns or first-year residents, yet they left satisfied, reassured that their OPD card carried Dr. Chaubey’s stamp. Authority, we learned, could be delivered in ink.

Ward 23 was the male medical ward. The female ward—Ward 25—was on the first floor, with its own house officer, Archana Srivastava, who would later become my Rakhi sister. Admission days were relentless. Forty to fifty patients was routine. We took histories, examined patients, wrote notes, drew blood, estimated haemoglobin, examined peripheral smears, tested urine sugars—then prepared for rounds that moved upward through the hierarchy: registrar, lecturer, reader, professor.

Among the nursing staff, Brother David and Sister Lalamma stood out. They had served in Ward 23 long enough to anticipate Dr. Chaubey’s preferences before he voiced them. Sister Lalamma took a special interest in me. I weighed barely forty kilograms then, and she worried quietly. She brought me lunch or dinner, sometimes even helped with blood samples. Years later, in 1984, I invited her to my wedding. She came.

After rounds—especially the sterner ones—the unit drifted instinctively to the Indian Coffee House on the ground floor, close to our ward. Tea arrived quickly. Masala dosa vanished even faster. Dr. S. M. Patil was the associate professor, and Dr. Viresh Gupta our lecturer. As per GMC tradition, juniors never paid. Seniors insisted on settling the bill. It was an unwritten rule, followed with the seriousness of a posted order.

Once a month, we had a unit party at Hotel Ashoka or Moti Mahal in Sadar. These gatherings marked milestones—completion of house job, submission of thesis, impending weddings. Dr. Chaubey attended without fail. I was usually the only vegetarian and the only one who did not drink. It never seemed to matter.

Around this time, a new two-storey postgraduate hostel was built. Each resident was allotted a single room—girls on one side, boys on the other. I chose Room 99 on the first floor, facing the dental college. I had always liked the number. The room was clean, quiet, and ideal for study.

A telephone stood a few metres away—our lifeline to the wards and to one another. The common mess, however, tested our endurance. Every vegetable seemed to contain potato. The rotis were thick, dry, and cold. By the time we arrived, the dal had lost both heat and hope. One friend summed it up perfectly: “You have to be a yogi to taste hostel food.”

Mornings improved matters slightly. For twenty-five paise, the Indian Coffee House offered salvation—idlis, uttapam, or yet another masala dosa.

And then, almost without warning, the house job ended.

We had lived in a tight loop—sleep, wake, work, eat, sleep again—with little time for reflection. Only later did I realise that Ward 23, with its discipline, fatigue, kindness, and quiet rituals, had taught me not just medicine, but how to endure it.

Entering the Inner Sanctum

In March 1979, the stars aligned. I secured a coveted seat in MD Medicine at the Government Medical College (GMC), Nagpur. In the rigid hierarchy of Indian academia, this wasn't just a degree; it was an elevation to a higher caste. I was no longer merely learning medicine; I was breathing it.

My journey began in Unit 4, servicing Wards 37 and 38. I had barely begun to acquaint myself with the charts—thick, yellowed files held together by rusted iron clips—when the summons arrived. I was to report to Dr. B.S. Chaubey, the formidable Professor and Head of the Department.

A ripple of whispers followed me down the lime-washed corridors. "Why has he called the new boy?" "Is it a test?" I walked to his chamber, heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The verdict was unexpected: Dr. Chaubey had handpicked me for his own unit. I was to be placed directly under the tutelage of the legend himself.

To work with Dr. Chaubey was a rare privilege; to survive him was a daily miracle.

***

The School of Dr. Chaubey

Between 1979 and 1982, my world shrank to the stone walls of Ward 23 and the Kidney Unit. Dr. Chaubey, a product of the British school of nephrology, wore discipline like a suit of armour.

His routine was a force of nature. Every morning, his blue Fiat would turn into the hospital lot at exactly 7:59 AM. We didn't need watches; the distinctive hum of that engine was our alarm. By 8:00 AM sharp, he would march into the ward, his white coat pristine, his stethoscope draped like a badge of office. We—the registrars and house officers—trailed behind like a nervous retinue, clutching case sheets and praying for invisibility.

In an era before CT scans and automated analysers, Dr. Chaubey was a clinical wizard. He proved daily that a sharp mind, a reflex hammer, and an attentive ear were enough to sketch the inner pathology of a man. But he suffered no fools. His teaching was Socratic, delivered with a razor’s edge.

I remember a post-admission round with agonizing clarity. I was presenting a middle-aged man with paralyzed legs—a textbook case of Acute Transverse Myelitis. I began with the bravado of a resident who had actually read the books. But under the "Grand Old Man’s" gaze, my tongue faltered. When he asked for the diagnosis, I stammered, "Guillain-Barré Syndrome."

The air in the ward froze. Even the overhead fans seemed to stall. Dr. Chaubey’s thick brows furrowed. He didn't shout; he turned to the Associate Professor, Dr. Patil, and pointed a finger at me as if I were a biological specimen.

"Patil," he thundered, the words echoing off the high ceilings, "God save this student. Poverty of thoughts and bankruptcy of ideas."

The verdict hung in the air, heavy and damning. It was a harsh sentence for a slip of the tongue, but in the crucible of Ward 23, there was no room for "loose" logic. That phrase branded my memory. It stung, but it woke me up.

***

The Thesis Saga: Science or Fiction?

The MD thesis is a rite of passage, a scholarly contribution to the ocean of science. Mine, however, was a comedy of errors that would have delighted R.K. Narayan.

Dr. Chaubey had a theory: Pfizer’s new drug, Prazosin, might dilate the peritoneal capillaries during dialysis, washing out more toxins. "Find out if it works," he commanded. "That will be your thesis."

In 1980, haemodialysis machines were science fiction in Nagpur. We relied on peritoneal dialysis—a primitive, messy, and visceral business. We would puncture a patient’s abdomen with a trocar, insert a stiff catheter, and flood the cavity with fluid, waiting for the poisons to seep out into glass bottles.

***

The Kidney Unit, 3:00 AM

The Kidney Unit sat on the ground floor, a place of high science and low plumbing. Dr. Chaubey had been a disciple of Hugh de Wardener at Charing Cross—the man who wrote the book on the kidney. De Wardener was a titan who understood renal physiology but also the human misery of the machine. He had even converted a disused convent into a holiday home for dialysis patients. Dr. Chaubey sought to transplant this British rigor into the humid soil of Vidarbha.

The Unit was the only one of its kind for hundreds of miles. Patients arrived from Raipur and Bhilai, pale, bloated, and literally drowning in their own fluids. I was the junior officer in charge of this precarious kingdom.

Nights were spent in a fugue of exhaustion with Abhichandani, the technician. His pride was a flame photometer—a temperamental contraption that flickered like a moody campfire as it measured sodium and potassium.

At 3:00 AM, the catheter would inevitably clog. The fluid would stop. I would find myself hunched over a gasping patient, manipulating the cannula, praying for a gush of fluid that rarely came. When a patient vomited blood and their pressure cratered, I faced a lonely dilemma. Dr. Chaubey wanted "how" and "why," but the reality was a lottery of leaking tubes and lab errors.

As the July 1981 deadline loomed, the data was a disaster. In several patients, the urea levels actually rose after dialysis. To show these numbers to the Professor was unthinkable—a heresy against the Prazosin hypothesis. Driven by fear, I did what many a desperate scholar has done: I "fixed" the numbers. I massaged the data until it whispered what Dr. Chaubey wanted to hear. The librarian, Mr. Atre, typed the manuscript, and the Dean’s office stamped it into existence.

It lies today in an obscure corner of the GMC library, gathering dust alongside thousands of other academic fictions—untouched, unread, and mercifully uncited.

***

The Remington Machine Gun

The practicalities of research were equally absurd. I had no training in methodology; I didn't know a p-value from a pH value. I hunted for references in the Index Medicus, handwriting abstracts because photocopiers were a luxury for the rich.

The final typing was a manual craft. I took my manuscript to the typist who worked on an ancient Remington typewriter that clacked like a machine gun. Gokhale was a man of leisure. He would type three pages, then disappear to make tea. He would emerge, sip it slowly on his veranda, and suggest editorial changes.

"Doctor, this sentence is too long," he would say, peering over his bifocals. I would nod meekly, hostage to the rhythm of his keys. When the thesis was finally bound—black with gold lettering—I felt only the relief of an escaped prisoner.

***

The Final Hurdle

As the residency drew to a close, the final MD examination loomed like a monsoon storm. To fail was to lose three years of life. Our batch was a "band of brothers" forged in the fires of the wards. We stopped shaving, we barely ate, and we became hypochondriacs by proxy, examining each other's livers and listening to each other's heart sounds in the library.

The practical exam was high theatre. External examiners arrived like visiting royalty. The viva voce was the final interrogation—four professors grilling us on everything from the history of medicine to the mechanics of digitalis. It was a test of nerve. Could you say "I don't know" with dignity?

When the results were posted, six of the ten had passed. The relief was explosive. I was no longer a resident; I was a Physician. I had earned the right to add those two letters—MD—after our names. It was the end of a long, arduous climb, and the view from the top was worth every scolding from Dr. Chaubey and every drop of sweat shed in the wards of GMC Nagpur.

Dr. B.S. Chaubey. Even today, the name stirs a familiar cocktail of awe and unease. He could be warm one moment and glacial the next, but his mind always worked like a scalpel—quick, clean, and merciless. He sliced through confusion and exposed the diagnosis we had missed, often in minutes.

For nearly twenty-five years, he ruled the Department of Medicine at GMC Nagpur. Ward 23—his ward—was a crucible. Young doctors were forged there. Some came out tempered; some came out singed; a few came out broken. He had no patience for mediocrity. His temper was famous, his standards unforgiving, and his sarcasm sharp enough to draw blood.

In 1979, I was a Unit 1 House Officer, stretched thin between the chaos of Ward 23 and the Kidney Unit. Mondays were a deluge. Forty new patients would pour in, spilling into the corridors and onto mattresses on the floor. We worked as if time had been outlawed—taking histories, examining patients, chasing reports—fuelled by nothing but adrenaline and fear. Sleep became a rumour.

Then came Tuesday morning. 7:59 a.m.

Dr. Chaubey’s blue Fiat would stop at the porch with a final, impatient squeal. He stepped out as if arriving for a ceremony: red tie perfectly knotted, white apron spotless, shoes polished to a mirror shine. His face carried that thin, unreadable smile, and his eyes moved like a hawk’s—quick, alert, hunting.

The ward stiffened. The Grand Rounds had begun.

A familiar phalanx formed around me—Jalgaonkar, Sarda, Pendsey, Kalamkar, Subhedar, Wasnik, Kane, Mundle, Srivastava. Nurses Bansod and Lalamma stood ready with files. Even our seniors, Dr. G.K. Dubey and Dr. S.M. Patil, looked attentive. Under Chaubey, nobody was truly senior.

He moved fast, dismissing cases briskly—malaria, ulcers, cirrhosis, TB—until he stopped at Bed Number Five, as if something had tugged at his sleeve.

"Present the case," he said.

I had been awake for nearly seventy-two hours. I was unbathed, rumpled, and sticky with fatigue. I knew even my unshaven face would irritate him. I swallowed and began. The patient was sixteen. Both legs paralysed. Numbness below the navel. Bladder distended.

"Kalantri," he cut in, his voice low. "Diagnosis?"

My heart began to thud. My mouth went dry.

"Guillain–Barré syndrome, sir," I said. I tried to pronounce it the way the books wanted—Ghee-yan Ba-ray—hoping a sophisticated French accent could rescue a weak answer.

There was a silence so heavy it felt physical. Then the storm broke.

His nostrils flared. His jaw tightened. With one sharp movement, he pulled the blanket off the boy’s legs and pointed to the abdomen. "Look!" he barked. "No sensory level? Bladder like a drum. Spasticity!"

A small muscle twitched at his temple—his warning signal, the tremor before the thunder.

"Textbook acute transverse myelitis," he said, each word landing like a slap. "And you missed it. Something so obvious!"

My ears burned. The ward seemed to shrink around me. He turned to Dr. S.M. Patil and shook his head, not even pretending to keep it private. "Who sends idiots to Medicine these days?" he asked—loud enough for nurses, students, patients, and even the bedpans to hear.

And then came the line he was famous for. His words were slightly twisted by his facial palsy, yet delivered with perfect aim:

"Poverty of thoughts and bankruptcy of ideas."

Coming from a vernacular school, English had always been my steep climb. His effortless accent made the sentence sting twice—first for what it meant, and then for how beautifully he said it. I stood there wrecked, while he moved on to Bed Six without a backward glance.

Forty-five years have passed since that morning. Dr. Chaubey is gone, but that voice still visits me at odd moments—especially when I am stuck and tempted to settle for the first easy diagnosis.

***

Bankruptcy of ideas.

My colleagues remember it too. Sometimes it comes up as a joke over tea. Sometimes as a warning. Was it brutal? Yes. Did it break me? For a day, it did. But it also shattered my complacency. It taught me to look again, to examine again, to think again.

Ward 23 gave me many things: sleepless nights, aching feet, and a few scars that still smart when I touch them. But it also gave me the habit of thinking straight. And for that—even for that humiliation—I remain grateful.

Room 99 and making of a Resident

In 1980, the postgraduate residents of GMC Nagpur moved into a new hostel. It was modern, two storeys high, and stood opposite the Dental College—barely a hundred metres from our wards. For boys raised in the crowded barracks of undergraduate hostels, it felt like luxury. Each of us got a single room.

By destiny or design, I landed in Room 99, second floor. The number had followed me through every hostel I had lived in. I accepted it like an old friend.

The room was simple: a table, two chairs, a cot, and a small almirah. From the window I could see the road leading to the Dean’s office, with people moving in and out as if the world ran on files and signatures.

Communication in those days was a physical act. No mobile phones. The hospital PBX worked when it pleased. A single landline sat in the corridor outside my room. It rang with summons—“Bed 4 is gasping”—or, on happier days, news from home.

More often, the call came on foot.

If a patient worsened at night, a ward attendant—almost always a woman in a saree—would walk across, climb the stairs, and knock on the door. In her hand was the call book, a small notebook where the resident had to sign before running back to the ward.

It was a simple system. It was also an accident waiting to happen.

One night, Dr. Pande and Dr. Deshpande were asleep in the dormitory after a brutal 36-hour stretch. The attendant arrived and whispered into the dark, “Deshpande Doctor…”

Dr. Pande, half awake, heard his own name. He grabbed the book and scribbled, in the reflex of a resident who had seen too many arrests: Inject adrenaline and start cardiac massage.

The call, unfortunately, was not for a cardiac arrest. It was for the obstetrician—there was fetal distress.

Even now, I smile at the thought. Then I shudder.

Downstairs, the mess served food that tested both appetite and character. The dal was watery. The chapatis arrived shrivelled. The vegetable was usually potato, sometimes pretending to be something else. We ate because we were young, tired, and hungry.

For breakfast, we escaped to the Indian Coffee House. For twenty-five paise, we could get two fluffy idlis or a crisp uttapam. That was not breakfast. That was survival.

---

On Being a Donor

In those days, our blood was not only ours. It often became a resource for our patients.

I remember rushing to the blood bank, sleeves rolled up, ready to donate for a patient in my ward who was sinking and needed a transfusion urgently. I would urge the officer to draw quickly so I could run back to work.

And while the paperwork crawled, I would slip into the Sindhi canteen nearby. A hot aloo bonda and a cup of tea—my small reward for a pint of blood.

We were naïve then. We lived in a pre-HIV world. We did not yet respect the silent travellers blood could carry. We saw only the patient in front of us and felt useful, even heroic, for a few minutes.

Later, screening became strict and donation became safer—and rightly so. But I still miss the simplicity of those days, when a young doctor could save a life and feel satisfied with tea and a potato fritter.

---

A Father’s Love, Delivered in a Box

The MD curriculum is vast, and the list of recommended textbooks can frighten even the brave.

During one visit home, my father asked, “What books do you need?”

I wrote a list: Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, books on the heart, lung, liver, brain, kidney. I handed him the paper, unsure if he would even recognise the titles.

A month later, a heavy cardboard box arrived in Room 99.

Inside were the latest editions of every book I had written down—neatly packed, almost reverently arranged.

I was stunned. In those days, imported textbooks cost close to ₹4,000. My monthly stipend was ₹625. My father was a man of modest means, careful with money, the kind who counted every paisa in his business. And yet he had quietly spent what felt like an impossible sum.

I ran my fingers over the glossy covers and felt something tighten in my throat. It was not just a box of books. It was his faith, sealed with tape.

He never spoke of the cost. He never asked for thanks. He simply wanted his son to learn.

Even today, I cannot recall every chapter I read from those books. But I remember the box.

---

Slides Before PowerPoint

Before PowerPoint, a seminar was not something you “made.” It was something you crafted.

I was assigned a topic for journal club: Clinical Approach to Coma. I buried myself in Plum and Posner’s Diagnosis of Stupor and Coma, spending weeks trying to understand brainstem reflexes and cortical functions.

Then came the slides.

Somehow, I procured a pack of thick, pure white 8×8 inch cards from FACOR. I followed a strict rule: six lines per slide, not more than eight words per line. With a pencil and ruler, I drew faint guidelines. Then I wrote with a black sketch pen, slowly, carefully, trying to make each letter behave.

On the day of the seminar, I projected those cards with an epidiascope. As I spoke, I watched my teachers’ faces. They did not clap. Teachers rarely do. But I saw it in their eyes—a quiet approval.

That day, I learnt a lesson I have carried ever since: clarity on the slide often reflects clarity in the mind.

---

A Thousand Names

In 1980, the Department of Medicine at GMC Nagpur hosted the annual conference of the Association of Physicians of India. It felt like a task too big for us.

Nagpur was not a metropolis. Resources were limited. But the department mobilised like an army. Faculty, residents, paramedics—everyone worked day and night.

Dr. Ramesh Mundle and I were given a job that required stamina more than glamour: writing names on certificates for nearly a thousand delegates. We sat for hours, pens in hand, ensuring every spelling was correct.

When the conference began, delegates poured in from across India. The sessions ran smoothly. The hospitality held. The academic content was solid.

At the end, Dr. Chaubey—usually sparing with praise—looked at our handwritten certificates and gave a rare half-smile.

For us, that was more than enough.

The winter of1980 remains vivid. Ten of us walked out to face that season together—Jayant Pande, Shriram Kane, Aziz Khan, Adesh Gadpayle, Kishore Kedar, Ramesh Mundle, Harish Baheti, Padmakar Somvanshi, Vijay Thakre, and I. We had trained side by side for years, sharing wards, night duties, dog-eared textbooks, and our deepest apprehensions. Now, we were stepping onto the field together, each of us hoping to stay at the crease.

For months, our preparation had been steady and methodical. We practised history-taking until it became muscle memory; we examined patients until our fingertips learnt to see what our eyes might miss. We rehearsed differential diagnoses the way a batsman rehearses strokes in the nets—playing Neurology and Cardiology patiently, defending when unsure, attacking only when the line was clear.

The theory examination went smoothly. We wrote with the calm assurance of men who had judged the pitch correctly. But we knew the real contest—the one that would decide our fate—awaited us at the bedside.

***

The Field Changes

The truth announced itself sharply during the clinicals. Our internal examiners, Dr. B.G. Waghmare and Dr. H.C. Attal, were like familiar umpires. They listened without interruption, allowing us to find our footing and settle into the rhythm of the case. The external examiners, however, changed the field. One was Dr. Mishra from King George’s Medical College—brisk and unsentimental. The other was Dr. V.V. Shanbhag, the Head of Medicine at Topiwala National Medical College. His reputation had arrived long before he did. When he looked up from a case sheet, the room seemed to tighten, as if the bowler had shortened his run-up and the fielders had quietly crept into a catching position.

We reported to Ward 13 at eight in the morning. The beds were occupied by patients brought in specially for the day—men and women from Untkhana, the home for the physically handicapped, whose bodies told complex stories. They carried inherited neurological diseases that moved, spoke, and walked in unfamiliar ways. There was nothing routine about their gaits or their postures. These were our "Long Cases." We did our mental arithmetic: forty minutes for history and examination, twenty to organise notes. It was tight, but we had done it a hundred times.

Then the examiner looked at us and said, evenly, "You have seven minutes to present your case." Seven minutes. We had trained for test matches—unhurried histories, careful examinations, presentations built brick by brick. Overnight, the format had switched to a T-20. Every ball suddenly mattered.

I was allotted a patient with Friedreich’s ataxia. The diagnosis was familiar, the signs waiting to be read. Yet, the time pressure dismantled my rhythm. I tried to play too many strokes at once, fumbling through the history and rushing the signs. Before I knew it, the innings was over. I returned to the hostel with the heavy, sinking feeling of a batsman dismissed for a duck. It wasn't that I didn't know how to bat; it was that I hadn't judged the pace of the bowling. I had read the books and practised the signs, yet I had failed to stay at the crease.

***

The Second Innings

The next day brought the short cases. This time, I took guard more carefully. The patients spoke clearly. Leaky valves murmured their stories; lungs destroyed by tuberculosis told theirs without ambiguity. I listened, examined, and responded without hurry. The bat met the ball. The confidence returned.

Then came the viva voce. The questions arrived steadily, like a probing spell of bowling. I answered what I knew, admitted what I did not, and refused to chase deliveries outside my off-stump. The examiner listened, made notes, and then delivered what felt like the final ball of the over.

"A young man develops syncope each time he urinates. What is the diagnosis?" "Pheochromocytoma," I replied. "And where is the tumour located?" "In the bladder wall, sir."

A pause followed—brief but heavy. Dr. Waghmare’s pen came to rest. Dr. Attal looked up, the severity in his face easing into something quieter. Across the table, the external examiners exchanged a glance over the rims of their thick spectacles. One raised his brows; the other allowed the faintest hint of a smile. It was an expression rarely seen in that room: approval.

The weight of the previous day lifted without ceremony. I knew then, without being told, that I had passed.

Not all of us did. But as I walked out, relief washed over me. I was no longer a resident; I was a physician. Two letters now followed my name—MD—earned through sleepless nights, Dr. Chaubey’s sharp rebukes, and the long, unforgiving hours in the wards of GMC Nagpur.

With distance, I see now that the examination was less a test of brilliance than of temperament. It didn't just ask if you knew medicine; it asked if you could steady yourself after a stumble, adapt to unspoken rules, and think clearly when the clock was ticking. Those seven minutes taught me a lasting lesson: preparation matters, but so does the ability to endure.

In 1979, a new postgraduate hostel rose on the GMC campus—freshly built, orderly, and unmistakably modern by the standards of the time. For residents who had spent years adjusting to makeshift arrangements, it felt like a quiet luxury.

Until then, we had lived in a dormitory with sixteen beds, no individual rooms, and zero privacy. It sat on the first floor of the hospital building—convenient, yes, but permanently half-awake. A tired resident would hunt for an empty bed, drop onto it as if shot, and steal whatever sleep he could before the next call dragged him back to the wards.

Communication was primitive. There were no mobile phones, and the PBX failed often. Messages travelled on foot, and confusion travelled with them. A ward attendant—almost always a woman—would walk to the dormitory, locate the resident, and obtain a signature on a call book.

On one memorable night, an attendant called out for "Deshpande." Dr. Pande, half-asleep and thoroughly disoriented, assumed the call was for him. He scribbled an order to "inject adrenaline and start cardiac massage," unaware that the message was actually for the obstetrician managing fetal distress with faint heart sounds. Fatigue was constant, and errors were always waiting.

***

The Move to Order

Against that chaotic backdrop, the new hostel felt like salvation. It stood facing the Dental College, solid and self-assured, with the wards and OPDs barely a hundred metres away. For once, exhaustion did not require a long walk.

The hostel was neatly divided into two wings: ladies on the left, gents on the right. It was perhaps the first time men and women stayed under the same roof in a common hostel, though the demarcation was clear and unquestioned.

I was allotted Room No. 99 on the second floor. I had always liked the number. My window overlooked the busy stretch of road running from the GMC entrance to the Dean’s office. I could watch the campus move through the day—students, nurses, patients, ward boys, and doctors in a hurry, all flowing in the same direction. The room itself was simple: a table, two chairs, a cot, and a compact almirah. Two toilets and bathrooms were shared among ten rooms, and a single telephone at the corner of the wing connected us to the hospital PBX. It was our lifeline—temperamental, unpredictable, but indispensable.

***

The Warden and the Mess

Our warden was Dr. H. C. Attal, then Associate Professor of Medicine—a man who combined discipline with his own unique brand of English. Short, dressed in an untucked bush shirt and chappals, he spoke in a manner that invited more smiles than fear. But a mere lift of his eyebrows was enough to signal that he had no patience for nonsense. He never owned a vehicle, depending entirely on residents to ferry him around as if it were an accepted part of our training. His trusted lieutenant was Mr. Chimurkar, the clerk who knew everyone, everything, and—most importantly—where to find it.

The ground floor housed the mess. The menu displayed a steadfast commitment to brinjal and potato, accompanied by shrivelled chapatis and lukewarm dal. Both disappeared without leaving much of a memory. As a friend put it, you needed spiritual discipline to taste hostel food.

Several of my 1973-batch classmates lived close by—Ramesh Mundle, Harish Baheti, Madhusudan Bagdia, and Shriram Kane. While hostel rooms tended towards disorder, mine was an exception. Driven by an obsession ingrained since childhood, I kept it scrupulously clean, sweeping and swabbing the floor daily—a habit that amused some and baffled others.

I still rode my old undergraduate bicycle. Throughout my MD years, it carried me through the then-quiet streets of Nagpur, faithful and uncomplaining.

The new hostel—with its privacy, its order, and its modest comforts—felt like progress. It did not make residency easy. It simply made it bearable. And at that stage, that was more than enough.

In the late 1970s, the Government Medical College (GMC) in Nagpur was a place of spectacular, almost exhausting, talent. If you follow Indian cricket today, you understand the modern dilemma known as the "problem of plenty." When you look at the opening slots for the national side, you have the established brilliance of Rohit Sharma and Yashasvi Jaiswal, but then you have KL Rahul, Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan, and even the prodigious young Vaibhav Suryavanshi all waiting in the wings, bats polished, ready to dominate. One feels that even if the top four were to disappear, the replacements would still score centuries.

The GMC Class of 1973 was exactly like that. We had too many "opening batsmen" for life. Had brilliance been a physical substance, the corridors would have needed widening to accommodate us. Everywhere I turned, someone was excelling—singing louder, running faster, or debating with a lethal ease that made the rest of us feel like we were stuck in the pavilion, padded up but indefinitely delayed.

***

The Pavilion View

The auditorium was our sanctuary, a place where the air was heavy with the scent of old wood and the collective sigh of students who had spent ten hours dissecting cadavers or memorizing the Krebs cycle. We would drift there in small groups, smelling of formalin and fatigue, to watch our classmates turn into stars.

Jayant Pande and Vivek Deshpande sang the golden hits of Rafi, Talat Mahmood, and Kishore Kumar with a calm that bordered on the professional. They didn't just sing; they performed "quiet repair work" on our frayed nerves. Sitar strings hummed under the fingers of Shriram Kane and Uday Gupte, while the flutes of Rajendra Sarda and Phadke brought a temporary, pastoral hush to our overworked urban minds. Shashikant Khaire would make the accordion sound like a cheerful conversation, while Jayant Pande—a man who seemed to have a diplomatic treaty with every musical instrument—would jump from the congo to the mandolin without breaking a sweat.

Then there was Vivek Kulkarni—affectionately known as Tillya. He didn't just debate; he held the hall captive. His arguments were sharp, his delivery effortless, and his mind seemed to run a full lap ahead of the judges. He died young, at thirty-three, from cancer of the oesophagus. The news stunned us. Some people belong so naturally to the world of vitality and wit that you never imagine them leaving it early. His absence felt like a clerical error by the heavens—a talent recalled too soon.

***

The Man in the Back Row

And then there was me.

I was a man of spectacular non-achievement. Not out of any grand protest or high-minded principle, you understand—I simply didn’t have the "equipment." I had no gift for music, no appetite for the stage, and certainly no instinct for sport. While my classmates were staking out their legacies on the cricket crease or the basketball court, I was the quiet watcher in the back row. I was the one who clapped the loudest when someone else stole the evening, finding a strange, vicarious joy in their brilliance.

My athletic career was particularly brief. Even our "stadium" was a compromise—a forty-foot terrace at Hostel No. 4, barely the size of a modern living room. The bowler delivered a tennis ball from six yards, not twenty-two, and the batsman was surrounded by close-in fielders waiting like creditors. There was no room for a classic cover drive; one played with tucked-in elbows and a prayer.

My only "proper" boundary came years later, during my internship, in a match between Bhadravati and Ballarpur. I managed a solitary four—a fluke of physics where bat and ball met more by coincidence than intent. I still recall that moment with the disproportionate pride of a man who has very little else to show in the department of physical prowess. Yet, I remained a devoted student of the game, one of those hopeless watchers who can recall scorecards from the 1960s with embarrassing accuracy, despite having no first-hand experience beyond that dusty terrace.

***

The Handwriting "Honour"

In eight long years, my extracurricular record remained gloriously spotless, save for one suspicious certificate: Second Prize for Best Handwriting in a pan-MBBS competition.

I have always regarded this "honour" with deep suspicion. Given the medical profession’s legendary reputation for scrawling like caffeinated spiders, a handwriting competition feels less like a contest and more like an act of misplaced optimism. It is like being named the most sober man in a tavern. I never discovered who walked away with the first prize, or whether their script required a microscope to be deciphered.

Yet, the ghost of that prize haunts me still. Decades later, I wrote a referral note to the cardiac surgeon Dr. Saurabh Varshney. He was so startled by the script—which defied every medical tradition of the "illegible scrawl"—that he posted it on Facebook. My colleagues suspect I am merely being thorough; the truth is that I have quite shamelessly fallen in love with my own calligraphy. In a world of digital fonts and rapid-fire typing, there is a quiet, meditative pleasure in a well-formed "G" or a sweeping "S." It is perhaps the only art form where I wasn't just a spectator.

***

Luxury and Loneliness

I successfully avoided the glamour of the era. Romance was something I observed from a distance, like a naturalist watching a rare species through binoculars. While classmates conducted courtships in the Coffee House or the library—punctuated by stolen glances and meaningful silences—I was… actually, I am not sure what I was doing. I wasn't writing love letters; I was probably re-reading the same chapter of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine for the tenth time. Shyness was my shield, but it was also my cage.

Luxury was equally theoretical. I remember the summer of 1975, when the mess closed and most classmates went home. Om Singhaniya and I stayed back in the sweltering Nagpur heat. We survived on ₹2.50 joint dinners at Hotel Alankar—two people, one plate, no discussion. We ate in a silence that wasn't awkward, just hungry. It was entertainment, nutrition, and social bonding all rolled into one efficient, albeit meager, outing.

***

The Informal Syllabus

I also managed to avoid the informal medical syllabus: smoking and drinking. Medical hostels treat these as compulsory extracurriculars conducted without supervision. You are away from home, surrounded by peers who assume abstinence is merely a temporary condition of childhood.

I still wonder how I stayed away. It was not born of moral resolve or lofty principle. Cigarettes never reached my lips, and liquor never traveled down a throat that remained stubbornly parched. This abstinence survived medical college and, later, even more determined assaults at conference cocktails where generosity was never scarce. In a profession where indulgence is often forgiven and illegibility is expected, my lifelong teetotalism feels less like a virtue and more like a clerical oversight that somehow went uncorrected.

***

The Education of an Observer

I did not stand out. I did not shine. I did not score runs or win debates. Instead, I accumulated something quieter: patience from patients, discipline from seniors, and a peculiar kind of humility that comes from being the least interesting person in a room full of geniuses.

My education arrived through repetition: ward rounds, late-night library sessions, and the slow, grinding understanding of the human body. I was the invisible student, the forgettable classmate, the man who stayed. My legacy from those years is that of a "front-row seat." I got to watch truly gifted people flourish, and perhaps, in the end, being a good witness is as much a vocation as being a good doctor.

It is not a record that would win me a spot in any Hall of Fame. But it is mine, warts and all, and looking back at sixty-nine, I wouldn't trade that back-row seat for all the applause in the world.

If my lack of musical or athletic prowess was a public affair, my real education was a private, almost monastic pursuit. While the stars of the Class of 1973 were winning trophies, I was busy building an internal architecture that would eventually support a four-decade career in medicine. At sixty-nine, I realize that what I "did" wasn't flashy; it was simply the relentless application of discipline to the mundane.

***

The Discipline of the Desk

I was a creature of the library. While others possessed the "Socratic spark" that allowed them to shine in spontaneous debates, I relied on the slow, grinding accumulation of knowledge. I discovered early on that I had a high tolerance for the "thick book." I didn't just read Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine; I lived in it.

I developed a habit of taking meticulous notes, which brings me back to that second-prize handwriting. It wasn't just about the aesthetics of the script; it was about the discipline of the hand. Writing things down—summarizing a patient's complex history or the specific pathophysiology of a renal lesion—forced me to organize my thoughts. In an era where "Poverty of thoughts and bankruptcy of ideas" was the greatest sin one could commit in front of Dr. Chaubey, my notebook was my shield.

***

The Art of the "Long Round"

While I wasn't on the basketball court, I was on the ward. I became a student of the "Long Round." I realized that if I lacked the natural clinical instinct of some of my peers, I could compensate with sheer volume of observation.

I stayed late. I talked to the ward boys, the dhobis, and the patients' relatives. I learned that a patient's story often changes between the formal morning round and the quiet of the evening. This habit of "lingering"—of being the last person to leave the bedside—taught me more about the human condition than any lecture ever could. It was during these quiet hours that I moved from seeing "cases" to seeing "people." I didn't realize it then, but I was practicing the very "shared moment of silence" I would later write about in my preface.

***

The Teetotaller’s Perspective

My decision to stay away from the "informal syllabus" of cigarettes and alcohol—while social suicide in some hostel circles—gave me an unintended advantage: time and clarity. While my peers were nursing hangovers or navigating the social complexities of the late-night drinking session, I had a clear head.

This wasn't born of a "holier-than-thou" attitude; I was simply too shy to join the fray. But that shyness acted as a filter. It allowed me to stay focused on the rhythm of the Vidarbha roads and the Himalayan treks I would eventually undertake. It taught me that one can be in a culture without being of it. This internal independence would later become crucial when I had to stand my ground as a Medical Superintendent, often making unpopular decisions in the name of ethical medicine.

***

The Habit of Handwriting

My obsession with my own handwriting, which earned me that solitary certificate, became a clinical tool. In a profession where a doctor’s scrawl is a cliché, my legible, sweeping notes became a mark of respect for the next person in the chain—the nurse, the pharmacist, the resident. It was my first lesson in "Systems Thinking." If I wrote clearly, the system worked better.

Even today, when I write a referral, it isn't just a communication; it's a craft. Dr. Saurabh Varshney- the Nagpur based cardiac surgeon- Facebook post about my script was more than just a compliment on my penmanship; it was a recognition of a doctor who took the time to be precise. In medicine, precision is often the difference between a cure and a catastrophe.

***

The Long-Distance Mindset

Finally, I developed the "marathon" mindset. I realized that medicine is not a sprint; it’s a forty-year trek. I didn't need to be the fastest student in 1975; I just needed to be the one who didn't stop walking. This grit—this "spectacular persistence"—is what allowed me to go back to school at forty-seven at UC Berkeley and to start long-distance cycling at sixty.

Looking back, those eight years at GMC Nagpur weren't about the applause I didn't receive. They were about the scaffolding I built when no one was watching. I emerged from GMC as an "invisible student," but I left with a foundation that was deep, solid, and entirely my own.

In the summer of 1982, I had finished my MD at Government Medical College, Nagpur. Like most young doctors, I stood at a familiar crossroads: private practice or hospital life.

My father had already drawn a neat map for me. He had built a modest structure in Wardha, well placed and full of promise. From its windows you could see the bustle of Indira Market and, not far away, the quieter lanes of Maganwadi. It was meant to be my clinic. He could already picture the signboard, the waiting room, the steady income, and our family name taking root in the town.

Only my heart hadn’t signed the papers.

The thought of sitting alone in a clinic all day made me uneasy. I wanted the noise and discipline of a teaching hospital—the ward rounds, the residents, the arguments over diagnosis, the quiet pride of watching a student grow into a doctor. I didn’t have a better plan. I only had a restlessness that refused to leave me.

***

One afternoon, I went to meet my childhood friend, Suhas Jajoo, at his home in Jajoo Wadi, Wardha. As luck would have it, I ran into his elder brother, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo. He was senior to me at GMC Nagpur (Class of 1968) and had known me since I was a boy. Suhas and I had grown up together through school and medical college. Ulhas, meanwhile, was now a Reader in Medicine at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram.

He looked at me for a moment—long enough to sense what I wasn’t saying—and asked, almost casually, “Why don’t you join us at Sevagram?”

There was no speech. No persuasion. No “think about it.”

Ulhas did what people of his generation often did when they wanted to help: he acted.

He spoke to Dr. Karunakar Trivedi, the Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital. Things moved with a speed that feels unreal today. I met Dr. Trivedi soon after. He was a man of few words and quick decisions. He glanced at my papers, asked a couple of questions, nodded once, and offered me the post of Senior Registrar.

The salary was ₹650 a month—small on paper, but to me it felt like a king’s ransom.

I said yes, almost before he finished the sentence.

When I told my father, he tried to hide his disappointment, but it slipped out through his eyes. The clinic he had imagined so carefully—the steady, respectable life he had planned for his son—had dissolved in one afternoon.

Yet he didn’t stop me. He never did.

With a grace I understood better only later, he stepped aside and let me choose my own road.

That road led to Sevagram—and then, without my knowing it, to the rest of my life.

***

The Hospital in the Guest House

It was a scorching afternoon on May 4, 1982, when I rode my Bajaj Priya scooter through the gates of MGIMS.

After the imposing stone buildings of GMC Nagpur, Sevagram felt like another country. This was not a purpose-built medical complex. The “hospital” I first saw was an old guest house built by Mr. G.D. Birla in 1940—two storeys, creaking wooden floors, and walls peeling in tired layers. Even the building seemed to carry a memory.

That memory went back to 1969, when Dr. Sushila Nayar began the medical school in this very structure. In those early years, the entire world of MGIMS fit into these two floors. The basic science departments—Anatomy, Physiology, Pharmacology, and Pathology—worked here. So did the library, dissection hall, laboratories, outpatient clinics, pharmacy, X-ray room, wards, an operation theatre, labour rooms, and even a small ICU.

It was cramped, but it was complete.

Over the next decade, the institute grew out of its guest-house skin. By 1982, a new, larger hospital building had come up on the hill, and most departments had moved there. The old Birla guest house, once the whole institution, had become the home of just one department—Medicine. It still housed 140 beds, a small ICU, and, lest I forget, the seminar room where we tried to sound wiser than we were.

Postgraduate training in Medicine had started only two years earlier. Two final-year residents, Hari Om and Ashok Birbal—who would later add “Jain” to his name to be more visible in the local Jain community—were preparing for their MD examinations due in November 1982.

The general wards on the ground floor felt like oversized dormitories. Tube lights glowed dimly, as if they were tired too, and the corners stayed stubbornly dark. The place was spartan—no ventilators, no multipara monitors, no infusion pumps. Central oxygen and suction were still ideas waiting for their turn.

We practised medicine the old way: with a stethoscope, a steady hand, and whatever judgement we could gather at the bedside.

The “ICU” was more a label than a unit. And yet, for all its shortages, this hospital had something Nagpur rarely gave us—stillness. A quiet that softened the day. The air smelled of neem and warm earth, not just spirit and phenyl.

***

Enter “Kissu”

That very first afternoon, I walked into the male medicine ward and saw a resident bent over a patient, doing a pleural tap with the calm ease of someone who had done it a hundred times before. A Littmann stethoscope—rare in those days—hung around his neck, not as a showpiece, but as if it belonged there.

He looked up. Sweat beaded on his forehead, his spectacles sat slightly crooked, and his eyes measured me in a quick scan.

His voice was blunt, but not unfriendly.
“Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

In my crisp new shirt, I suddenly felt like a schoolboy on his first day.
“I’m Dr. S.P. Kalantri,” I said. “I’ve joined as Senior Registrar.”

He paused for a moment. Then his face broke into a wide, sheepish grin. He peeled off his gloves and held out his hand.

“I’m Krishan,” he said. “But you can call me Kissu.”

That handshake steadied me.

I didn’t know it then, but Krishan Kumar Aggarwal—Kissu—would become one of my closest friends in Sevagram. The kind you don’t plan for. The kind life quietly slips into your story. There would be laughter, shared tiffins, long days, longer nights, and the silent understanding that grows between two doctors trying to make sense of rural medicine.

Later, after his MD, Kissu moved to Delhi. He joined Moolchand Hospital, built a formidable career in cardiology, and became a familiar face in the media. Wherever he went, his stethoscope went with him—hospital corridor, home, car, restaurant, even an airport lounge. It hung around his neck like a habit, like a signature.

He was awarded the Padma Shri. And then, in a twist none of us could accept, we lost him during the COVID pandemic—to the very disease he had spent a year explaining, warning against, and fighting every single day.

Even now, when I think of my first day in Sevagram, I see his crooked spectacles and that grin.

***

The Morning Ritual

If the hospital building was the body of the department, the faculty were its soul. In those days, the Department of Medicine had three men at its centre—Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. A.P. Jain, and Dr. Ulhas Jajoo.

Dr. O.P. Gupta, the Head of the Department, lived nearby in MLK Colony. This was long before mobile phones and the constant buzzing of “urgent” messages. His life ran on a simple axis: home and hospital. He appeared in the wards without warning, his sharp eyes catching a missing chart or a crumpled bedsheet from what felt like across the ward.

He disliked waste the way some people dislike dishonesty—deeply, almost personally.

“Why are the residents wasting ECG paper?” he would grumble, holding up a long rhythm strip as if it were a luxury item. “I sanctioned two rolls a month ago!”

Every morning at exactly 8:00 AM, a ritual unfolded in his chamber that made residents straighten their backs and swallow hard: ECG correction.

We lined up outside his room with the night’s ECGs clutched like confession letters. Inside, Gupta, Jain, and Jajoo sat shoulder to shoulder, studying each strip with the seriousness of a court hearing. Nothing escaped them—not a missed P wave, not a lazy measurement, not a careless conclusion.

“Why hasn’t this resident calculated the Estes’ score for left ventricular hypertrophy?” Dr. Gupta would ask, peering over his glasses.

“And why can’t they remember the causes of a tall R wave in V1?” Dr. Jain would add, his impatience sharpened by precision.

“They still haven’t mastered vectors,” Dr. Jajoo would sigh, as if our ignorance was a personal tragedy.

It felt like a daily trial by fire. But it was also the finest classroom I ever attended. In that small room—between scolding, silence, and sudden insight—we learned what medicine teaches again and again: the answer is usually hiding in the details.

***

Settling In

Soon my life found a rhythm. Every morning I rode in from Wardha on my scooter, the Vidarbha wind slapping my face like a hot towel. On Tuesdays and Fridays, when I was on emergency duty, I stayed on campus in Kabir Colony—Kabir Niwas, barely three hundred metres from the hospital.

The quarters were modest, even by our standards. Two small rooms squeezed into about 400 square feet, a kavelu roof above, and a farshi floor below that stayed cool under bare feet. The toilets were the old kind—squat only, no commode, no frills, no pretending. Thirteen of these quarters stood in a row, and in our little corner of Kabir Niwas, two of us lived together, making space for ourselves the way young doctors always do—by adjusting without complaint.

I shared the apartment with Dr. Sanjay Shrivastava, an ophthalmologist who somehow managed to look calm even when the rest of us were running on tea, adrenaline, and borrowed sleep. Sanjay stayed for two years, then returned to his hometown, Bhopal, to start private practice. Years later, he would become Joint Secretary of the Medical Council of India. In those days, though, he was simply Sanjay—quiet, steady, and good company on an exhausting night.

One evening in Kabir Niwas, we were doing what young men with little money and big appetites for life often did—huddled around a radio, listening to cricket commentary as if it were a national bulletin. It was 1983, and India was playing Pakistan in Delhi in what people called the first day–night match in India. The lights were new, the excitement was real, and every boundary sounded brighter on the radio.

In the middle of it, I noticed a young man standing quietly outside our door, half in the corridor, half in shadow. He looked hesitant, as if he had walked there and then changed his mind twice.

Dark, shy, self-effaced, and polite to the core—M.V.R. Reddy.

At that time, he wasn’t “Dr. Reddy” yet. He was an MSc from Andhra Pradesh, doing his PhD in Biochemistry. He lived just two quarters away, but we didn’t know him.

He cleared his throat softly and knocked.
“Can I… watch the match?” he asked, almost apologetically.

“Of course,” we said, as if he had asked for a glass of water.

We offered him tea. He sat down without fuss, hands on his knees, eyes fixed on the invisible field inside the radio. For the next two hours, we listened together—four young men in a small quarter, held together by commentary, suspense, and the strange intimacy of sport.

When Kirti Azad began hitting those sixes, our little room came alive. And when India finally won, we celebrated like we had contributed something ourselves—clapping, laughing, speaking all at once, as if the victory had travelled straight from Delhi to Kabir Niwas and stopped at our door.

That was my first real interaction with Reddy.

I had no idea then that this quiet, shy man would become my closest friend, a next-door neighbour for a decade, and almost family. Our children—Ashwini and Amrita—would grow up alongside his boys, Srikant and Sridhar, as contemporaries, as playmates, as if this had been decided that night.

Back home, my mother and my sister-in-law, Kanta Bhabhi, made sure I never went hungry. My tiffin carried the taste of my world—soft parathas, spicy chutneys, and Marwari vegetables cooked the way only home can manage. I often shared it with Hari Om, a warm, easygoing MD resident and an MGIMS alumnus from Etawah. Over those lunches—amid the clatter of steel boxes and the ward’s familiar noise—the feeling of being a stranger began to loosen its grip.

I had come to Sevagram. I had traded the promise of a comfortable private practice for ₹650 a month and a hospital with creaking floors.

And yet, as I walked along the quiet, tree-lined paths of the ashram hospital, I felt something settle inside me.

I was exactly where I needed to be.

The Men Who Built the Department

A department isn't built only with bricks, beds, and budgets. It is built with people — especially the kind who stay long enough to leave something of themselves behind.

When I joined MGIMS, the Department of Medicine stood on three legs: Dr. O.P. Gupta, Dr. A.P. Jain, and Dr. Ulhas Jajoo. They were different men — different in temperament, style, and the particular way each of them occupied a room. But together, they gave the department something that no infrastructure grant could have provided: a standard worth inheriting.

Every morning at eight, they gathered in the HOD’s chamber for what the medicine residents—Hari Om, Ashok Birbal, Krishan, Kapil Gupta, Vijay Kathuria, the late Ashish Kulkarni, Madhusoodanan, Rakesh Sood, Samir Mewar, and Anil Gombar—quietly called “court.” ECGs were spread out on the table like evidence. A diagnosis was never accepted at face value; it had to be explained, defended, sometimes withdrawn. Mistakes were discussed openly, without embarrassment but without escape. And in that small room, with everyone listening and no one able to hide, learning happened in a way that stayed.

I walked in their shadow first. Later, I had the privilege of walking alongside them. What follows is what I remember — and what I cannot forget.

Dr. O.P. Gupta — The Quiet Builder

Dr. Gupta was the anchor.

I joined his unit as a lecturer in June 1983, and my first impression of him was not what I expected. I had braced for the formal distance that senior professors maintain. What I found instead was warmth. Soon after my wedding, he and his wife Geeta invited Bhavana and me for lunch. I was a junior lecturer — barely known, easily overlooked. They treated us like family. That small gesture told me more about the kind of man he was than any ward round ever could.

He had joined MGIMS in 1971, when the department was still finding its feet. In those early years, there were only a handful of physicians. They did everything — OPD, wards, teaching, emergencies, administration — often in the same breath, on the same morning, without complaint. Dr. Gupta carried that habit his entire career. He never seemed to distinguish between what was his job and what simply needed doing.

For years, his unit ran out of the old Birla guest house. The walls peeled. The tube lights flickered weakly. The wards looked more like dormitories than a teaching hospital. But he practised medicine there with the seriousness of a man in the finest metropolitan institution. He never used the building as an excuse for his standards.

He also had a strict streak that kept us alert. Living in MLK Colony, he would sometimes appear in the ward without warning — just to check if the residents were awake and doing what they were supposed to do. It kept us nervous. It also kept us honest. We were better doctors because we never quite knew when he might walk through the door.

As Dean, between 1994 and 2002, he changed how MGIMS examined its students. He pushed for MCQ-based entrance exams, bringing objectivity into a system that could otherwise bend with influence and mood. It was the kind of reform that people resist at first and quietly thank you for later.

Even after a heart attack and bypass surgery, he never stopped learning. When we moved to the new building in 2012, his office sat close to mine. I would often look across and find him bent over a computer screen — reading, searching, figuring things out — like a student who had never quite finished his education.

He retired on 31 July 2023, at the age of eighty. The department didn't just lose a senior professor that day. It lost a habit of discipline.

***

Dr. A.P. Jain — The Clinician Who Used Fewer Words

If Dr. Gupta was the steady hand, Dr. Jain was the sharp blade.

He came from Uttar Pradesh and joined MGIMS in 1974. For a time, he had considered Psychiatry. Medicine claimed him instead — and, I think, got the better of the bargain. Dr. Jain believed in the bedside more than the machine. He had no patience for unnecessary tests, unnecessary labels, or the kind of medical theatre that impresses families while helping no one. His consultations were spare and precise, like a well-edited sentence.

He often quoted Osler: "The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease." But with Dr. Jain, this was never merely a quotation. It was a working style, visible in everything he did.

He could be intimidating. His wit could sting. If you tried to cover ignorance with confidence, he could puncture you with a single line. But behind that sharpness lived something solid: a clinician's integrity that patients recognised long before they could articulate it. In 1995, when Dr. Sushila Nayar suffered a massive heart attack, she chose Dr. Jain as her physician — without sending for anyone from Delhi or seeking a more famous name. That choice said more about him than any award could.

He built things too, quietly and without fanfare: the Dialysis Unit, the Geriatric OPD, and the DNB Family Medicine programme, which grew into one of the strongest in the country.

When Parkinson’s disease arrived in 2018, he did not announce it. He simply carried it. His hands trembled. His gait grew unsteady. Yet he continued his ward rounds, his journal clubs, and his teaching. He never dramatised his struggle. He refused to let it define him.

He retired on 31 July 2023, the same day as Dr. Gupta. Two pillars left together on a single afternoon. The hospital felt quieter after that. It still does.

Four days before his fall, Dr. A. P. Jain walked into my office in the Department of Medicine and sat down. We spoke for an hour about the past, the present, and what he still hoped to do. His hands shook. His steps were uncertain. But there was no trace of fear in his voice.

“I take life as it comes,” he said simply.

Then he pushed back his chair with trembling hands and walked away.

On 6 February 2025, he fell in his bathroom and suffered a devastating brain haemorrhage. He spent four weeks moving between critical care units in Nagpur and Sevagram. He died on 15 March 2025, in the very ICU where he had taught, treated, and mentored generations of doctors for nearly fifty years. In the end, he lay connected to the dialysis machines he had introduced to the hospital two decades earlier.

His name, Ajeet, meant unconquerable. For those who knew him, the name could not have been more fitting.

He is gone now. But the way he thought about patients—that precise, unsentimental, deeply humane way of thinking—still lives on in the doctors he trained. Few legacies endure more quietly, or more completely.

***

Dr. Ulhas Jajoo — The Humanist Who Never Hurried

And then there was Ulhas.

To the world, he is Dr. Ulhas Jajoo. To me, he has always been Ulhas Bhaiyya — and that is the only name I am able to write here without feeling that something essential has been left out.

Our story began long before Sevagram, in Nagpur, when I was still a student and he was the senior who decided newspapers were more dangerous than cigarettes. He cancelled our newspaper subscription to protect two young boys from distraction. At the time, I thought it was strict. Later I understood it was care — the particular, slightly interfering kind that only people who genuinely invest in you will bother to offer.

In 1982, when I stood uncertain at the crossroads between private practice and hospital life, it was Ulhas who looked at me and said, almost without ceremony: "Why don't you join us at Sevagram?"

That one sentence changed the direction of my life. I have thought about it many times since.

He practised medicine like an art, not a transaction. He trusted experience and intuition in ways that kept younger colleagues slightly uneasy — because he was so often right. He would remind us, with a half-smile, that statistics speak in averages while patients arrive one at a time. He never forgot the difference.

His ward rounds had their own unmistakable rhythm. Khadi shirt. Chappals. A crowd of students trailing behind him, notebooks ready. Questions fired like arrows — not to embarrass, but to awaken. He asked about symptoms, yes. But he also asked about money, family, fear, and the long walk to reach us. The patient was never just a case to him. The patient was always a person who had arrived at the hospital carrying more than their illness.

He was a storyteller, and that made his teaching impossible to forget. Students didn't remember only his prescriptions. They remembered his tone, his patience, the particular way he sat beside a bed and listened without glancing at the clock.

Every year on February 14, social media fills with tributes written by people he trained. One student once wrote something that has stayed with me: "I saw Jajoo Sir speaking with patients with compassion, and I wanted to be just like him." That one sentence, I think, is the most complete description of what he gave us.

Ulhas taught us that the most sophisticated instrument in medicine is not the CT scanner. It is the ear. And the willingness to use it without hurrying.

He retired on 28 February 2026, a fortnight after his seventy-fifth birthday. To everyone’s surprise, he soon began private practice, sitting every morning and evening in his younger brother Suhas’s OPD in Wardha.

I still find myself looking at his OPD papers—meticulously written, with careful notes on history, physical signs, diagnosis, and the do’s and don’ts for each patient. Even in retirement, his habits remain unchanged.

He also bought ten acres of agricultural land three kilometres from Sevagram, where he plans to take up organic farming with the help of three local farmers.

I have tried, without much success, to imagine the department without him. I still cannot.

***

What They Left Behind

Gupta, Jain, and Jajoo built the department I later inherited. They demonstrated, over decades and without ever saying so directly, that serious medicine could be practised in a village. That a hospital need not have the finest equipment to produce the finest doctors. That what a department really runs on is standards, discipline, and a moral spine.

They were, by any measure, giants.

And for many of us — for me, certainly — it was enough that they let us walk beside them.

My relationship with Sevagram did not begin with fanfare or a master plan. It began in the sticky heat of May 1982, when I arrived as a Senior Resident—not quite settled, not quite sure where I was headed.

Dr. Trivedi, the Medical Superintendent then, made it happen. He was a man of few words and quick decisions. He gave me a foothold and moved on. For a year, I worked in the wards, doing what young doctors do best—carry files, chase reports, and stay awake when the body begs for sleep.

Then in June 1983, a post appeared on the notice board: Lecturer in Medicine.

In those days, a government job was not a “career option.” It was security. It was respectability. It was the kind of thing families prayed for.

I applied.

***

The Interview Room

The interview room had an air-conditioner that hummed like a bored mosquito. It didn’t cool the room, but it made the silence feel official.

Across the table sat Dr. B.S. Chaubey.

To Maharashtra’s medical world, he was a titan—Dean of GMC Nagpur, brilliant, feared, and famously short-tempered. To me, he was something else: the man who had watched me closely during residency, the examiner who had seen my strengths and, more painfully, my hesitation.

He didn’t ask me the usual questions. No causes of splenomegaly. No management of DKA. He already knew what I knew.

He leaned back, looked at me for a long second, and asked the only question that mattered.

“So, Kalantri… you want to teach?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It is not the same as passing exams,” he said.

“I know, sir.”

That was it. A few more questions, a nod, and I was sent out.

When the result came, it was in my favour. On 1 July 1983, I signed the register as Lecturer in Medicine. I was twenty-six—barely older than the postgraduates I was supposed to guide.

The title changed overnight. The feeling didn’t. Inside, I still felt like a student who had wandered into the staff room.

***

The Morning I Nearly Failed Punctuality

If the interview tested my nerves, the first few months tested my timing.

Punctuality at MGIMS was not a good habit. It was a religion. And one Monday morning, I nearly became a sinner.

I had spent the weekend in Bhopal with my sister and returned by an overnight passenger train, confident I would make it comfortably for my 7 AM lecture to the 1979 batch.

Indian Railways had other plans.

The train rolled into Wardha East—today’s Sevagram station—at 6:35 AM.

I looked at my watch and felt my stomach drop. Twenty-five minutes. In that time I had to get home, wash up, change, and reach the college—six kilometres away.

I ran.

My mother met me at the door, alarmed by my face.

“Tea? Milk?” she asked.

“No time, Aai,” I said, already pulling off my travel shirt.

I splashed water on my face, threw on a clean khadi shirt and trousers, slipped into my sandals, and kicked my Priya to life. The scooter started on the first kick—one small mercy.

I was flying towards Sevagram when I saw it.

The railway crossing.

Gate down. Red light blinking. A long passenger train crawling through like it had all the time in the world.

I braked hard. Dust rose. My lecture began in ten minutes.

And then I saw a friend on the other side, waiting to go into Wardha. We locked eyes through the iron bars. He understood immediately.

“Swap?” I shouted.

“Swap!” he shouted back.

I left my Priya there, jumped the tracks like a thief, and ran across. His scooter was an old Lambretta—battered, noisy, and stubborn.

It groaned. It smoked. But it moved.

I drove that Lambretta as if my job depended on it. Maybe it did. The speedometer needle shook its way towards eighty. There were no helmets in those days, only youth and poor judgement.

I reached the college, parked, and sprinted to the lecture hall.

As I entered, the clock clicked to 7:00 AM.

The students looked up, mildly surprised, as if I had been dropped from the ceiling. I stood at the podium, caught my breath, picked up the chalk, and wrote the topic on the blackboard.

Only then did my heart slow down.

I had beaten the clock—by a whisker.

***

The Department of “P”s

The Department of Medicine in the early 1980s was not just a workplace. It was a small world with its own rules, its own hierarchy—and its own shorthand.

We called it the department of “P”s.

There was KP—Dr. Kamal Pervez.
There was JP—Dr. J.P. Sharma.
And now there was SP—me.

We were the junior lot. The foot soldiers. The ones who lived in the wards and carried the department on our backs, one admission at a time.

Above us sat the two peaks of the place: OP and AP.

Dr. O.P. Gupta was the sun around which everything revolved. He wore khadi like armour and arrived at 8:00 AM sharp. If you came at 8:05, you didn’t need a watch to know you were late. His eyebrow was enough.

He had an old-fashioned memory. He didn’t need the file to know the patient. He remembered the pulse rate from yesterday and the potassium from the day before.

Dr. A.P. Jain was the counterweight—precise, minimalist, and dangerously sharp. He moved through the ward like a detective, looking for what everyone else had missed: a soft murmur, a faint rash, a line in the history that didn’t fit.

And then there was Dr. Ulhas Jajoo—the conscience of the department. He reminded us, again and again, that illness did not come alone. It came with poverty, fear, and the cost of missing a day’s wage.

Together, they ran the department like a family—loving, demanding, and slightly terrifying.

***

The Tribunal

Every morning began with a ritual that taught us more than any textbook ever did.

ECG correction.

We gathered in the old hospital building—the former Birla guest house. The wooden floors creaked. The walls peeled. The place smelled of phenyl and old paper.

In a small room, the three of them sat together—Gupta, Jain, and Jajoo—like a bench of judges.

A resident would step forward holding a long strip of pink ECG paper, as if it were a confession.

“Read it,” Dr. Gupta would say.

The resident would begin, cautiously. “Sinus rhythm… rate 78…”

Dr. Jain would interrupt softly. “Look at V6 again. Is that a U wave or a P wave?”

And Dr. Jajoo would bring us back to earth. “You are reading a paper. Where is the patient in your thinking?”

There were no digital machines. No automated interpretations. No troponins. No quick CT scans to rescue you from doubt.

We had only our eyes, our ears, our stethoscope—and that strip of paper.

We dreaded that room some mornings. We also grew up in it.

Because in Sevagram, we learnt something simple and lasting: technology helps, but it doesn’t think. The doctor has to do that part.

And in the Department of “P”s, there was no escape from thinking.

On November 4, 1982, the calm of Pavnar Ashram broke. Acharya Vinoba Bhave had fallen ill. He was eighty-seven, and at that age even a “simple fever” makes everyone sit up a little straighter.

The message reached Sevagram quickly. Dr K.K. Trivedi, Dr O.P. Gupta, and Dr Ulhas Jajoo went across to examine him. They found him feverish and breathless, with a cough that would not settle. He was too weak to walk out of his room. Treatment began at once, but by afternoon it was clear this would not end with a couple of injections and a good night’s sleep.

Dr B.S. Chaubey was called from Nagpur. He examined Vinobaji carefully and said it could be pneumonia—or a pulmonary embolism. The next day, Dr Ashwin Mehta, the cardiologist from Bombay, arrived. Within hours, the ashram had more doctors than devotees, and a small “medical summit” formed almost on its own.

Everyone agreed on one thing: Vinobaji needed hospital care—Sevagram or Nagpur, anywhere with better support.

Vinobaji refused.

He would not leave Pavnar.

So we did the only thing left. If the patient wouldn’t come to the hospital, we took the hospital to the patient.

***

The ICU inside an ashram

A small room in the ashram became our makeshift ICU. Dr Chaubey chose two of us to stay there round the clock. I was one. The other was my colleague, Dr Ramesh Mundle.

We replaced Vinobaji’s simple wooden cot with a Fowler’s bed. We kept an IV stand ready. We arranged a tray with syringes, emergency medicines, and fluids. It looked like a hospital corner squeezed into a space meant for silence and prayer.

There were no monitors. No pulse oximeter. No alarms. We relied on the oldest tools in medicine—our eyes, our hands, and our stethoscopes. For ten days, Mundle and I lived in Pavnar, taking turns, sleeping in short bursts, waking at every change in breathing. We checked pulse, blood pressure, and temperature, and listened to his chest again and again, trying to decide whether the crackles were truly less—or only quieter.

For the first few days, we treated him aggressively. Penicillin for infection. Aminophylline to ease breathing. Heparin because we did not want to miss a clot. We also checked his urine for acetone—one of the simple ways we watched for starvation and metabolic trouble in those days.

Vinobaji lay there frail and bare-chested, ribs showing, beard flowing down like a white stream. His hearing had dulled, but his presence filled the room. Even when he spoke softly, people leaned in.

***

A brief recovery

By November 8, he looked better. His fever came down. His breathing eased. He was awake and attentive in that quiet way of his. That evening he took nourishment—milk, honey, paneer—measured in tolas, because the ashram recorded everything carefully.

It felt reassuring, almost like his body was telling us, I’m not done yet.

We relaxed a little. We stopped the glucose and saline, and told ourselves the worst had passed. That day Dada Dharmadhikari visited. Someone recited shlokas from the Gita and the Gitaai. Later, Rig Veda chants rose and fell in the room, steady as breathing.

For a few hours it felt like we were only doing our job—not standing at the edge of something larger.

***

The moment he chose

That night, something changed.

At 8:15 p.m., Jaidev—Jaisimha Rao, his close associate—brought him his usual glass of milk and honey. Vinobaji lifted his hand. Not in anger, not even in refusal the way we understand refusal. It was more like a man saying, gently, “Enough.”

We tried to persuade him. We told him he was improving, that the medicines were working, that he only needed a little more time. But he refused the milk. Then he refused the medicines. Then he refused water.

As doctors, we are trained to fight for life. That is what our hands are taught to do. That night, our hands had nothing to hold on to.

Vinobaji had decided on Prayopaveshan—a voluntary withdrawal from food and water, a deliberate departure. I had read about such things. I had never seen it up close. I certainly had not imagined I would be posted beside it.

***

Bulletins on a board

Once his decision became known, people began to arrive. Some were anxious, some curious, and some came as if this was a national event—which, in a way, it was.

We were asked to prepare daily health bulletins. Mundle and I wrote them by hand and pinned them outside the room, like school notices.

A few lines still stay with me. On 7 November, we wrote that his condition had improved, that pulse and blood pressure were stable, that he was conscious and taking milk and honey. On 9 November, we noted that he had stopped food, water, and medicines, and that this posed a serious threat. On 12 November, we wrote that he had taken nothing for 80 hours, and yet his condition had not worsened in the past ten hours.

It felt strange to write those sentences—clinical words for something that was not purely clinical.

***

When the body refused to behave

After a point, Vinobaji’s survival stopped obeying our textbooks. Even without intake, his urine output increased. The swelling in his feet disappeared. We kept checking for acetone. We found none.

I remember thinking—half in disbelief and half in irritation at my own ignorance—that this man’s body was not reading the same book as we were.

We were used to simple arithmetic. Three plus three is six. With Vinobaji, it felt like three plus three became eight.

On November 12, he pressed both ears with his hands and signalled pain. We cleaned his ears with glycerine, gave medicines, and waited, but the pain persisted.

I was young then. I had seen death in wards, in emergencies, in the ICU at Sevagram. But this was different. This was not death arriving.

This was death being invited in.

The morning after Vinobaji decided to stop food, water, and medicines, Pavnar changed colour. The ashram, usually held together by the soft rhythm of prayer and spinning, began to hum with another kind of energy—the kind that comes when important people arrive and everyone starts walking a little faster.

Mrs Indira Gandhi came that day. With her came Rajiv Gandhi, Babasaheb Bhosle, Vasant Sathe, Sitaram Kesri, and a small army of officials. Walking a respectful step behind was her personal physician, Dr K.P. Mathur. His presence made the situation feel even more serious.

When a Prime Minister brings her own doctor, you know the visit is not only political. It is personal.

Mrs Gandhi entered Vinobaji’s room quietly. She folded her hands, bowed, and touched his feet like a pilgrim. Vinobaji, frail but fully conscious, returned the greeting with a gentle namaskar.

For a moment the room felt strangely normal—an old man on a cot, a visitor on a mat, and a few doctors standing awkwardly at the edge.

“Baba,” she said softly, “at least take some water. Or a little fruit juice.”

Vinobaji lifted his hand. It was a small motion, almost mild, but it carried the finality of a decision that had already been made. No water. No juice. No medicines. No persuasion.

***

A lesson hidden in a breath

As Mrs Gandhi turned to speak to the doctors, Vinobaji called out in a thin voice, “Ram-Hari… Ram-Hari.”

She turned back at once.

He was showing her his breathing—slow, deliberate, almost rhythmic. He pressed his fingers against one nostril, inhaled to “Ram,” and exhaled to “Hari.” Even then, even in weakness, he was teaching. Not with words, but with breath.

Mrs Gandhi watched him closely, as if she had forgotten the crowd outside and the files waiting in Delhi. She nodded once, the way a student nods when something finally makes sense.

“Yes,” she said, “I will.”

I have seen many leaders up close over the years, but I have rarely seen one sit so still, so attentive, and so unprotected by power.

***

Lunch on the floor

She stayed for lunch.

The meal was the kind Pavnar served every day: roti with a little ghee, dal, rice, a boiled vegetable, curd, achar and chutney. There were no special arrangements, no separate plates, no “VIP food.” The ashram did not know how to flatter anyone, and Mrs Gandhi did not demand to be flattered.

When the meal ended, she stood up, picked up her own plate, and walked to the washing area. Then she washed it herself, calmly and thoroughly, as if she had done it all her life.

It was a small act, but it unsettled me. In medical college we were trained to stand up when a professor entered the room. Here was the Prime Minister of India washing her plate like an ashram inmate.

That image has stayed with me for decades, sharper than many speeches.

***

A young doctor speaks too honestly

Later, she asked the doctors to introduce themselves. She listened carefully, not distracted, not impatient. She asked a few questions about Vinobaji’s condition and our plan.

And then, almost inevitably, the conversation returned to the one thing we could not change: Vinobaji’s refusal.

I was young then, and still full of the medical instinct to fight. I had been trained to treat, to push, to rescue. Standing beside a patient who could recover if only he allowed us to help him felt like watching someone walk away from a bridge while you stood holding the rope.

“Madam,” I said, “he can live. But he doesn’t want to. As doctors, we are taught to save life. As a patient, he is choosing to leave it. What is the right thing to do?”

Mrs Gandhi looked at me for a moment. The political mask slipped away, and what remained was a woman who had seen enough of life to understand its limits.

“The patient’s wish comes first,” she said. “We may not agree, but we must respect it. Sometimes dignity matters more than the length of life.”

It was a lesson in ethics, delivered without a textbook and without drama. I remember feeling both relieved and defeated—the way you feel when someone tells you a truth you did not want to hear.

***

When the body stopped following rules

After that, the days tested our certainties.

Vinobaji pressed his ears with both hands, signalling pain. We tried cleaning his ears with glycerine. We tried medicines. We tried whatever little we had. The relief never lasted.

But the rest of his body behaved in ways that confused us. His urine output increased. The swelling in his feet disappeared. We tested his urine for acetone again and again, expecting starvation to show itself. Nothing.

As doctors, we like rules. We like patterns. We like predictable decline. Vinobaji’s body did not cooperate. It was as if the physiology had decided to obey a different master.

Standing by his bedside, I felt I was watching something I could not explain, and could not control.

***

Dr Sushila Nayar’s anger

Two days later, Dr Sushila Nayar came to Pavnar. She belonged to a different school of medicine—firm, fierce, and unwilling to watch a patient slip away if she believed he could be saved.

To her, inaction was almost a moral failure.

“This is not right,” she said, clearly upset. “He is not terminally ill. We cannot let him die of thirst.”

She took a glass of water and brought it to his lips herself. Vinobaji did not argue. He did not raise his voice. He simply brushed her hand away—gently, almost affectionately, but with the same steel we had seen from the first day.

His associates stood around him like silent guards. Not against us, but for him. They were there to protect his decision, even from doctors who meant well.

That day I understood something uncomfortable: a doctor can be helpless not only because the disease is stronger, but because the patient is.

***

A prediction we couldn’t chart

On the evening of November 14, we thought the end was near. His pulse felt like a tired thread. The blood pressure dropped and refused to rise. We looked at our notes, did our mental calculations, and prepared ourselves for the moment we knew was coming.

Then Radhakrishnaji—Gautam Bajaj’s father—walked in. He had been sleeping in a nearby room. He looked at Vinobaji and said, with complete certainty, “He will not go tonight. He will leave after 9:30 tomorrow morning. It will be Somvati Amavasya.”

We had our charts. He had his faith. And in that room, faith sounded strangely confident.

That night none of us slept.

***

9:30 a.m.

Morning came.

At 8 a.m., we gave Vinobaji a sponge bath with warm water. He remained conscious. His eyes followed us. He tried to sit up but could not. There was no panic, no pleading, no last-minute bargaining with the body.

At exactly 9:30 a.m., Vinoba Bhave’s heart stopped.

There was no shouting. No chest compressions. No desperate running around. Just a stillness that felt heavy and clean, the kind you feel after a long storm has passed.

He left the world the way he had lived—quietly, on his own terms.

***

From Moscow to Pavnar

The news reached Mrs Gandhi in Moscow, where she had gone for Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral. She returned immediately. The next morning she landed at Nagpur and flew by helicopter to Pavnar.

To avoid the crowd and the press, she entered from the back, walking past the goshala to the veranda where Vinobaji lay. She sat down near him and cried.

In that moment, the most powerful woman in India looked like a woman who had lost someone she deeply respected.

She did not make a speech. She did not turn it into a public moment. She simply sat there, quiet and human.

***

A funeral without spectacle

There was a suggestion to broadcast the funeral live on television. Vinobaji’s younger brother, Shivaji Bhave, refused. He also opposed covering the body with the tricolour.

“This is not a show,” he said firmly.

Mrs Gandhi accepted it without protest. The procession began, led not by priests or politicians, but by the women of the ashram, with Mahadevi Tai in front.

Vinobaji’s body lay on a simple bamboo stretcher, wrapped in white khadi and decorated with flowers. Mrs Gandhi walked with the ashram inmates to the Dham river. At the cremation ground, Mahadevi Tai lit the pyre.

Before leaving, Mrs Gandhi untied a small knot in the pallu of her sari, took out a piece of sandalwood she had carried, and placed it into the fire.

It was a Prime Minister’s offering, but it felt like something else—a private goodbye.

***

A note on memory (and power)

Years later, Arun Shourie came to Sevagram and asked me about those days. He was writing Preparing for Death. Dr K.P. Mathur wrote his account too. Others disagreed with him. Everyone remembered something different, as people always do.

Mathur’s version carries the view from close to power—security concerns, arrangements, and the small theatre that follows a Prime Minister. But at the bedside, the story felt different. The centre was not comfort or protocol. It was one man’s decision to stop.

I do not claim a monopoly over truth. But I know what I saw: a saint chose to step away, and the rest of us—doctors, politicians, devotees—had to learn how to step back.

In medical training, we are taught to act. That fortnight taught me the harder skill—to respect a patient’s choice, even when it breaks your professional reflex.

And I still remember Mrs Gandhi washing her plate. In that small act, she seemed to understand what we doctors were struggling to accept.

Can you imagine the confusion when a “VIP” patient lands in the ward—and the VIP happens to be the father of a doctor from the same department?

I saw it up close in 1983.

My father had been diabetic for nearly ten years. That week, he was admitted to our old medical ward on the ground floor—the building that now houses Community Medicine. He couldn’t swallow properly and wasn’t taking fluids. His blood sugars ran high and kept swinging. In those days we didn’t have fancy bedside glucometers. We adjusted treatment the old-fashioned way—by checking urine sugar again and again, sometimes six times a day.

I was a young lecturer in Medicine then, so I had easy access. After finishing my work, I would sit by his bed and do what sons do when they also happen to be doctors. I checked his urine sugar, wrote it down carefully, measured his blood pressure, looked at his nasogastric tube, and kept an eye on his neurological status. I tried to look calm, but inside I was constantly alert—listening for a change in his breathing, watching his face, waiting for some new trouble to announce itself.

For the first few days, I assumed things were running smoothly. Senior consultants came, spoke kindly, examined him, and moved on. Everyone seemed attentive. My father, too, felt reassured. He had always trusted doctors, and now three of them were hovering over him like guardian angels.

By the seventh day, I realised something odd.

My father had plenty of visitors, but no single doctor in charge.

Dr. O.P. Gupta thought Dr. A.P. Jain was looking after him because I worked closely with Dr. Jain. Dr. Jain assumed Ulhas was the main man because of our family bonds and his natural leadership. Ulhas, in turn, felt my father should technically be in Unit 1 because he had been admitted on Dr. Gupta’s admission day.

So my father was being seen by everyone—and owned by no one.

Every morning and evening, all three would still come. They stood at the bedside, glanced at the monitoring sheet, asked about the urine sugar, offered a few encouraging words, and walked away. Each visit looked like responsibility. In reality, it was shared goodwill floating without a centre.

It was VIP care in its most confusing form: extra attention, but unclear accountability.

I didn’t point it out to them. They were all senior to me, and I was still new enough to choose silence over argument. Besides, I knew how such conversations go—explanations, counter-explanations, and polite insistence that everything is under control. Meanwhile, the patient remains in limbo.

So I did what seemed simplest.

I took charge.

Once I felt my father was stable enough to go home, I discharged him myself. I filled the discharge card, assigned him to a unit on paper, wrote out his medicines, and brought him home.

He did well after that. The episode ended quietly, without drama—thankfully.

But it stayed with me.

It taught me that VIP treatment can be a strange thing. It looks like the best care, but it can create a fog—too many hands, too many good intentions, and no clear line of responsibility. And it reminded me of something basic that hospitals sometimes forget: kindness is important, but clarity is safer.

That week, my father recovered. I did too—though in a different way. I learnt, early in my career, that in medicine, everyone must know who is holding the rope.

In 1983, I suffered from a peculiar affliction common to young doctors: the "Alphabet Itch." I already possessed an MD, but I was convinced that unless I could trail a few more capital letters behind my name—like the tail of a stubborn kite—I would remain a medical lightweight. And so, I set my sights on the MNAMS (now known as the DNB). I imagined my future visiting card becoming quite the heavy-hitter in academic circles.

The theory papers in Bhopal went off with the breezy ease of a Sunday brunch. I felt invincible. But then came the practicals at Maulana Azad Medical College in Delhi.

***

Delhi, as any provincial doctor will tell you, is where egos are polished more frequently than stethoscopes. My assigned patient was a textbook case of a cervical cord tumor—or so I thought. I poked, prodded, and questioned the poor man with the precision of a detective. When I faced the external examiner, I was armed with facts and a dangerous amount of youthful certainty.

The examiner, a gentleman whose seniority was matched only by the stiffness of his collar, frowned. "The plantar reflex isn't up-going," he declared, peering over his spectacles as if I’d suggested the earth was flat. "Therefore, no cervical cord lesion."

Now, a sensible man would have nodded. He would have looked thoughtful, perhaps even slightly humbled, and made a strategic retreat. But I was intoxicated by clinical epidemiology. Instead of a graceful exit, I decided to "educate" him. I quoted literature. I stood my ground. I treated the viva like a debating society at Oxford rather than a high-stakes exam in a humid Delhi ward.

The examiner did not appreciate being "educated" by a candidate. He went silent. In a viva, silence isn't golden; it’s the sound of a guillotine being sharpened.

Only four out of thirteen passed that day. I was, quite predictably, left in the cold.

***

A few months later, the very same examiner turned up at Sevagram for our MD exams. He spotted me immediately. "Weren't you at MAMC recently?" he asked with a smile that was dangerously kind. "You were one of the best candidates," he whispered, "but you made one fatal error. Never bruise the examiner’s ego. In an exam room, the examiner is God—even if his theology is a bit rusty."

It was a delightful lesson in humility. I realized that medicine is fifty percent science and fifty percent reading the room. I didn't cry into my tea. I didn't declare it a tragedy. I simply filed the failure away like a misspelled lab report and went back to the wards.

In Sevagram, my patients were remarkably indifferent to my lack of a DNB tag. They didn't care about the alphabets; they cared if I showed up when they couldn't breathe, or if I could explain their heart failure in words that didn't require a Latin dictionary.

***

There is, however, a delicious postscript. My senior, Dr. A.P. Jain—a man twelve years my senior and a formidable unit head—had also secretly sneaked off to Bengaluru to take the same exam. He told no one. He, too, wanted the extra alphabets. It was only when the results came out that the truth emerged: he had failed as well.

Dr. Jain passed away a year ago, and I think he’d enjoy me sharing this now. We both failed. We both lived perfectly distinguished lives without those extra letters. It confirms my long-held suspicion that exams don’t actually select the best doctors; they merely select the best exam-takers. The rest of us are too busy actually practicing medicine.

In October 1984, I travelled to Madras for a conference on Allergy and Immunology at Stanley Medical College. For me, it was a professional outing. For Bhavana, it was our first real trip together after marriage. We had been married barely eight months, and the excitement of travelling with your wife still feels new at that stage.

We took the Grand Trunk Express. It carried us steadily south, as if it had been doing this job for a hundred years and had no reason to hurry. When we reached Madras, the city greeted us with smells I still remember—jasmine in someone’s hair, sea air on the roads, and that unmistakable comfort of filter coffee.

The conference had its lectures and its slides, but my best memory from that trip came from outside the auditorium.

***

Maitreyan’s house, and the chapati struggle

I called my old friend from GMC Nagpur, Vasudevan Maitreyan. In those days he was studying Medical Oncology, fully absorbed in the world of cancer—quiet, serious, and hardworking. Later, he would enter politics and become a familiar name. But in 1984 he was simply Maitreyan—my batchmate, my friend, and someone I trusted.

He invited Bhavana and me home for dinner.

His family was Tamil Brahmin—rice, sambar, rasam, curd rice… the kind of food that arrives with its own rhythm. But they had decided to cook a North Indian meal for us. It was such a sweet idea, and such a difficult one.

In the kitchen, I watched his sisters wrestle with wheat dough. For us, chapatis are muscle memory. For them, it looked like a geometry problem. The dough stuck to their fingers. The circles came out like the map of a new country. They rolled, adjusted, tried again, and refused to give up.

When we finally sat down, they watched us closely—like examiners waiting for a viva answer.

“Is it okay?”
“Does it taste right?”
“Dal is fine?”

We ate with genuine pleasure and told them the truth: it was delicious. Not because it was “perfect North Indian food”, but because it was full of effort and affection. Those chapatis were not just bread. They were hospitality.

That evening, Maitreyan’s mother did something that stayed with us. Before we left, she performed a small aarti. She applied sindoor to Bhavana’s maang and tucked flowers into her hair—blessing her the way mothers do, without asking what language you speak.

We walked back to our hotel feeling strangely at home in a city that was still new to us.

***

October 31: when the city held its breath

The next morning, the mood changed.

We heard the news in fragments first, and then clearly enough to believe it: Indira Gandhi had been assassinated.

Only two years earlier, I had seen her at Pavnar, sitting near Vinobaji with quiet respect. I remembered her stillness, her seriousness, the way she seemed fully present in that room. It felt impossible that she could be gone.

The conference ended abruptly. Madras, usually busy and noisy, turned into a different place. Shops shut. Streets emptied. Even the air felt cautious. It wasn’t panic. It was a kind of stunned silence.

Bhavana and I stayed inside our hotel room. This was long before mobile phones. Trunk calls were a struggle on normal days. In those days, they were nearly impossible. We could not reach Wardha. We could not reassure our families. We sat with the radio and listened, waiting for facts, receiving rumours.

And rumours, as you know, are never gentle.

We heard about violence in the North. About Sikhs being attacked. About trains being stopped. About mobs. We were in the South, far away from the worst of it, but distance doesn’t protect you from fear. It only adds helplessness to it.

On the third day, we stepped out for a short walk, hoping the city had returned to itself. It hadn’t. The roads still looked drained of life. We came back quickly, as if the hotel room was the only safe address we had.

***

The long ride back

After a few days, trains began running again. We got seats on the GT Express back towards Nagpur.

Normally, a long train journey in India has its own comfort—vendors shouting, children running, someone offering you a banana for no reason. This time, the compartments stayed tense. When the train slowed down between stations, people fell quiet and looked out of the windows with suspicion, as if the fields could suddenly produce trouble.

Nothing happened. But the fear travelled with us, sitting quietly in the corner.

When we finally reached Wardha, I felt relief in my bones. We had come back to familiar roads, familiar faces, and the simple comfort of being able to tell our families: we are safe.

That trip gave me two memories that don’t sit easily together—chapatis made with love, and a city going silent overnight. Madras offered both. And somehow, both stayed.

Strange as it may sound, my entry into medical writing did not begin with a grand hypothesis or a randomized trial. It began with a single sheet of paper—and a young boy with an unusual collarbone.

It was 1986. I had finished my MD five years earlier and had just been promoted as Reader in Medicine at MGIMS. A case report we had written—“Cleidocranial Dysostosis with Grand Mal Epilepsy”—was published in the Indian Journal of Radiology and Imaging.

To be honest, the paper was less my brainchild and more an accident of geography and seniority. I happened to be present, reasonably literate, and the youngest man in the room who could be trusted with a typewriter. The real engine was Dr. Sharad Pendsey.

***

Dr. Pendsey was my senior from the 1971 batch at GMC Nagpur. Even back in my house-officer days, he was a man who had quietly carved out a unique reputation. Long before "super-specialist" became a fashionable label for visiting cards, he was perhaps the first physician in Central India to dedicate his practice exclusively to diabetology.

He found his true calling in treating children—young lives that revolved around the relentless cycle of syringes and glucose charts. He stood as a guardian for these families, providing insulin that often cost far more than they could comfortably afford.

While he had a flair for the dramatic and showcased his research at international conferences, he was equally at home in the modern era, remaining active on social media to share his knowledge. Yet, beneath the accolades and the public presence, he was a man of discipline; he simply showed up every day and did the work.

Dr. Pendsey’s presence was as striking as his medical reputation. With his remarkably fair skin and a distinctive tuft of hair, he possessed the charisma of a Bollywood leading man. But it was his eyes that truly defined him—large, expressive, and perpetually dancing with a mischievous glint, as if he were sharing a private joke with the world.

He was a man of two worlds. On the international stage, he was the consummate professional, conducting himself with a polished grace that earned the respect of global peers. Yet, the moment he stepped back into the clinic, that sophistication transformed into a deep, grounded empathy.

For Dr. Pendsey, diabetology was not just about managing numbers; it was a crusade for the quality of life. He fought a tireless battle against the cruelest complications of the disease. He devoted his skill and heart to saving a patient’s limb from amputation, protecting a child's sight from blindness, and guarding fragile kidneys against failure. To his patients, he wasn't just a "super-specialist"—he was the hero who stood between them and a lifetime of disability.

When he passed away from stomach cancer in 2023, the loss felt premature. He was a pioneer who still had much to give, and he left us all a bit too early.

***

My own contribution to the paper was modest: I searched and manged to get the patient's x-ray from the Radiology department, located references, corrected commas, and nodded wisely. In academia, this level of participation is sometimes enough to earn authorship.

When the reprints arrived—ten crisp pairs wrapped in brown paper—they felt absurdly grand, like contraband or a government secret. I slit the packet open with unnecessary ceremony. Inside lay our names in print, black and permanent. I must confess my heart beat faster.

I examined each copy the way a child inspects a new cricket bat, or, more accurately these days, the way people in India open Amazon parcels—with suspicion first, then delight, and finally the quiet calculation of whom to show it to. I smoothed the pages, admired the typesetting, and briefly entertained the dangerous illusion that I had produced something of consequence.

For a few minutes, I was not a junior doctor with ink-stained fingers. I was, unmistakably, an author.

Then the ward bell rang, and reality resumed.

My name sat at the end of a list of six authors. Not exactly the stuff of legends. But holding those reprints in my hands, I felt something shift. The ward work we did every day could live beyond the bedside. It could travel.

And it could stay.

***

Before journals, the bulletin (late 1980s–early 1990s)

For the next decade, my “research output” looked different from what people usually mean by research.

I wrote more for the MFC Bulletin (Medico Friend Circle) and the local press than for indexed journals. The topics were not glamorous—rational use of drugs, the political economy of health, and the everyday unfairness of rural medical care.

These pieces were not peer-reviewed in the strict sense, but they taught me something important: how to look at medicine with my eyes open. They trained me to ask why things happen, not just what happens.

In those years, I did not have sophisticated tools. But I was learning to think.

***

The pivot: McMaster, Berkeley, and a new lens

The real change came in the mid-1990s, when I was exposed to McMaster University and later did my MPH at UC Berkeley.

Until then, like many doctors of my generation, I practised a lot of what can politely be called eminence-based medicine—you trust your teachers, you trust the textbook, and you hope your experience fills the gaps.

McMaster and Berkeley introduced me to evidence-based medicine and clinical epidemiology. It was exciting—and slightly unsettling. Suddenly, “common sense” was not enough. A hunch needed proof. A treatment needed outcomes, not reputation.

I returned to Sevagram with a different kind of confidence. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind that comes from knowing how to ask a question properly—and how to test the answer.

***

A simple rule: give students the credit

Back home, I realised one thing quickly: research in Sevagram could not be a solo hobby. It had to become a habit. A culture.

I began guiding a large number of residents for their MD theses. In many medical colleges, a thesis becomes a heavy file that nobody reads again. I wanted ours to become something else—a piece of work that could stand outside the examination hall.

We chose questions that grew out of daily practice:
Does this clinical sign really predict pneumonia?
How accurate is this rapid test for malaria?
What puts rural Indians at risk for heart attacks?

We did diagnostic accuracy studies, risk factor work, and prognostic studies. But just as important as the methods was the ethics of authorship.

My friend and collaborator Madhukar Pai gave me a rule that stayed with me: the student does the work, the student gets the credit.

So the resident became the first author. I stayed in the background as corresponding author. Watching young doctors see their names in print—often for the first time—gave me a satisfaction that no “impact factor” can match.

***

When Sevagram entered big trials

In the early 2000s, the horizon widened again.

MGIMS became part of major international collaborations led by Dr Salim Yusuf and the Population Health Research Institute, through colleagues like Dr Prem Pais and Dr Denis Xavier at St John’s, Bangalore.

It was a leap of faith. Could a rural hospital in Vidarbha match the discipline and documentation required for multicentric global trials?

We proved we could.

We contributed to studies like INTERHEART, INTERSTROKE, and POISE. What pleased me most was not the prestige. It was the thought that data from our patients—farmers, labourers, housewives—was helping shape global understanding of disease.

Wardha was quietly entering the textbooks.

***

The people behind the papers

No research journey is a one-man show. Mine certainly wasn’t.

Two collaborators shaped my work deeply: Rajnish Joshi and Madhukar Pai.

Rajnish was my student from the 1992 batch. Over time, the teacher-student line faded. He went on to Berkeley for his MPH and later a PhD, and eventually we worked as colleagues. Watching his growth—from Sevagram to global health—felt personal, like seeing your own story rewritten in a sharper script.

With Madhu, I entered the world of tuberculosis research and “clinical operations research”—not only asking does it work? but also can it reach the patient who needs it? Some of that work contributed to questioning—and eventually stopping—the use of inaccurate TB serology tests. That felt like research doing its real job: protecting people from bad medicine.

***

What I see when I look back

Today, if I look at my PubMed list, it looks like a tidy record—titles, journals, years.

But I don’t see it that way.

I see residents collecting data late at night, fighting sleep and ward chaos. I see patients in Kasturba Hospital allowing us to learn from their illness, without ever asking what they would get in return. I see long email threads with co-authors debating one line in a table as if it were a life-and-death decision.

My research journey began with a case report of a boy with a collarbone defect.

It grew into something larger—a way of thinking, a way of teaching, and a way of staying honest in medicine.

And it taught me one lasting lesson: if you listen carefully at the bedside, the paper almost writes itself.

In 1987, for reasons I can no longer explain with a straight face, I decided to learn German. I had no plans to travel. No professional need. Perhaps I just wanted a small escape from the daily cycle of rounds, case sheets, and prescriptions. Or maybe I wanted to prove to myself that my brain could still do something new.

Learning a foreign language in Wardha in those days was not exactly fashionable. We lived comfortably with Marathi and Hindi, and we managed our medical English as best as we could. Deutsch felt as distant as snowfall. But Wardha has its own way of surprising you.

Mrs. Sunita Kawale, the wife of the District Collector, had moved to Wardha. She was a linguist, fluent in German, and she agreed to teach.

A class of one sounded depressing, so I did what every enthusiastic beginner does—I recruited others. Dr. Sudha Jain and Dr. Anjali Ingle from Anaesthesiology joined in. Monika Ahuja, an intern with a sharp mind, signed up too. So did Parthak Pradhan and Ganesh Srinivasan, two third-year students who were always ready for anything that wasn’t PSM.

***

The J-Y Problem

We committed ourselves to a six-month course. Three evenings a week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday—we gathered in the Medicine seminar room. Outside, Wardha baked. Inside, we tried to sound like people from Berlin.

Grammar was manageable. Pronunciation was the real enemy.

The letter J, we discovered, behaved badly. In German it softened into a Y, which created an identity crisis for half our department. “Jajoo” became “Yayoo.” “Jain” turned into “Yen.” We said these names with great sincerity, and then collapsed laughing.

And then came the dreaded ü. We sat pursing our lips like we were trying to whistle without knowing how. The sounds we produced were somewhere between a groan and a complaint. Mrs. Kawale stayed calm through it all. She corrected us gently, as if she had been trained for this in Germany too.

***

The Exam That Made It Real

Despite the comedy, we took the classes seriously. In May 1987, I appeared for the examination conducted by Max Mueller Bhavan, the Indian arm of the Goethe Institute. I still remember the small thrill of seeing my score.

84 out of 100.

That number made me greedy. I enrolled for the advanced course. This was no longer about memorising words. It was about speaking without panicking.

An external examiner came for the final assessment by the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband (DVV). The oral exam was the hardest. I spoke in careful sentences, like a man walking on a freshly mopped floor. Somehow, it worked. I scored 64 out of 90 in theory and 22 out of 30 in the oral. In December 1987, I was officially declared passed.

***

Germany Came to Sevagram

None of us went to Germany after that. We stayed exactly where we were—firmly in central India, with our wards, our patients, and our familiar dust.

Still, the effort wasn’t wasted. Learning a new language opens a window in the mind. It freshens the air. It also gives you the quiet satisfaction of doing something difficult just because you wanted to.

And it gave me a small party trick.

Kasturba Hospital had a few senior nurses who had trained in Germany years earlier—efficient, stern, and impossible to impress. Once in a while, I would walk up to the nursing station and drop a sentence in German.

“Guten Morgen, Schwester. Wie geht es Ihnen?”

The first reaction was always shock. Then came a smile—quick, genuine, almost childlike. For a moment, the usual doctor–nurse distance softened. We became two people connected by a language that had no business being in Sevagram.

We never went to Germany.

But for a few evenings in 1987, Germany came to us.

In December 1987—exactly a year after my father passed away—Bhavana and I decided to change the map of our lives. We moved out of the familiar comfort of Jaishree Bhavan in Wardha and into the MGIMS campus at Sevagram. It wasn’t a grand leap. It was a quiet shift. But it changed everything that came after.

We were allotted Flat No. 13, first floor, in the “Type 2” quarters near Kasturba Vidya Mandir. Two bedrooms, a small drawing room, and a kitchen that quickly became the busiest room in the house. We didn’t own much then, so the move was almost embarrassingly easy. One truck, a few steel trunks, and we were done.

To set up our new kitchen, I took my seventeen-year-old niece, Surekha, on my scooter to Sitabuldi in Nagpur. We returned like proud hunters with our trophies: a gas stove, a Sumeet mixer-grinder, and a 165-litre Kelvinator refrigerator. Soon after, a black-and-white Digichrome television arrived. Ulhas Jajoo and Mr. C.B. Taori helped coordinate it, as if buying a TV was a public health programme that needed teamwork and planning.

Once we settled in, colony life took over—quickly and completely. We were surrounded by young lecturers: Dr. Ramji Singh, Dr. Mendiratta, Dr. Ajay Agrawal, and many others whose doors stayed open more often than closed. Privacy existed, but it wasn’t treated as a sacred right. In a two-minute walk you could meet twenty people you knew, and if you looked even slightly troubled, someone would ask, “Kya hua?”

Evenings had their own rhythm. Badminton in the open, cups of coffee that never stayed hot, and snacks that travelled from one house to another without needing permission. Birthdays were not private family affairs. They were community events. One child blew the candles, and the whole block ate cake.

***

The Malgudi of Sevagram

Sevagram was a village, but our colony felt like a little town square. It had its own characters—warm, quirky, and unforgettable—people who could have walked straight out of an R.K. Narayan story.

Dr. K.K. Ghuliani, Head of Community Medicine, became our next-door neighbour when we shifted to Vivekanand Colony in 1989. In the department he looked stern, almost military. Students feared his punctuality more than exams. But at home he was a different man—easy, affectionate, and addicted to Scrabble. Many evenings ended with him grinning over a triple-word score while the rest of us protested like injured parties.

His wife, Mohini, held the colony together in ways no official circular ever could. She taught flower decoration and knitting, organised children’s programmes at the staff club, and somehow made every gathering feel like a family event, even when half the people were meeting for the first time.

Then there was Dr. R.S. Naik from Forensic Medicine—a paradox if there ever was one. He worked with death all day, yet he carried the liveliest spirit on campus. As warden of the boys’ hostel, he followed one simple philosophy: “Boys will be boys.” And since this was the pre-cable-TV era, he started a Cine Club. Every weekend, films were screened, and the hostel boys got their dose of Bollywood, romance, and noise—exactly what young men need when they are stuck in a rural campus with too much study and too little distraction.

***

Lali, Kali, and the Director

But the most eccentric—and most loved—were Dr. Samit Kumar Ghosh and his wife, Laxmi. Dr. Ghosh, our Professor of Anatomy, lived with three passions: dissection, gardening, and dogs. He spoke English in a rich Bengali accent and carried a temperament that could switch from thunder to tenderness without warning.

The Ghosh household didn’t “keep pets.” They had family members who happened to be dogs.

They had adopted two street dogs and named them Lali and Kali, based on their coats. These weren’t dogs who slept outside. They slept on the bed, ate home food, and were spoken to in Bengali like small children who refused to study.

One Sunday morning, the colony woke up to a crisis. Lali and Kali were missing.

Mrs. Ghosh rushed out in panic—hair uncombed, an informal house gown, and a big red bindi that announced she meant business. She stopped a passer-by and demanded, “Excuse me! Have you seen Lali and Kali?”

The man was Dhirubhai—the formidable Director of the institute. He stared at her blankly. Lali and Kali sounded like nieces, or granddaughters, or maybe two important VIPs he was expected to recognise. When she explained they were dogs, his expression shifted from confusion to alarm. He muttered something, shook his head, and escaped before he could be recruited into a search party.

Years later, when Dr. Ghosh moved to Kolkata, their devotion reached another level. They booked a special carriage on the Mumbai–Kolkata Mail for Lali, paying a handsome sum, while Kali travelled by car. They were not dogs, after all. They were Sevagram royalty.

***

A dent in the car, a lump in the throat

Dr. Ghosh could be fiery, but he also surprised you when you least expected it.

In 1999, we bought a second-hand Maruti 800. Bhavana was learning to drive, while managing her job in the IT department, two children, and the daily chaos that runs every Indian home. One Sunday morning, while reversing out of the driveway, she misjudged the angle.

Crunch.

Our car hit Dr. Ghosh’s shiny, well-kept vehicle. A dent appeared—clear, ugly, and impossible to hide.

Bhavana froze. She knew Dr. Ghosh’s temper. She imagined the shouting, the humiliation, the long lecture that would follow. Still, she walked to his door and confessed.

Dr. Ghosh came out, looked at the dent, then looked at Bhavana standing there with her head slightly bowed, waiting for the blast.

Instead, he turned to me.

“Kalantri!” he said sharply. “Why are you not helping her more?”

I stood stunned.

Then his voice softened as he spoke to Bhavana. “It is not your fault. Reversing is difficult. You are doing too much.”

He looked back at me. “She is managing home, children, job. You must share the load. Shoulder her burden.”

And with a casual wave of his hand, he dismissed the dent as if it was a mosquito bite.

Bhavana came back home with tears in her eyes—not from fear, but from relief. The car had a dent. But what stayed was something else: the unexpected kindness of a man who could have shouted, but chose to protect.

***

Amrita arrives—and Ashwini finds a tail

In October 1989, we moved to the first floor of Vivekanand Colony. Soon after, Bhavana went into labour. It was 10 p.m., and the hospital was barely five minutes away on foot. Dr. Chhabra arrived quickly, and within an hour, our daughter Amrita was born.

Ashwini, then three and a half, was thrilled. Outside the labour ward he met Dr. Anuradha Gokarn, a house officer who was engaged to her batchmate, Fali Langdana. In a playful mood, she asked him about a recent staff club party.

“What did you do at the party?” she asked.

“I became Lord Hanuman!” Ashwini announced.

“But you don’t have a tail,” she teased. “How did you become Hanuman without a tail?”

Ashwini looked at her as if the answer was obvious.

“Oh, that was easy,” he said. “I used Phali for the tail.”

He meant the long bean vegetable—phali. But Dr. Anuradha burst out laughing. The thought of her fiancé, Fali, being used as a tail in a toddler’s costume was too funny to resist.

That’s how those years felt: small homes, open doors, shared laughter, and the comforting noise of neighbours who slowly became family.

We moved to Sevagram thinking we were only changing our address.

We didn’t realise we were also choosing our people.

1990 began with a small disaster. In January, only a few months after Amrita was born, I injured my foot. A large, angry wound appeared on the top of it. Walking hurt. Shoes were out of the question.

It got bad enough for me to do something I almost never did—apply for ten days of earned leave.

I stayed home in Vivekanand Colony, sulking a little and limping a lot. The wound needed daily dressing, and I needed antibiotics. My friend, Dr Suhas Jajoo—the surgeon we all trusted—had shifted his practice to Wardha town. It was only a few kilometres away, but with a throbbing foot it might as well have been another district.

Suhas gave me a simple plan over the phone.
“Gentamicin. Ten injections. Twice a day for five days.”

Simple plan. Difficult execution.

***

The Unlikely Nurse

The question was: who would give the injections?

I couldn’t go to the hospital twice a day. Calling a nurse home morning and evening felt excessive—and frankly, embarrassing. I was a doctor. I should have managed my own foot better.

That’s when Bhavana said, quite calmly, “I’ll do it.”

I looked at her as if she had offered to perform a bypass surgery after making tea.

She had no medical training. She had never held a syringe. At home she already had her hands full—Ashwini was three, and Amrita was barely three months old. But she didn’t hesitate. Not once.

In those days we still used glass syringes. She boiled the syringe and needle like she was sterilising kitchen vessels. She snapped open the Gentamicin ampoule, drew the medicine carefully, and walked towards me with a seriousness that made me sit up straight.

I was the patient now, and suddenly very obedient.

***

Kitchen Confidence

I stretched my arm out on the bed, trying to look brave. Inside, I was praying silently: Please don’t miss the vein.

Bhavana tied the tourniquet. She tapped gently. She looked once, then slid the needle in—quick and clean.

I watched her pull back the plunger. A flash of blood appeared in the barrel.

She was in.

She pushed the medicine slowly, withdrew the needle, and pressed cotton over the spot like she had been doing this all her life. I exhaled. Only then did I realise I had been holding my breath.

“How did you do that?” I asked. “You’ve never done it before.”

Bhavana shrugged, as if I was being dramatic.
“Oh, please,” she said. “We women do harder things in the kitchen every day. Finding a vein is easier than making a perfectly round chapati.”

For five days she gave me all ten injections. She didn’t miss once. No swelling. No bruising. No drama.

My foot healed. But what stayed with me was her steady hand—and the quiet confidence behind it. I had married a woman who could run a home, raise two small children, and still teach a doctor a thing or two about courage.

And she did it without asking for a certificate.

In the early decades of MGIMS, the Department of Medicine rested not on titles but on temperament. Two men—Kiran Munjewar and Sudhakar Bijewar—carried no MD degrees after their names, yet the wards leaned on them the way an old house leans on its central beams. If they were absent, the place felt slightly unstable, as though a screw had come loose somewhere.

They had arrived when the institute was young and stayed long enough to grow old with it. As a resident, I depended on them without knowing it; as faculty, I depended on them knowingly. They were always present—on Sundays, on Diwali afternoons, during monsoon nights when the power failed and the generator coughed into life. They did not speak of dedication. They simply reported for duty and began work.

In a hospital that loved meetings and memos, they believed in neither. Their loyalty was to the next patient, the next strip of paper, the next slide under the microscope.

***

The ECG Room and the Earthing Ritual

If you mentioned an ECG anywhere in Sevagram, someone would say, “Ask Munjewar.”

The ECG room was small, warm, and faintly metallic in smell, like overheated wiring. In one corner stood the old BPL single-channel machine—cream-coloured, heavy, and stubbornly reliable. It did not forgive carelessness. A clean tracing required patience, good earthing, and a steady hand.

Munjewar treated that machine the way a priest treats an altar.

Before every recording he went through a quiet ritual. The green earthing wire was clipped firmly to a water pipe or sometimes to a copper rod pushed deep into the soil outside the window. The patient’s skin was rubbed with spirit until it shone. The brass electrodes were pressed down carefully, as though he were persuading them, not forcing them.

Then he waited.

If the patient was anxious, the baseline trembled. So he would rest a hand lightly on the patient’s shoulder and talk about something ordinary—how far the village was, whether the crops had survived the rain, whether the bus had been crowded. The heart rate would slow. The line would settle.

Only then would the stylus begin its slow, scratching journey across the thermal paper, burning the rhythm into a grid with a soft skritch-skritch sound.

Today machines interpret and print diagnoses in bold letters. Munjewar interpreted faces first, then hearts.

***

Geometry, Not Waste

Paper, to him, was not expendable.

Where a young resident might waste half a roll waiting for the leads to settle, Munjewar moved through them with quiet precision—I, II, III, then the augmented leads, then the chest leads—each switch timed so perfectly that the entire twelve-lead ECG fit into half the length we would normally use. Watching him was like watching a tailor cut cloth without leaving scraps.

He could spot trouble before the rest of us found our pens. A faint ST depression, a shy heart block, an evolving infarct—he would tap the strip and say, “Something is changing here,” and nine times out of ten he was right.

Over the years he must have recorded hundreds of thousands of ECGs. The P waves and QRS complexes were not abstractions to him; they were old acquaintances.

***

The Side Lab Republic

If the ECG room belonged to Munjewar, the side laboratory belonged to Bijewar.

It was a cramped, dim room that smelt permanently of stain, spirit, and warm glass. No automation, no screens, no reassuring beeps. Just benches, microscopes, slides, bottles with handwritten labels, and residents who learnt quickly or suffered.

Every Medicine resident passed through that room like a rite of passage.

Residents estimated haemoglobin with Sahli’s tubes, squinting to match colours. They made smears by hand and hunted for parasites under oil immersion until their eyes watered. When a patient came in with suspected meningitis, they did not wait for a central lab report. They carried the CSF straight here, counted the cells ourselves, and made decisions on the spot.

Medicine, stripped of glamour, looked like this: stained fingers, bent backs, and the smell of Leishman’s dye.

Bijewar ruled this republic with quiet authority.

***

The Gospel of Frugality

He believed waste was a moral failure.

To ask for an extra slide invited interrogation. “Why two?” his raised eyebrow seemed to ask. “One is enough if you know what you’re doing.” Coverslips were washed and reused. Reagents were measured like precious medicine.

If someone spilled stain or used too much Benedict’s solution, he noticed. He never scolded loudly. The reckoning came later, in a soft voice, with accounts demanded like a shopkeeper balancing a ledger.

At the time we found it excessive. Later, working in resource-poor settings, we understood that he had been teaching us something more important than thrift. He was teaching respect—for material, for labour, for the small economies that keep a rural hospital alive.

Clinical excellence, he seemed to say, begins with not wasting what you have.

***

The Great Purge

Around the year 2000, when we were converting the old ward into an ICU, I decided that the Medicine office needed cleaning. “Cleaning,” I imagined, meant order. To Bijewar, it meant catastrophe.

The office had become a geological site. Files from the 1970s lay under files from the 1980s. Leave applications from doctors who had long retired slept peacefully beside circulars announcing Independence Day celebrations from another century.

One Sunday morning I gathered a group of residents. Sleeves rolled up, we attacked the room with revolutionary enthusiasm. Old forms, yellowed notices, ancient mark sheets—out they went. For three hours we cleared, dusted, rearranged, and admired the sudden space as though we had discovered land.

On Monday at nine, Bijewar walked in.

He stopped at the door.

His eyes scanned the shelves the way a man scans the aftermath of a burglary. “Where are the files?” he asked quietly. To us they had been junk. To him they were history, proof, continuity—the paper memory of the department.

There was a brief protest, a small lament for vanished documents, and then acceptance. But for days he handled the new shelves like a man learning to live in a house rebuilt overnight.

We called it decluttering. He probably called it vandalism.

***

What Remains

Today both men have slowed. Age has done what administrators never could.

Bijewar walks carefully now, Parkinson’s and osteoarthritis negotiating each step, yet the old half-smile survives. Munjewar spends his mornings in his garden, coaxing tomatoes into ripeness with the same patience he once used on anxious patients.

When I meet them, we speak of ordinary things. They never list achievements. But whenever I look at a clean ECG or a neatly prepared slide, I see their handwriting.

Machines today are faster, cleverer, almost arrogant. They announce diagnoses before we think. Yet sometimes, standing in a modern ICU full of screens and algorithms, I miss those two men and their deliberate ways—the careful folding of a strip, the measured drop of stain, the sense that tools deserve respect.

They did not merely record rhythms or count cells. They taught us how to practise medicine without noise, without waste, and without drama.

The department still stands on the foundations they laid, though most of us realised it only after they had quietly stepped aside.

By February 1993, I had been an MD for nearly a decade. In medicine, ten years is a long time to remain the fellow who is always “helping” and never quite leading. I was a Reader in Medicine by then—experienced enough to know my way around the wards, yet still functioning as a dependable second-in-command.

The work was steady. The days were full. But somewhere inside, a small restlessness had begun to tap its foot.

The turning point came at a wedding, not in a ward. I was in Pune for the wedding of Sujata Bajaj—Radhakrishnaji Bajaj’s daughter—to Rune Larson. It was February 1993. The hall was buzzing in that familiar Indian way: loud greetings, relatives searching for chairs, photographers shouting instructions, and people eating as if the baraat might snatch away the food.

In the middle of that cheerful chaos, I found a quiet moment with Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta. He had joined the Kasturba Health Society in 1982 and had the rare ability to understand both files and feelings. I decided to be honest with him.

“Dhirubhai,” I said, “I’ve been here for years. I have the degree and the experience. But I’m still working in someone else’s shadow, and it is slowly dampening my zeal. If I don’t get the independence to run a unit, I fear I’ll stop growing.”

He listened without interrupting, the way good administrators sometimes do—silently, but with attention. He didn’t promise anything. He didn’t even say much. But I had a feeling he had heard me properly.

A few weeks later, back in Sevagram, the wheels began to turn.

On March 1, 1993, a notice appeared on the department board: a new unit was being created for me. For a few seconds I felt relieved, almost boyishly pleased. Finally, I thought, a unit of my own.

Then I read the rest.

The administration had divided the department into “Major” and “Minor” units. Units I and II were given two OPD days each. Units III and IV—the newer units—were given only one OPD day each. On paper, it was just a timetable. In real life, it meant something else. In a teaching hospital, patients are our textbooks. Fewer OPD days meant fewer patients, fewer discussions, fewer opportunities for residents to learn by seeing and doing.

A “minor unit” was not a minor thing.

There was another line that made me uncomfortable. The notice said I would share OPD duties with Dr. Ulhas Jajoo—my senior colleague and close friend. To accommodate this new arrangement, Ulhas had been asked to give up one of his OPD days. I stared at the notice for a while, hoping it would rewrite itself out of politeness.

It didn’t.

It felt unfair in two ways. My unit would start with less clinical material, and Ulhas would lose a day despite years of service. I knew the intention was not unkind. It was simply the usual administrative jugglery—three balls in the air and one landing on someone’s head.

I could have accepted it quietly. Many people would have. After all, even a “minor unit” was better than none. But I also knew that if I began my independence by accepting something that didn’t feel right, I would spend the rest of my career adjusting and compromising, and calling it maturity.

That evening, I went home and pulled out my Brother portable typewriter. Its clack-clack-clack filled the room, making my protest sound louder than it actually was. I wrote to our Head of the Department, Dr. O.P. Gupta. I kept the tone respectful and the argument simple. I said the “Major–Minor” divide would breed resentment among junior faculty and create second-class units inside the same department. I also wrote clearly that Ulhas did not deserve to lose an OPD day after serving the institute for so long.

Then I suggested a solution that even a tired resident could understand: distribute OPD and indoor work equally across all four units.

After I signed the letter, I sat for a moment, feeling my heartbeat a little too loud for a man who had only typed a page. In medical colleges, questioning a notice is not considered a hobby. It is treated like a mild infection—people watch it carefully.

To my surprise, Dr. Gupta did not take offence. He did not call me in for a scolding, and he did not make me feel like an overconfident junior. He did something far better. That very day, he withdrew the earlier notice and issued a revised one. The “Major” and “Minor” labels disappeared. The work was redistributed evenly. And I was given full independent charge.

My OPD days were fixed: Monday and Thursday. My emergency duty was set for Thursdays and every fourth and fifth Sunday of the month. I read the new roster twice, as if it might vanish if I blinked too hard. It didn’t.

That evening I felt something loosen inside me. I wasn’t just relieved. I was quietly grateful—first to Dhirubhai for listening, and then to Dr. Gupta for responding with fairness instead of ego.

I also learnt a small professional lesson that has stayed with me: competence is important, but sometimes you must speak up—politely, clearly, and on time. If I hadn’t spoken in Pune, and if I hadn’t typed that letter in Sevagram, I would probably have continued doing my work with a smile on the face and a grumble in the heart.

Instead, I finally had a unit of my own to run—and no reason to keep looking over my shoulder.

My first tryst with printing was in 1986, when I began helping edit the MFC Bulletin. The articles arrived by post — most handwritten in varying degrees of legibility, a few badly typed on manual typewriters with faded ribbons, the letters uneven, the margins ignored. My job was to collect them, mark them up, and take them personally to Samyayog Press in Wardha, near Rajkala Talkies, on my scooter.

Shri Tukaram Chaudhari managed the press. He wore a spotless Gandhi shirt and dhoti, a Gandhi cap placed squarely on his head, and carried himself with the quiet discipline of a man who believed that a clean uniform and a clean proof sheet were equally important. He was unhurried, courteous, and entirely unimpressed by titles. A Professor of Medicine from the hospital up the road was, to him, simply another person who needed a job done correctly.

He had a small team of boys, each one trained in a specific task. One handled the type-setting — picking individual metal letters from the shallow wooden trays and assembling them by hand into words and lines. Another managed the inking — rolling a brayer evenly across the assembled type to coat every raised surface with a thin film of black ink. A third operated the press itself, feeding sheets of paper with a careful precision that came from doing it a thousand times. A fourth handled the proofing — peeling back each freshly printed sheet, holding it to the light, looking for the letter that had shifted, the line that had slipped, the word that had come out faint because the ink had run thin. Together they moved through the room with the practised ease of a surgical team — each knowing his role, each trusting the others to do theirs.

Watching him was like watching a man knit. There was the same repetitive rhythm, the same unhurried confidence, the same quiet that comes from doing one thing so many times it no longer requires thought.

When a line was complete, he transferred it to a flat metal tray, building the page column by column. Thin metal strips between the lines controlled the spacing. There were no fonts to click, no sizes to select from a menu. Every choice was physical — a different tray for a different typeface, fetched and returned by hand. When the page was assembled, it was locked into a frame and placed on the press: a heavy cast-iron machine that had probably been printing things since before Independence. Ink was rolled across the raised type. A sheet of paper was laid over it. A lever came down. The sheet was peeled back and held to the light.

This was the proof. Errors at this stage were painful. A wrong letter meant finding the right metal slug among hundreds, removing the wrong one with a pointed tool, substituting it. There was no undo button.

Often it would take four hours to set a single page. I would sit on a wooden stool beside the compositor, marking corrections on the proof, drinking tea brought in a glass from the stall outside. The ceiling fan turned slowly overhead. The press thudded with a steady, industrial heartbeat. Somewhere outside, Wardha went about its afternoon.

Then computers arrived. The software was PageMaker — a desktop publishing programme that let you design an entire page on screen, adjust the spacing with a keystroke, and send a clean file to the press. What had taken four hours now took forty minutes.

I do not miss the old way. But I understood, after those evenings at Samyayog Press, that every word on a printed page was once placed there by a person — one letter at a time. It made me a more careful editor. Perhaps it made me a more careful physician too. The principle is the same: small errors, in printing as in medicine, have a way of becoming large ones.

In 1990, MGIMS had a problem we didn’t even know how to name. Students graduated, walked out of the gate, and—quite literally—vanished.

There was no Facebook, no WhatsApp, no email. If you wanted to stay in touch, you wrote a letter, posted it, and waited. Sometimes it arrived. Sometimes it didn’t. Professional networks ran on luck: a chance meeting at a conference, or a familiar face spotted across an OPD corridor. Otherwise, silence did the rest.

Today it is hard to explain that kind of quiet. A photograph clicked in Sevagram now reaches New York before the tea cools. Back then, even a change of address could erase a friendship.

Mrs Desikan’s idea

Mrs Kamla Desikan, Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society, understood this loss more sharply than most of us. She had the rare ability to see an institution not as buildings and departments, but as people—especially the ones who had left.

One afternoon she said to me, almost casually, “We need a newsletter.”

Not a circular. Not an annual report. A newsletter—something that would tell our alumni, We remember you. And we still belong to each other.

And before I could ask what that would involve, she added, “You will edit it.”

That is how I became, overnight, the editor of the MGIMS News Bulletin.

A one-man newsroom

The plan sounded harmless: a four-page quarterly bulletin.

In reality, it became a small second job that ran alongside ward rounds, teaching, and the daily chaos of hospital life. In a proper newsroom you have reporters, sub-editors, proofreaders, and designers. At MGIMS in 1990, I had only myself—and a stubborn desire to make it work.

I went from department to department collecting news the way some people collect stamps. A new faculty joining. A seminar. A guest lecture. A promotion. A retirement. Anything that could make an alumnus pause and say, Ah, so the old place is still alive.

But I quickly realised something: buildings and equipment don’t create belonging. People do.

So the most-read part of the bulletin became what we called the “personal columns”—births, deaths, marriages. It was the campus grapevine, made respectable in print.

Cut, paste, and patience

Designing the bulletin was a physical exercise. “Cut and paste” wasn’t a computer command. It meant scissors, glue, and strips of typeset paper.

I sat for hours arranging columns, counting words, trimming edges, and shifting paragraphs by millimetres so the four pages looked balanced. There were days I felt like a junior doctor doing a delicate procedure with no instruments—only patience.

And yet, I enjoyed it. The work had a quiet satisfaction. It felt like stitching together a community that had started to fray.

Our social media, on paper

Looking back, the MGIMS News Bulletin was our social network—just slower and far more polite.

It did what WhatsApp groups do today. It reminded people they still mattered. It gave them a sense of place. When an alumnus posted in a remote district hospital opened the envelope and saw a familiar name, the distance shrank for a moment.

I remember the excitement of the early issues. One line announced the birth of a baby: Shridhar Reddy.

At the time it was just a happy entry in a column. Today, Shridhar is a grown man—a 33-year-old orthopaedic surgeon. That single line, printed on cheap paper, quietly contains three decades of life. No “timeline” can do that so cleanly.

The printing ritual

Every quarter, the bulletin took me back to a familiar place—the printing press of Mr Rajabhau Chawade.

The press had its own smell: ink, paper, and a faint metallic heat. The proofs came out warm, the letters sharp and slightly raised. Photographs were grainy black-and-white headshots, the kind that made everyone look either too serious or slightly guilty.

We checked the layout, fixed the mistakes, argued about fonts, and worried about deadlines. When the final copies arrived in bundles, it felt like a small victory. Not the kind that wins applause, but the kind that makes you breathe easier.

Thousands of bulletins would then go out—little paper ambassadors carrying Sevagram to wherever our alumni had landed.

The dead letter problem

Printing was only half the job. Posting it was the real battle.

Doctors move the way monsoon clouds move—often and without warning. Internship. Rural bond. Residency. Fellowship. Another city. Another hostel. Another address.

In the 1990s, when people moved, they didn’t update a profile. They simply disappeared.

We typed labels, stuck stamps, carried sacks to the post office—and then waited for the heartbreak to return. Weeks later, envelopes came back with red postal stamps:

Addressee left.
Insufficient address.
Door locked.

Each returned copy felt like a small failure. Somewhere, someone who still cared about MGIMS didn’t get the bulletin because life had shifted a few kilometres and we didn’t know.

We tried to keep a database, updating addresses with pencil and hope. It was never complete. It could never be.

What the internet changed—and what it didn’t

I edited the bulletin for six years and then passed it on. The bulletin continued, but the world changed.

With the internet, news stopped waiting for the postman. Retirements, deaths, achievements, celebrations—everything now travels instantly. WhatsApp groups do in minutes what our bulletin did in three months.

In that sense, the bulletin lost its urgency. It became less “news” and more “record.”

But I still feel something for print.

An email is skimmed and forgotten. A notification is swiped away. A printed bulletin is different. You hold it. You turn pages. You sit with it. It asks for your attention without shouting for it. It feels strangely human.

And paper has another strength—it stays.

Hard drives crash. Phones get replaced. Passwords are forgotten. But a booklet can sit quietly in a drawer for thirty years and still open like a memory.

The regret that stayed

This brings me to a regret that still pinches.

Somewhere between office shifts, renovations, changing administrations, and our casual neglect of archives, MGIMS lost most of the News Bulletins from 1990 to 2007.

The irony is painful. We created the record of those years—and failed to keep it.

Sixteen years of campus history: births, obituaries, milestones, faces, names, small announcements that now feel precious. They may still exist in someone’s trunk or attic, saved by an alumnus who couldn’t throw them away. But our own shelves are empty.

That loss taught me something simple: institutions love ceremonies, but they rarely love storage.

And yet, I don’t regret those years.

For a while, we built a paper bridge between Sevagram and the world. It carried more than news. It carried belonging.

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.

A note found inside an MD thesis in the MGIMS library. The handwriting at the bottom is Dr. Ravinder Narang's — suggested titles for a thesis not yet written.

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.

If patient records are the biography of a disease, an Annual Report is the biography of an institution. MGIMS began publishing these reports in 1971, barely two years after opening its doors. For decades, this booklet was our proof of life — a bureaucratic confession of how many students we taught, how many patients we treated, and what research we managed to squeeze out of our limited hours. Important, certainly. But let us be honest: most such reports read like railway timetables from the British Raj, destined to gather dust in the deep recesses of government cupboards.

In 1998, the job of editing this document landed on my desk. I held the post until 2005. I had cut my teeth editing the MFC Bulletin in the late eighties, so I assumed I knew something about deadlines and commas. I was spectacularly wrong. The Annual Report was not about opinion or flair. It was a minefield of numbers, names, and unforgiving details. One wrong digit could turn a year of triumph into a year of negligence.

***

The Backbone of the Story

When I took over, I felt the report lacked a spine. It was a chaotic heap of statistics waiting for a narrator. It needed to tell the story of Sevagram in a way that even a distracted bureaucrat in Delhi could follow.

So, I reorganised the chaos into four distinct pillars: Education, Hospital, Research, and Community Work. That simple structural shift changed the tone entirely. ‘Education’ captured our academic soul—the admissions, the results, the theses. ‘Research’ highlighted our intellectual pulse through papers and conferences. ‘Hospital’ revealed the sheer weight we carried—the OPD footfall, the surgeries, the midnight deliveries, the blood transfusions. And ‘Community Work’ brought us back to our roots, documenting the dust and heat of our village camps.

Suddenly, the report felt less like a government file and more like a biography.

***

March to June: The Great Paper Chase

Writing the report was easy. Finding the data was an exercise in despair.

We must remember the era. There were no Google Forms, no shared drives, no submit buttons. Every March, I sent polite formal letters to Heads of Departments. Then I waited. In April, reminders. In May, desperate pleas. By June, information would arrive — but rarely in usable form.

It came in dribs and drabs: handwritten notes on prescription pads, half-typed sheets from manual typewriters, figures squeezed into margins, tables that looked as if they had been drawn during a blackout. Numbers did not tally. Names were misspelled. Units were mixed up. I learned to suppress my temper and do what internists do best — verify, cross-check, and clean up the mess without creating a scene. It felt less like editing and more like stitching a quilt from scraps that refused to match.

***

The Press in the Heart of Wardha

The real heart of this story beats not in the corridors of MGIMS but in the noisy centre of Wardha town.

Mr. Rajabhau Chawade ran a small printing press near the R.D. Sinhal shop in the main market. His building defied commercial logic: while most people lived upstairs and worked downstairs, Rajabhau lived on the ground floor and kept his computer shop on the first. He was a gentle, patient man who likely viewed my arrival — with my new format and obsessive lists of corrections — as a divine test of his patience.

He never complained. Not once.

For seven years, my evenings followed an unshakeable ritual. After finishing hospital rounds, I would kick-start my Bajaj scooter and ride into town. It never occurred to me to ask for an official college vehicle, even though I was doing official college work. Perhaps I was too shy. Perhaps I simply did not know the rules. So I drove myself, dodging stray cattle and potholes, arriving at a place that smelled permanently of ink, cheap paper, and machine oil.

The offset machines hummed with a loud rhythmic thud — a steady industrial heartbeat that made conversation difficult. In that cramped noisy room, surrounded by stacks of fresh paper and tins of grease, we sat for hours trying to turn raw data into something readable.

***

The Eighth-Grade Typesetter

Rajabhau did not employ a high-end DTP professional from Nagpur. He had something better. He had his daughter, Pallavi.

In 1998, Pallavi was in the eighth standard — a shy girl from a Marathi-medium school who was suddenly navigating complex English syntax. When she realised I was a senior doctor from the hospital, she froze. Her fingers hovered hesitantly over the keyboard, tongue-tied by the hierarchy that separates a schoolgirl from a Professor of Medicine.

It took time to dismantle that wall. I spent the first few minutes of every session just talking — asking about school, which film she had seen, what she had eaten for breakfast. Small questions. Slowly the tension evaporated. She forgot my title and I became simply the uncle sitting beside her.

Once comfortable, she was formidable. She sat before a bulky HCL computer, wrestling with PageMaker on a screen that flickered with exhaustion. The machine was slow, the software temperamental, and every now and then the computer would freeze like a stubborn patient refusing to answer a question.

Her English was limited, and medical terminology is cruel to the uninitiated. One slipped keystroke and *hypoglycaemia* becomes *hyperglycaemia* — a typo that changes a cure into a cause of death. I would sit beside her on a plastic stool, watching tables jump to the next page and columns shift like unruly schoolchildren, catching the letters that tried to escape.

"Sir, the table is moving again," she would say, panic creeping into her voice.

"Adjust the row height," I would reply, feigning a confidence I did not feel.

One memory still makes me smile. Occasionally she would accidentally delete an entire paragraph and freeze in horror. I taught her Ctrl+Z — the undo button. Her face would light up as if I had been handed her a miracle drug. That simple shortcut saved our sanity, and the report, more than once.

We fought power cuts that plunged the room into sudden darkness. We fought software glitches that ate our files. We fought deadlines that seemed impossible. But every year, we finished.

I had unilaterally changed everything — the cover, the font, the layout — without seeking the Dean's permission. A bold, perhaps reckless, move. Twenty-five years later, I am pleased to see that the annual reports still carry the DNA of the format we designed in that small room in Wardha.

***

Pulitzer on Page One

When the final report arrived from the press, it was a transformation. A glossy cover with the MGIMS emblem. Crisp paper inside. Legible fonts. Tables that no longer made the eyes water.

I began a small tradition: opening each report with a quotation to give the dry numbers a human voice. In the 1998–99 report, I chose Joseph Pulitzer, and it became my editorial north star:

"Put it to them briefly, so that they will read it Clearly, so that they will appreciate it Picturesquely, so that they will remember it And above all, Accurately, so that they will be guided by its light."

The report travelled to funding agencies, government ministries, and donors. For our alumni scattered across the world, it was a yearly postcard from home — a reminder of where they had come from.

The Physician’s Confession

Over time, the Chawade family became more than my printers. They became my patients. And here I must make a confession that punctures my ego.

Rajabhau had come to the hospital hundreds of times over forty years — delivering registers, printing forms, meeting staff. He must have been examined by a dozen physicians. I myself had seen him in the OPD countless times. Yet when he turned seventy-five and complained of breathlessness, we all assumed it was age, or perhaps mild asthma.

We were wrong.

An echocardiogram revealed severe rheumatic mitral valve disease. The murmur of mitral stenosis — that classic rumbling mid-diastolic sound we grill our students about, asking them to find it with the bell of the stethoscope — had escaped us all. It had escaped me.

Had we missed it for another year, his death certificate would likely have read "Bronchial Asthma," obscuring the truth. Fortunately, we caught it in time. I supervised his valve replacement, and he lived a full life until 2022.

It struck me then: the man who had helped me preserve the history of MGIMS had nearly slipped out of it because of our clinical blindness.

***

Handing Over the Baton

By 2005, the Annual Report had become a well-oiled machine. Institutions need fresh blood. I passed the baton to Dr. Anshu, a sharp Professor of Pathology who shared my obsession with precision.

For my final report — the thirty-fifth edition — I signed off with George Santayana:

"We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, knowing that once it was all that was humanly possible."

The Journal and the Resignation

Some years later, MGIMS launched its own research journal — a biannual publication carrying the work of the institute's faculty. I served as one of several associate editors, helping select manuscripts, reviewing papers, and guiding authors through revision.

Then I began to notice something that bothered me. Papers I had rejected outright as peer reviewer were finding their way into print. The science was not always sound. For months I sat with the discomfort, uncertain whether to raise it or simply continue. Eventually I made my decision.

I wrote to Dr. Anshu, who had just taken over as editor.

Dear Dr Anshu,

I would like to resign both as a member of the editorial team and as a peer reviewer for the Journal of MGIMS.

It has been long since I joined the board, and I feel that those who can critically analyse manuscripts and help the journal separate wheat from chaff should serve it now. The journal needs vision, creativity, leadership, and the courage to call a spade a spade — qualities that younger editors with fresh eyes are better placed to bring.

With too many things on my plate, I can no longer do justice to the post. Hard though it is to give up something you care about, I feel that sharper minds can help the journal carve out the niche it deserves.

May I wish you and your team all the best.

With regards,
SP

***

Editing those reports was labour — pure, unglamorous labour. But years later, when I was tasked with leading the Hospital Information System, I realised those evenings in Wardha had not been wasted. I knew the data. I knew the difference between a real admission and a clerical error. I knew the hospital not just by its patients but by its pulse — its numbers. The report told the truth. In our profession, the truth is the only thing worth printing.

1994 was a year of seismic shifts for India, but for us at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (MGIMS), it was simply the year the money ran out.

I was a Reader in Medicine then, managing a ward that never slept and a bank account that was dangerously quiet. I had a lively group of residents, but two stood out: Dr. Prabhat Goel and Dr. Ravi Sautha, both from the Class of 1983. They were a study in contrasts. Prabhat, a Medicine resident, was the cerebral type—the kind who absorbed textbooks by osmosis and could quote Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine as if it were poetry. Ravi, an Orthopedics resident, was the pragmatist—hands-on, energetic, and possessed of a sharp, street-smart clinical eye.

Their enthusiasm was abundant. Their money, like most of ours that year, was nonexistent.

It was a strange, anxious summer. The Institute had fallen foul of Mr. B. Shankaranand, the then Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare. In a move designed to teach the management a lesson, he pulled the purse strings tight. The central government withheld our grant. For two months, salaries simply did not arrive.

In a metro city, you have credit cards or anonymity. In Sevagram, you have neither. There were no overdraft facilities to cushion the fall. We lived on borrowed time, patience, and the immense goodwill of the local kirana shopkeepers who quietly noted our debts in their greasy ledgers without asking questions.

***

It was in the middle of this fiscal drought that my phone rang. It was Dr. Sudhir Bhave from Nagpur.

Sudhir was a kindred spirit—an alumnus of GMC Nagpur (Class of 1976), a psychiatrist with a sharp academic streak, and a man who had music in his blood. He was a storyteller and a singer, the kind of person who could make a mundane event feel like a festival. He was organizing the annual medical quiz for the Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS), Nagpur.

“We want a team from MGIMS,” he said, his voice crackling over the landline. “One teacher and two residents. Will you lead it?”

I looked at Prabhat and Ravi. They were drowning in discharge summaries. I was buried under a pile of lecture notes. We were tired, we were broke, and our minds were occupied with the very real problem of how to pay for next week’s groceries. “We can’t,” I started to say. “There is a trophy,” Sudhir added. “And lunch is on us.”

I paused. A free lunch. A day away from the oppressive heat of the wards. I looked at the boys. They nodded. So, we said yes.

***

Third Class, First Spirits

We travelled the way unpaid doctors travel.

There was no question of hiring a taxi. That was a luxury for consultants with private practices. We pooled whatever crumpled notes and coins we had in our pockets, squeezed our frames into a shared auto-rickshaw to Wardha station, and bought tickets for the unreserved compartment—what we unashamedly called “Third Class.”

The train was a sensory assault. It was packed with the humanity of rural India—farmers with sacks of grain, women with crying babies, students playing cards, and the pervasive smell of sweat, hair oil, and steel. We didn’t find seats. We stood near the door, clinging to the grimy steel rod, swaying with the rhythm of the tracks.

But the mood was electric. Perhaps it was the escape from the hospital, or perhaps it was the absurdity of our situation. We stood there, sweating in our synthetic shirts, grilling each other like schoolboys. “What’s the triad in Felty’s syndrome?” Prabhat shouted over the roar of the wheels. “Rheumatoid arthritis, splenomegaly, neutropenia,” Ravi shot back, dodging an elbow from a fellow passenger. “Don’t ask me triads. Ask me something we actually see!” “Okay, X-ray findings in scurvy?” “White line of Fraenkel!”

We laughed, throwing answers like paper balls, oblivious to the stares of the other passengers who surely wondered why these three men were shouting about spleens and vitamins.

***

The Long Walk on North Ambazari Road

We deboarded at Ajni station. It was a strategic decision—partly to save time, and partly because we didn't want to look like lost villagers navigating the chaos of the main Nagpur station. From Ajni, we walked. The venue was the IMA Hall on North Ambazari Road. It was a mile and a half away. Under the merciless Vidarbha sun, that mile felt like a marathon. We walked briskly, clutching our small bags, watching the heat rise in waves off the asphalt. By the time we reached the gates of the IMA Hall, our shirts were clinging to our backs like damp towels. Our shoes were coated in grey dust. We looked less like a team of intellectuals and more like three refugees who had just crossed a border.

We had come with no preparation, no books, and absolutely no expectations. It is, I discovered that day, a very light way to travel.

***

The Dark Room and the Slide Projector

Inside the hall, the atmosphere changed instantly. The air-conditioning hit us like a blessing. But the social temperature was different. Teams from the Government Medical College (GMC) and Indira Gandhi Medical College (IGMC) sat in neat, huddled groups. They looked fresh, crisp, and intimidatingly prepared. They had the calm faces of people who had slept well, eaten a proper breakfast, and revised their notes. We were the rural cousins. The underdogs.

But then, the lights went out. The hall plunged into darkness, save for the single, piercing beam of the carousel slide projector. The hum of the projector fan filled the room. "Question One," the quizmaster’s voice boomed.

Medicine does not care about the starch in your shirt or the money in your pocket. A question is a question—whether you read it in a library in Nagpur or face it in the casualty ward of Sevagram at 2:00 AM. The first slide clicked into place. A blurry image of a retina. The buzzer rounds were brutal. You had seconds to decide.

"Roth Spots," Prabhat whispered instantly. "Hit it," I said. Ravi slammed the buzzer. "Correct."

The questions came fast, a mix of the obscure and the everyday. A chest X-ray showing an odd shadow. An ECG strip with a wandering baseline. A history of a farmer with fever and muscle pain.

This is where the Sevagram grind paid off. Our competitors knew the books. But we knew the patients. We had seen the farmer with Leptospirosis; we had smelled the organophosphorus poisoning; we had held the wrist of the patient with the collapsing pulse. Prabhat was the encyclopedia—he provided the syndrome names. Ravi was the pragmatist—he spotted the fractures and the surgical signs. I played the conductor, keeping us calm, filtering the answers. We worked as a single organism. No ego. No "I think." Just a whispered consensus and a hand on the buzzer.

There was a moment in the visual round that turned the tide. A slide showed a peculiar skin rash. The other teams hesitated. They were looking for textbook descriptions. Ravi leaned in, squinting at the screen. "That’s Pellagra," he muttered. "Look at the necklace distribution. We saw a case last week in the OPD." We buzzed. We scored. By the final round, the "outsiders" label had vanished. The audience was leaning forward. We weren't just participating; we were dominating.

***

A Hundred Rupees and a Bonus Salary

When the lights came back on, the scoreboard told the story. We had won.

The organizers called us to the stage. There was applause—polite from the rivals, enthusiastic from Sudhir Bhave. They handed us a gleaming trophy and certificates. Then, they handed us an envelope. Inside was the cash prize: ₹100 each.

To a modern reader, a hundred rupees is barely a tip. It won’t buy you a coffee at an airport. But in 1994, with two months of unpaid wages haunting us, that red note felt like a brick of gold. It wasn't the purchasing power; it was the timing. It felt like an unexpected IV line when the vein has been playing hide-and-seek for hours. It was validation. It was survival money. We stood there, clutching our certificates and our hundred-rupee notes, grinning like we had won the Nobel Prize.

Lunch followed. And what a lunch it was. The Academy of Medical Sciences did not scrimp. There were steaming vessels of rice, rich gravies, paneer that melted in the mouth, and sweets dripping with syrup. We ate like men who had marched across a desert. We went back for seconds. We scraped our plates. The food tasted better not just because of the hunger, but because we had earned it with our wits.

***

The Silent Victory Lap

The journey back to Sevagram was a blur of exhaustion and euphoria. The trophy sat on my lap like a newborn child that needed guarding. We took a shared auto back to the station and boarded the evening train. This time, we managed to find seats.

The compartment was just as noisy as before, but we were in our own bubble. We replayed the quiz, question by question. "I can't believe they missed the Atrial Myxoma sound!" "I thought we lost points on that Pharmacology question." "Did you see the face of the GMC team when we answered the spleen question?"

There were no smartphones in 1994. No WhatsApp groups to flood with "Winner!" emojis. No Instagram stories to post with a #ProudMoment caption. We couldn't broadcast our victory to the world. We couldn't even tell our wives until we physically walked through our front doors.

Oddly, that digital silence made the win sweeter. The victory stayed strictly between the three of us, sealed in the rocking motion of the train and the smell of coal smoke. We carried the news home the way people once carried love letters—tucked inside a pocket, private and precious.

When we finally reached Sevagram, dusty and dishevelled, we told our families. Their smiles completed the circle. We had left that morning on an unreserved ticket, unpaid, unprepared, and anxious. We returned with a metal cup, three hundred rupees in our pockets, and the lightness that comes from a small victory when the world feels heavy.

For one day, amidst the salary crisis and the politics, three broke doctors felt like kings.

If the 1990s were about digitising hospital records, the early 2000s were about upgrading the software of our minds. In 2000, the Medico Friends Circle (MFC) held its annual meeting at Yatri Niwas in Sevagram—a modest guest house across the road from Gandhi’s Ashram.

MFC meetings had their own distinct flavour: simple arrangements, serious conversations, and a fierce, unvarnished idealism. We sat cross-legged on the floor, arguing about social determinants of health over endless cups of tea, while ceiling fans pushed warm air from one corner to another in a futile attempt at cooling. It was in this sweltering, intellectually charged atmosphere that I met Dr. Madhukar Pai—known to everyone simply as Madhu.

He was a young graduate from Madras Medical College, then pursuing his MD in Community Medicine at CMC Vellore. Madhu spoke with a clarity that was almost startling. He wasn't loud or dramatic; he was simply sharp and well-structured, his thoughts organized like a perfect clinical note. We began talking about medical research, and I confessed my growing fascination with Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), a concept I had stumbled upon in 1996 through the writings of David Sackett.

Madhu’s eyes lit up. He was already a pioneer in his own right, conducting workshops on epidemiology and statistics. In that small room, with the scent of chai and the low buzz of activists outside, we decided to collaborate. It was a casual decision, made between sips of tea, that quietly shifted the trajectory of my professional life.

***

The Workshop That Woke the Wards

In February 2000, we organized a three-day workshop on Statistics and Study Designs at Sevagram. Thirty residents signed up—a mix from Medicine, Paediatrics, OB-GYN, and Surgery. Most arrived with the expression I knew well from thesis season: a mask of polite interest thinly veiling a deep sense of dread. They expected a dry diet of p-values, t-tests, and academic boredom.

Madhu had other plans. He didn’t teach statistics as a punishment; he taught it as a torch. He showed the residents how bias can bend the truth, why randomisation is simply fairness written into a study design, and how to read a medical paper without being seduced by confident conclusions. He made confidence intervals feel like common sense rather than a mathematical hurdle.

For eight hours a day, the residents stayed awake—fully, vibrantly awake. In Sevagram, that was a minor miracle. By the end of the third day, the fear had softened. They began to see research not as dry mathematics, but as curiosity armed with discipline. Many pleaded for Madhu to join MGIMS full-time. I realized then that we were no longer just treating patients; we were learning to interrogate our own habits.

***

McMaster: My First Flight, My First Mistake

Three years later, the pull of this new world took me to its birthplace—McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. This was where EBM had been shaped into a global movement.

In June 2003, I was accepted for the prestigious workshop, How to Teach Evidence-Based Clinical Practice. The Kasturba Health Society funded part of the cost, and Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta helped bridge the rest. I booked an Air Canada ticket—my first international flight. My route was Mumbai to London, then Toronto, with a ninety-minute layover.

I landed at Heathrow and did exactly what a novice international traveller does: I wandered. I stared at the luxury shops. I walked slowly, as if the terminal itself were a museum. I forgot that ninety minutes in a giant terminal is not a window of time; it is a countdown. When I finally reached the transfer desk, the staff looked at me with a mix of sympathy and disbelief.

“Sir, your flight has already departed.”

I felt small, foolish, and suddenly very far from home. My luggage was on its way to Canada, and I had neither the money nor the courage for a new ticket. I went to the Air Canada desk and told the truth: I was a doctor from rural India on a grant, trying to learn how to teach better medicine. The lady at the counter listened, her fingers dancing across the keys. She paused, then said, “Okay. We can put you on the next flight. It leaves in an hour.”

I didn’t celebrate. I simply ran. That day, I learned a vital clinical rule for travel: never underestimate the distance between two gates.

Nafisa Kapadiya-Aptekar, an MGIMS alumna from the Class of 1975, was waiting at the airport with her husband to rescue me. They listened to my travel travails with a mix of laughter and sympathy, fed me a proper meal, and coached me on the tips and tricks of fighting jet lag. I stayed with them overnight—a small, welcoming island of Sevagram in the middle of Ontario—before shifting to the Hamilton hostel the next morning.

***

Hamilton: Among the Masters

Hamilton in 2003 felt like a city built on a different logic. The McMaster campus was a sprawling blend of limestone and glass, nestled near the Royal Botanical Gardens. The air was crisp, a sharp contrast to the humid heat of Wardha, and the university felt like a cathedral of thought.

There were ninety of us from across the globe, but we didn't sit in a lecture hall. We sat in circles. The method was role-play—slightly uncomfortable, deeply effective. One person played the sceptical student, another the arrogant consultant, and a third the EBM advocate trying to introduce evidence without bruising a senior's ego. It was funny, but it was also a mirror. I realized that knowing the evidence is useless if you cannot navigate the hierarchies of human pride.

Then there were the masters themselves. In those days, we in India were still easily fascinated by international celebrities, and here they were, in the flesh. I found myself sitting across from Gordon Guyatt, the man who had actually coined the term "Evidence-Based Medicine" in 1992. Seeing a giant like Gordon—casual, accessible, and intensely focused—teaching us was a thrill I can still feel.

Beside him was Deborah Cook, a powerhouse who co-authored the definitive Users' Guides to the Medical Literature. Watching Deborah explain diagnostic accuracy tests, likelihood ratios, and how to apply them at a patient's bedside was like watching a master artist at work. She turned abstract numbers into tools for survival.

A librarian sat with each group, teaching us how to navigate PubMed and Cochrane. Watching her find answers in minutes that would have taken me days was a humbling experience. It made me uneasy. How much of my earlier practice had been built on "expert opinion," and how little on hard, verifiable evidence? This workshop changed everything. It influenced the thirty-two MD theses I would go on to supervise and shaped my later time at UC Berkeley. I returned home as a better physician, now knowing when—and more importantly, why—not to order a test or write a prescription.

***

An Alumni Trail and a Suitcase of Books

On the way back, I stopped in the UK to visit the MGIMS diaspora. I stayed with Monica Ahuja in London—once a resident, now a mother juggling medicine in a new world. In Edinburgh, I visited Bhavana’s cousin, Vipin Zamvar, a cardiac surgeon who showed me his theatre with a quiet, practiced pride. In Aberdeen, I spent time with Muthu Kumar and Sonali, and bought the Harry Potter audio series for my daughter, Ashwini, carrying the tapes home like precious contraband.

In Oxford, I met Dr. Sadhana Bose and her husband, through whom I was introduced to Dr. David Warrell, the editor of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine. We spoke for two hours about snakebites—a global expert and a rural doctor discussing a problem that slithers into our Sevagram wards every monsoon.

I returned to India with a suitcase full of books and a new lens. The evidence revolution had begun in Sevagram, but for me, it was merely the prelude to an even bigger adventure: a year at UC Berkeley.

On January 3, 2001, a silence fell over Sevagram. Dr. Sushila Nayar — our Badi Behenji — was gone.

She had passed away in Prerna Kutir, a residence stubbornly modest for a woman of her stature. Visitors did not sit on sofas; they sat on a thick cotton mattress covered with stark white khadi sheets. On that mattress, the hierarchy of India dissolved. A Union Minister would sit cross-legged beside a ward attendant, both held in the same steady gaze. To the nation, she was Mahatma Gandhi's physician and a freedom fighter. To us, she was simply the gravitational force that kept MGIMS from floating away.

With her passing, the baton moved to Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta. He took charge quietly, aware of the giant shadow he was stepping into.

***

The Phone Call

By August 2001, I was finally exhaling. For six months I had been obsessed with renovating the Medicine ICU — a project that had turned me into what I jokingly called an "intellectual decorator." Alongside Dr. Rajnish Joshi and a nocturnal architect named Anil Pandit — who prowled the construction debris at midnight with a cheek full of paan — we had turned a pile of rubble into a functioning place of healing.

Then the phone rang. It was Dhirubhai.

"SP," he said, using the initials that only close friends used. "We need to bring out a book. A tribute to Behenji. I want you to edit it."

A surge of honour. Then a cold wave of alarm.

"When is the release?"

"Her first death anniversary. January 3, 2002."

I did the arithmetic. Four months. In the Sevagram of the early 2000s — where communication still moved at the speed of the post — four months was effectively yesterday. The intellectual decorator hung up his hard hat and picked up a red pen.

***

The Team

I knew my limitations. I needed a partner who handled the English language with surgical precision. I called Dr. Prabha Desikan, Class of 1984. Prabha had Sevagram in her marrow — her father was the legendary leprosy researcher Dr. K.V. Desikan. She possessed an editor's eye: sharp, patient, and entirely unsentimental.

We were joined by Dr. Rajnish Joshi and Dr. Ashish Goel, both from the MGIMS classes of 1992 and 1993, then in the middle of their MD residency in the department. Today both are Professors of Medicine — Rajnish at AIIMS Bhopal, where until recently he also headed the department, and Ashish at AIMS Chandigarh, where he currently heads it.

They were a perfect counterbalance. Rajnish possessed a restless, fertile mind—quick to innovate and uniquely capable of wrestling fleeting ideas into finished realities. Ashish, on the other hand, wore the quiet, measured look of a man who weighs his words. He anchored the project with exactly what it required: precise writing, meticulous proofing, and an intuitive sense of how text should rest on the eye. We would need all of it. Together, we faced a staggering mandate: forty-five contributors, a three-month deadline, and the grueling, everyday demands of our hospital work—the packed OPDs, the wards, the ICUs, and the unpredictable rush of medical emergencies. And, lest I forget, Rajnish and Ashish were simultaneously writing their own MD theses.

Yet, despite the exhaustion of the wards and the weight of their theses, we were driven by a singular vision. We wanted the volume to be what Prabha Deikan and I called in the introduction a "prism of affection." To build it, we reached out to MGIMS faculty, administrators, politicians, Gandhian scholars, social workers, and alumni, leaving the content entirely to the contributors. We weren't trying to create a perfect, saintly portrait that hid her flaws. We were after something much more difficult: a small, honest tribute to a woman who refused to give up, told through the raw and real stories of the people whose lives she had changed.

***

The Printer's Lifeline

For the printing, I turned to Vinod Sinhal. He was thirty-five then, a man quietly carving out his own path. His father ran R.D. Sinhal Stores, a well-known shop in Wardha Market that sold everything from stationery to guns and bullets—a combination only small-town India could produce without irony. The elder Sinhal was a man of firm principles; if a child returned too soon for more pencils, he would conclude they had been careless and refuse to sell them any. Schoolchildren approached his counter with the same caution they reserved for difficult teachers.

Vinod, however, had moved out from under that stern shadow. By 1996, he had set up his own small press in the industrial area, four kilometers from the college. He had never produced a book before, and when I approached him, he accepted the commission with a visible, nervous hesitation. What he could not have known then was that this project would go on to define the rest of his professional life.

Since Vinod was new to books, we had to assemble a makeshift team across two cities. We worked with Prashant Thakre, who ran a small typesetting center in Wardha, but for the heavy lifting, we had to look toward Nagpur. The project was a massive technical undertaking for its time. We had piles of black-and-white images from the 1940s that required high-resolution scanning—a luxury in 2001. We took them to a specialist near the Gandhi statue in the Mahal area of Nagpur, paying nearly ₹18,000 for scanning alone.

For the visual design, we found Vijay Farkase. He was a talented man who had designed the iconic Haldiram's snack pouches but, like the rest of us, had never worked on a book. We were all learning on the fly, a team of amateurs fueled by enthusiasm.

This inexperience led to one serious setback: after the first few copies were printed, we discovered a layout error. We had to reprint the entire run. It was a costly, demoralizing blow, but in the spirit of the woman we were writing about, we absorbed the loss and moved on.

***

The Shirt on the Scanner

As the deadline approached, the cover remained our biggest hurdle. The sketches looked amateur, and the photographs felt generic. We wanted something that was unmistakably "Behenji"—plain, firm, and without ornament.

We were sitting in my office, staring at a succession of failed proofs, when Rajnish Joshi suddenly pointed at my chest.

"Sir," he said. "Why don't we use that texture?"

I was wearing a yellow khadi shirt. In Sevagram, khadi was the code. I had made my own compromise with the institute's dress culture: I wore crisp khadi shirts rather than trousers, which usually crumple so badly by late afternoon that you end up looking like an unmade bed.

"The fabric," Rajnish insisted. "That’s her."

We took the shirt off my back right then and there and placed it on the glass bed of a flatbed scanner. The machine whirred, capturing the rough, uneven weave of the hand-spun cloth. That scan became the soul of the cover. Over that yellow texture, we superimposed a sepia photograph of Behenji sitting beside Bapu. The title followed naturally: Bapu Ki Beti, Hamari Behenji.

The photographs inside presented their own challenge. We didn't want the book to look like a modern documentary; we wanted it to feel like a memory. Today, you can achieve this with a simple Instagram filter, but in 2001, it required a kind of darkroom alchemy. We drove to Nagpur yet again to find a specialist who could convert the sharp blacks and whites into warm sepia tones.

We didn't want the book to look glossy; we wanted it to look timeless. When the first proof finally came off Vinod’s machine, we knew we had achieved it. Gandhi. Behenji. Khadi. Nothing extra.

***

The Steel Behind the Compassion

Tribute books suffer from a predictable disease: they become hagiographies — garlands of sugary praise in which the subject ceases to be human. We were determined to avoid this.

Everyone in Sevagram knew Behenji's famous temper. It was not the petty irritation of a bureaucrat. It was the terrifying wrath of a matriarch who could not tolerate laziness, excuses, or indifference to patients. We included a detailed interview from the National Medical Journal of India where she spoke in her own unvarnished voice. We ensured the essays we selected reflected both her immense compassion and her steel. A Behenji without her temper would not have been Behenji.

Prabha Desikan worked through the drafts with a disciplinarian's eye — smoothing language, fussing over margins, obsessing over font sizes and spacing. The invisible details that decide whether a volume looks like a serious work or a rushed souvenir.

***

One Minute of Glory

When the final copy was bound, I took it to Dhirubhai. He held the book in both hands, running his fingers over the cover — perhaps recognising the texture of the ideology he was now sworn to protect. He praised the work at length. Then the practical man surfaced.

"How much did it cost?"

"The printer's bill is ₹1,40,000."

He nodded, pulled out his pen, and authorised a payment of ₹1,50,000. It was a gesture of class — his acknowledgment that Vinod Sinhal had gone beyond what was asked.

On January 3, 2002, exactly one year after she left us, the book was released at a ceremony in the open ground behind the Microbiology department. The chief guest was Shri Krishan Kant, the Vice President of India. Security was tight, speeches were long, and the stage was crowded.

I was not on it. I do not recall being invited even to the front row. In the theatre of official functions, the workers are rarely the actors. The flashbulbs popped, the Vice President held up the yellow cover, and the applause moved through the crowd.

It did not matter. Standing at the back, I felt a quiet, private satisfaction that had nothing to do with the stage. I knew the one-minute glory of a public function fades before the car reaches the gate. But the book was real. We had taken the rough weave of a khadi shirt and turned it into a testament. We had preserved the spine of Sevagram.

For Vinod Sinhal, that single project changed everything. He mastered the trade, went on to publish the MGIMS News, police annual reports, and nearly every publication the institute required. A partnership that continues to this day — built, at its beginning, on a nervous young man's willingness to say yes to something he had never done before.

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.

By 2003, Evidence-Based Medicine had begun to take root in Sevagram, and much of that credit belonged to my collaboration with Madhukar Pai. But Madhu, as always, thought one step ahead.

“You have to go to McMaster,” he said. “That’s where it all began.”

McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, was the birthplace of this movement. It was where Gordon Guyatt—who coined the term “Evidence-Based Medicine”—taught and trained people to question their own certainty. Madhu had attended a workshop there and returned with a new kind of confidence: not the loud kind, but the quiet confidence of someone who knows how to check the facts. He wanted me to feel that shift too.

***

The letter that opened the door

On April 10, 2003, I wrote to the President of the Kasturba Health Society. I had been accepted for a workshop titled How to Teach Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, scheduled from June 22 to 27. The organisers had waived the tuition fee—$2,700—which felt like a small miracle. But travel was still expensive. I worked out the cost of the round trip—Sevagram to Mumbai, then London, Toronto, and back—at around ₹65,000, a serious amount in those days.

I also added a second reason for the trip. Dr. Mike Galvin had invited me to stop in the UK on my way back and speak in Leeds and London about MGIMS—our work, our rural focus, our stubborn belief that good medicine is possible even in a village. I hoped it might open doors for exchange programmes.

To my relief, the Society agreed to fund half the cost. For the remaining amount, Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta arranged ₹30,000 from a private trust in Mumbai. That settled the only question that mattered.

I booked an Air Canada ticket.

It would be my first international flight.

***

Heathrow, and a small disaster

I left India with a suitcase of clothes and a head full of nervousness. My itinerary looked simple on paper: Mumbai to London Heathrow, a 90-minute layover, then onward to Toronto.

Heathrow, however, was not an airport. It was a small universe.

I landed, looked around, and immediately felt out of place. Everything was enormous—corridors that never ended, signboards that seemed to multiply, people walking as if they were late for something important. I did what a small-town traveller does when he wants to appear calm and “international”: I slowed down. I wandered past duty-free shops. I tried not to look rushed.

I didn’t realise that in aviation, a 90-minute layover is not a relaxed stroll. It is a test.

When I finally reached the transfer desk for the Toronto flight, the staff member looked at my ticket and shook her head.

“Sir, your flight has already departed.”

For a second, I couldn’t even respond. The sentence landed like a slap. I was alone in London. I had limited foreign currency. My luggage—most likely—was already flying to Canada without me. I stood there feeling ridiculous and helpless, like a child who has lost his mother in a crowded market.

Then I did the only thing left. I walked back to the airline desk and pleaded.

“I’m a doctor from rural India,” I said. “I’m going to learn how to treat patients better. I don’t have money for a new ticket. Please help me.”

The woman behind the counter studied my face for a moment. Then she softened. She typed quickly, printed a boarding pass, and handed it to me.

“There’s a seat on the next flight,” she said. “It leaves in an hour. Run.”

I ran.

I reached the gate breathless and humbled, with a new rule stamped into my mind: never treat a transit lounge like a picnic spot.

***

A Sevagram welcome in Toronto

By the time I landed in Toronto, the panic had drained out of me. And then I saw a familiar face.

Dr. Nafisa Kapadiya, an MGIMS alumna, was waiting at the airport. She had graduated from Sevagram, done her MD in Radiology at Tata Memorial Hospital, and was now settled in Toronto. Despite my delay, she and her husband had waited patiently.

“Welcome to Canada, Sir,” she said, smiling.

That one sentence brought me back to earth. That evening, sitting in their warm home, we spoke about Sevagram—teachers, wards, old friends, and the strange way a small rural institute stays inside you even when you move continents. MGIMS alumni carry that bond quietly. You recognise it instantly.

I stayed with them for a night. The next day, I travelled to Hamilton and checked into the university hostel.

***

The workshop that rewired my thinking

The McMaster workshop felt nothing like the conferences I was used to in India. There were no long speeches and no ceremonial lectures. It was serious work from the first hour.

The programme was led by giants—Dr. Deborah Cook and Dr. Gordon Guyatt. There were around ninety participants, mostly from North America. I was one of the few from a developing country, and for the first day or two, I felt that difference keenly.

We were divided into small groups by specialty—eight participants, two tutors, and one person who surprised me the most: a librarian.

At MGIMS, librarians were caretakers of shelves. At McMaster, the librarian sat with the clinical group like a key team member. She taught us how to search PubMed and Cochrane properly, how to frame a clinical question, how to separate a good paper from a confident paper.

That was a new idea for me: that finding the right answer is a skill, not an accident.

***

Role-play, resistance, and real life

A large part of the teaching happened through role-play. It sounded childish when I first heard it. It turned out to be brilliant.

One person played the senior consultant—confident, experienced, and allergic to new evidence. Another played the eager junior doctor trying to introduce a guideline without insulting the boss. We acted out the conversations we all know too well, the ones that happen in wards and ICUs when “experience” and “evidence” collide.

McMaster taught me something I wish we taught residents early: being right is not enough. You have to communicate without bruising egos.

Before applying any new research, we were trained to ask three questions:

Is the study valid?
What are the results?
Will it help my patient?

For five days, from morning to evening, we lived inside those questions. We argued over P-values. We dissected confidence intervals. We learned to say, without shame, “I don’t know.”

By the end, I understood what Madhu meant. I wasn’t returning with just notes and handouts.

I was returning with a new operating system in my head.

After the intensity of McMaster, I crossed the Atlantic. My old friend Dr. Mike Galvin—a long-standing ally of MGIMS—had choreographed the visit with meticulous care. The itinerary was split into two distinct halves: the professional, involving lectures in Leeds and London, and the personal, a quiet pilgrimage through the MGIMS family scattered across Britain.

I landed in a country that felt oddly familiar. It wasn't the weather or the food; it was the people. Everywhere I turned, I ran into someone who spoke my language—not English, but Sevagram.

My base was Wakefield in West Yorkshire. I stayed with Agam Jang and her husband Suresh Kumar, both Class of 1985. They were living in on-campus accommodation, navigating the grueling process of retraining for the UK system. Agam was a Senior House Officer then, moving with that breathless, early-career velocity I knew so well.

One morning, as she rushed to the hospital, I found myself standing in their living room, ironing the school dress of their five-year-old daughter, Alakh. It was a domestic scene that would have looked perfectly ordinary in Wardha, yet here it was unfolding in Yorkshire. Two decades later, Agam and I still laugh about it over the phone. Alakh is a doctor now, having stepped into the very shoes I saw her parents lace up that morning. In that small act of ironing a child's dress, the formal label of "Visiting Faculty" evaporated. I was simply a family friend trying to be useful.

***

A Stone House in Ackworth

Mike lived in Ackworth, a village of old, solid stone houses that seemed to have grown directly out of the landscape. Mike was a man of firm routines and fierce loyalties. His children often nudged him to move closer to them, but he refused. He liked his village. He liked his house. End of discussion.

His wife, Hazel, was warmth personified. She ensured that this vegetarian doctor from rural India was never once made to feel like a culinary burden. Mike hosted a dinner for me—easy hospitality, gentle laughter, and the kind of conversation that makes you forget the thousand miles of ocean between you and home. Between the soup and the dessert, we compared the NHS with our Indian system. The logistics differed, but the heartbeat was identical: too many patients, too little time, and doctors trying to bridge the gap with nothing but their wits.

Hazel passed away a few years ago, after a brave battle with lymphoma. Mike’s connection to Sevagram, however, remained unbroken. As recently as 2023, he returned to participate in the Medico Friends Circle (MFC) meeting. Watching him engage in our heated, four-decade-long debate on public health ethics, I realized that some friendships aren't just personal; they are philosophical.

***

The Pinder of Wakefield

The professional peak of the trip was a talk at Pinderfields Hospital. I was charmed to learn the name came from the "Pinder"—an old town official tasked with impounding stray animals. It sounded like a detail from an English storybook.

I spoke about MGIMS—the village camps, our pro-poor philosophy, and the daily, gritty compromises of practicing medicine far from the luxuries of a metropolis. I explained how we kept care affordable without cutting corners on quality.

Midway through, I felt a jolt of genuine nervousness. Sitting in the audience was Dr. Maurice King.

To anyone in public health, Maurice King is a giant. His seminal work, Medical Care in Developing Countries, shaped our entire worldview. For a fleeting second, I wondered what a doctor from Wardha could possibly teach the man who wrote the bible of resource-limited medicine. But he was the definition of grace. His questions were not tests; they were genuine inquiries into how we managed critical care in Sevagram. It was the highest form of compliment: serious attention from a master who did not give it lightly.

***

The Tour of Familiar Faces

The rest of the journey was a moving reel of old students. MGIMS had travelled much further than we ever imagined back in the 1980s.

In Leeds, I found Vandan and Veena Zamvar in a modest hospital apartment. In Edinburgh, I visited Vipin Zamvar (Bhavana’s cousin), now a Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon. He showed me the Royal Infirmary—gleaming, modern, and efficient. Yet, when he spoke of his patients, the tone was familiar: serious, involved, and quietly proud. What struck me most wasn't his surgical theatre, but the community centre where he volunteered his time for cardiac patients. No spotlight, no fanfare. Just a surgeon giving back.

In Aberdeen, I stayed with Muthu Kumar and Sonali (Class of 1985). Scotland was a landscape of grey stone and biting cold. It was there that I performed the ultimate ritual of the Indian father abroad: I bought the Harry Potter audio series for my daughter, Ashwini. In 2003, those tapes felt like carrying back a suitcase of gold.

In London, I stayed with Monica Ahuja (Class of 1982), an outstanding student who had done her MD under my wing. She was then a Registrar in Oncology, newly a mother to her son, Rahul. Seeing her so calm and capable in a high-pressure North London ward gave me a deep, quiet happiness. (Monica has since moved to Perth, Australia, continuing the diaspora's reach.)

***

Two Hours on Snakebites in Oxford

My final stop was Oxford, staying with Sadhana Bose (Class of 1985), who had built a formidable career in public health. Through her husband, I secured a meeting with Dr. David Warrell, the editor of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine and the world's leading authority on snakebites.

We spent two hours discussing a problem that was a daily terror in Vidarbha but a clinical curiosity in Oxford: antivenoms, transport delays, and the subtle clinical signs that distinguish a lethal bite from a terrified patient.

It was surreal—sitting in the shadow of Oxford’s spires, talking about Indian cobras with the man who wrote the definitive text. Yet, it felt right. Medicine has a way of shrinking the globe until the most unlikely rooms are connected.

***

The Weight of Pride

I returned to Mumbai on British Airways with a suitcase of gifts and a head full of memories. But the real weight I carried was pride.

The students we had taught in the dusty wards of Sevagram were now healing hearts in Edinburgh, fighting cancer in London, and shaping health policy in Oxford. Our little institute had quietly gone global. For those ten days, it felt as though Sevagram hadn't stayed behind in Wardha; it had come along with me.

When I look back at three decades in Sevagram, my mind does not wander to the sterile hum of the lecture hall or the polite boredom of committee meetings. It goes to a smaller, messier place: my office desk.

I see faces. I see young MD residents, eyes rimmed with the specific, heavy fatigue of thirty-six-hour duties, sitting across from me and clutching sheaves of paper they hoped would eventually become a thesis. To the outside world, and perhaps even to the National Medical Commission, an MD thesis is a mere formality—a black-and-gold bound volume destined to gather dust on a library shelf, sandwiched between years of forgotten data.

For me, it was never a formality. It was a rite of passage. It was a shared struggle to wring a single drop of truth from a sea of noisy clinical data.

I was not an easy guide. I confess this now with the safety of retirement. In my younger days, I was viewed not just as strict, but as a terror. I demanded a discipline that many found unreasonable. I lost my temper when p-values were misunderstood. I sent exhausted residents back to the wards to collect data again or threw drafts into the bin because the grammar was sloppy. I can see now how that must have felt to a twenty-five-year-old doctor. But my intention was never to harass; it was to instill a singular, terrifying standard: if a document carried the Sevagram name, it had to be bulletproof.

***

The Archive of Inquiry

This archive records the lives and labors of thirty-two residents in Sevagram. I suspect—indeed, I am certain—that few enjoyed the work. During the frantic years of residency, a thesis is rarely a pursuit of truth. It is a hurdle; a bulky ghost let loose by the university to haunt a doctor through three years of training.

I have yet to find a student who claimed to love the task. None genuinely thanked destiny or their guide for the chance to master the mechanics of research. One should never trust the "Acknowledgements." Fifteen years ago, the university removed that section to keep the manuscripts anonymous. Before then, it portrayed guides as patient demigods of wisdom—the sole reason the work ever saw the light of day. The reality was often the opposite.

The thesis is a forced march through a desert. The traveler hates every step and finds no joy in the sand, yet he knows he must reach the other side if he is ever to be called a physician.

A young doctor’s priority is the bedside. He wants to master clinical skills and ICU procedures. He needs time to digest the two voluminous editions of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. Without that, he cannot clear the MD hurdle or find the confidence to practice medicine. I do not blame them for viewing the thesis as a nuisance; I was in the same boat in 1980, treating my own manuscript with the same weary resentment.

Furthermore, a medical degree does not grant the gift of data management. Most residents arrived with little idea of how to collect evidence, let alone how to clean, analyze, or reference it. In the early years, they wrung out manuscripts by hand. They suffered the labor of physical rewriting and the whims of professional typists. Only when the computer became universal were residents freed from the caprice of the stenographer to type their own thoughts.

Be that as it may, here is the record of those thirty-two journeys.

The Pioneers and the Rebels

It began with the rhythmic clack-clack of the typewriter. Those were the days of carbon paper and the sharp, chemical scent of correction fluid—the era where a single typo on page 80 could induce a minor nervous breakdown.

Monica Ahuja was the first to break the mold. A Mumbai girl from Borivali, she was studying the prognostic value of stress tests after a heart attack. While the rest of the department was drowning in handwritten drafts, Monica quietly rebelled. She carried her manuscript to Baroda because a friend there had access to a computer—a machine then as rare as a unicorn in Sevagram. She returned with a manuscript that looked like it had fallen from the future: crisp, laser-printed, and devoid of the smudge marks that defined our era. That thesis didn’t just impress me; it frightened me. It signaled that the world was moving, and we had to move with it.

Not everyone had the stomach for the long haul. Vijay Subbarao lasted exactly fifteen days. He took one look at the rigor I required, realized that Sevagram—and perhaps the particular brand of academic penance I practiced—was not the canvas for his life, and left. He was right to do so. Some people change continents, but they rarely change their nature. Vijay moved to the United States and became an accomplished cardiologist in Denver, the city where Madhuri Dixit also lives. Today, when he isn't fixing broken hearts in his cath lab, he spends his time riding his bike, reading, and practicing photography.

***

The June Baby and the Red Ink

Then there was Anju Gupta, Class of 1982. She had fallen in love with Irfan, a junior, transformed into Anjum Amreliwala, and brought a fierce, quiet determination to her work. Anjum was my partner in a new craft I had just brought back from Mumbai: fiber-optic bronchoscopy.

We were threading thin, lit tubes into the lungs of patients to see if "bronchial washing" could catch tuberculosis bacilli that routine samples missed. Anjum was allotted this topic—a top-down decree from guide to student that remains a stubborn tradition in Indian medical colleges today. We hand out topics like inheritance, and students accept them like fate.

May 1991 was a month of heavy air. Rajiv Gandhi had just been assassinated; I recall hearing the news on the platform at Itarsi station, feeling the specific chill that ripples through a nation when a leader falls. While the country mourned, Anjum was in the final phase of her thesis. She was also full-term pregnant.

In those days, the postal service was our only "shared drive." I was in Bhopal; Anjum was in Jalgaon. Every few days, a thick brown envelope would arrive. I would bleed red ink all over her drafts and post them back. On June 18, 1991, the race ended in a tie. Anjum delivered her first baby girl, and she delivered her thesis. We never published it—a mix of laziness and the relentless pace of the wards—but it remains a quiet biography of a summer of red ink and a June baby.

***

The Tapper from Tripura

Parimal Sarkar, Class of 1985, arrived from the far reaches of Tripura. He survived on the unadvertised kindness of peers who pooled money for his food. He was a brilliant, silent boy who navigated Hindi and English with a thick, melodic Bengali accent. He was too poor to afford the trip home to Agartala, so he stayed in the hostel, a permanent fixture of the campus.

His thesis was pure Sevagram: The diagnostic value of percussion in assessing heart size.

We were born and brought up on the holy trinity of eyes, ears, and hands. Parimal spent two years tapping on chests, listening for the transition from the resonant thud of the lungs to the flat dullness of the heart. He was trying to prove that a doctor’s touch could still compete with the machine.

Alas, even Hutchison’s Clinical Methods has now quietly amputated percussion from its chapters on the heart. It is a discarded skill. But Parimal’s journey did not end there. The boy who once relied on classmates for a meal is now a Professor of Medicine in Agartala. He is no longer the silent student; he is the mentor, likely teaching a new generation that there is still truth to be found in the tips of one’s fingers.

***

The Bedside as a Laboratory

Others followed, each taking a slice of the human condition. Dhanraj Singh spent his residency palpating spleens, asking the oldest question in medicine: Is it really enlarged? Manoj Singh explored the mystery of fever, trying to quantify how accurately a patient knows their own body temperature before the thermometer touches them. Priya Badam and Vaishali Solao walked the wards looking at stroke patients, trying to predict subtypes by clinical presentation alone, while Ravindra Indra hunted for the hidden signs of hypothyroidism in those who simply looked "tired."

These were not abstract inquiries. They were battles against death. Amandeep spent his nights in the ICU, asking why patients with venomous snake bites were dying despite our best efforts. Sumedh cataloged the grim spectrum of pesticide poisoning, a tragedy that haunts the cotton fields of Vidarbha. Madhuri Meena looked at diagnosing malaria with rapid tests, while Swati Waghdahare dusted off century-old textbooks to see if the classic signs of meningitis were science or merely medical folklore.

***

The "Ghostwriter" and the Silent Partner

I had one odd habit: I did not just supervise; I infiltrated. I would sit with residents until midnight, typing their drafts and obsessing over the font size of their references. I was the ghostwriter who couldn’t help himself. If a sentence was clumsy, I physically couldn't leave it alone. I wanted the English to be as precise as the science.

This once led to a moment of supreme comedy. A resident—now a successful oncologist—walked into my office, saw the pristine, finished manuscript I had largely polished, and asked with total innocence:

"Sir, since you have done so much... can you also write the Acknowledgement section for me?"

I laughed so loud I startled the pigeons on the windowsill. "My dear friend," I asked, "How do I thank myself? Do I write a paragraph about how wonderful Dr. Kalantri is and sign your name to it?" That was the limit. I stopped writing Acknowledgements.

The real work, however, happened at my dining table. Residents would arrive after rounds, hungry and hollowed out. This is where Bhavana, my wife, became the silent partner in all thirty-two theses. She never understood the p-values, but she understood the hunger. She served endless tea, cooked late-night dinners, and turned our home into a sanctuary. When these doctors meet me today in the UK or Australia, they rarely talk about statistics. They talk about Bhavana’s dal. They remember the warmth of the kitchen more than the chill of the library.

***

The Legacy of the Ledger

I eventually forced the department into the digital age—Word, Excel, EndNote—treating software as a weapon against error. But one rule was absolute: the resident was always the first author. The sweat was theirs. The glory had to be theirs.

Most of these thirty-two did not become career researchers. They became practitioners and teachers. For a long time, I felt a pang of failure about that. I wanted to build an army of scientists. But I see it differently now. The thesis was never really about the book; it was about the mind.

It was meant to teach a doctor how to think. How to spot the lie in a glossy pharmaceutical brochure. How to respect the uncertainty of biology. How to understand that a "significant P-value" is not the same thing as the truth.

Those black-and-gold books sit in the MGIMS library now. The paper is yellowing. The protocols are outdated. But to me, they are a ledger of our lives together—a record of the nights we spent trying to stop death with nothing but a stethoscope, a question, and a typewriter.

***

My career as a postgraduate guide began in 1988 with Monica Ahuja. She was an MGIMS student from the 1982 batch, and her task was to decipher the prognostic significance of treadmill tests in patients who had recently survived the wreckage of a myocardial infarction. At the time, I was what one might call a "raw" guide. I possessed the title and the white coat, but I was entirely untrained in the formal architecture of a thesis. I knew little of statistics and even less of epidemiology. Like many of my contemporaries, I was a bush-pilot flying by sight, learning the process through a messy series of trials and errors.

The early years were defined by technical frustration. I harbored a long-cherished desire to master the tools of modern research, but they remained just out of reach. That changed when Madhukar Pai entered my life. It was through our association that I finally developed a firm grip on biostatistics and the digital instruments that make sense of clinical chaos. I learned to navigate the sharp corners of Stata, to organize a sprawling EndNote library, and to coerce Microsoft Word and Excel into doing my bidding. This newfound fluency allowed me to direct my students toward clinical questions that actually mattered in the wards of Sevagram.

The topics we tackled were as diverse as the patients in our waiting rooms. We interrogated the human body and the systems we use to measure it. P. Sarkar looked at the utility of palpation in assessing cardiomegaly, while M. Singh tested the simple validity of a hand on a forehead to screen for fever. We explored the grim realities of rural life through the clinical profiles of snake bites and pesticide poisoning—work carried out by residents like Pranay Taori and Abhay Kelkar. Later, we moved into the realm of neurological scoring, where Priya Badam and Vaishali Solao evaluated the Siriraj and Guy’s hospital stroke scores to see if they held water in a rural Indian setting.

Yet, as I look back on these thirty-two residents, regret colors the memory. The workflow followed a predictable, flawed pattern. My postgraduates would type their drafts and send them to me via email. I would then sit at my desk, delete their clunky phrasing, retype their observations, and polish the prose until it shone. I would deliver them a final, pristine copy. In doing so, I committed a pedagogical sin. I robbed them of the freedom to stumble. By smoothing over their mistakes, I prevented them from developing the very skills I had worked so hard to acquire. Most of my postgraduates wrote their theses passively; they emerged as degree-holders, but few emerged as confident researchers.

The Integrity of the Byline

In the competitive world of Indian medical academia, there is an unwritten rule: the names of heads of departments or senior guides must occupy the prestigious first or second authorship slots. I found this practice a quiet form of intellectual theft. If a student spends two years laboring over a project, their name should lead the charge in the journals.

I took a different path. It is a matter of quiet satisfaction that many of my MD residents saw their thesis work transition from a bound volume to high-impact medical journals as first authors. Monica Ahuja led the way with her work on treadmill tests. Parimal Sarkar and Dhanraj Singh Chongtham published rigorous interrogations of the physical exam—Sarkar on the utility of palpation in cardiomegaly and Singh on the clinical signs of splenomegaly and ascites. These were not mere student exercises; they were contributions to the global understanding of bedside medicine.

Others followed. Manoj  Singh published on the screening of fever, while Priya Badam and Vaishali Solao saw their evaluations of stroke scores reach a wider audience. Ravindra Indra contributed to the diagnosis of hypothyroidism, and Samir Patil documented risk factors for myocardial infarction in our rural setting. Even complex cross-sectional studies reached publication under the primary authorship of the residents: Geetha Devi on brain lesions, Amandeep Singh on snake bite mortality, and Trunal Lokhande and Swati Waghdhare on the accuracy of physical signs in pleural effusion and meningitis. Madhuri Meena rounded out this tradition with her work on undifferentiated fever.

By stepping back and taking the final slot, I hoped to teach them that the true reward of research is not the hierarchy of the byline, but the integrity of the evidence. My Google Scholar profile serves as a ledger of these shared successes—a record of what happens when a guide acts as a steward rather than a master.

The Evidence of the Wards

My research has never been about the vanity of citation counts; it has been a systematic attempt to turn the daily observations of a rural hospital into data that could help others. The research was born from the dilemmas we faced at the bedside. We looked at the prevalence of tuberculosis infection among our own healthcare workers in a study published in JAMA, and we interrogated simple tools, such as using pallor to detect anaemia, finding that our eyes are rarely as precise as the laboratory. We didn't just look at the high-tech; we also documented the "diagnostic uncertainty" of non-malarial fevers to reduce the irrational use of antimalarial drugs in rural OPDs.

In the mid-2000s, I began a collaboration with Madhukar Pai that eventually yielded some three dozen papers, including systematic reviews on phage-based tests and line probe assays for rapid drug resistance.

The education of a researcher is often a spectator sport. In August 2004, before I moved into a studio in Berkeley, Madhu graciously hosted me for a fortnight. I would watch him work, his eyes fixed on every line of a manuscript, revising and refining until the prose passed his own particular acid test. He was a man of extreme meticulousness; he labored to ensure the final draft was flawless, aiming for the exacting standards of journals like JAMA.

It was this rigor that saw his PhD thesis on tuberculosis—work actually performed in the wards of Sevagram—find its home in the pages of JAMA with Madhu as the first author. When the news arrived, the joy in his eyes was impossible to describe. It was the look of a debutant test cricketer who had just struck a century in his first innings.

My work has also been a tool for advocacy—from exploring the crisis in access to essential medicines to campaigning against industry sponsorship of medical conferences. During the pandemic, we insisted on the rigor of well-designed trials for Hydroxychloroquine and Inhaled budesonide over the noise of anecdotal "cures." This body of work is the "paper trail" of my life in Sevagram—evidence that we tried to leave the science a little clearer than we found it.

The Fall of the Bound Volume

This realization eventually grew into a public critique. I have argued that we must stop the mandatory PG thesis. In its current form, it has devolved into a "Double-Blind Trial": the student is blind to the methodology, and the guide is often blind to the science. And both have no idea what is going on until the thesis is submitted to the university. You can read my full indictment in The Double-Blind MD Thesis.

The tragedy of the modern thesis is that instead of teaching ethics, we are inadvertently instilling the habits of data manipulation and plagiarism. It is a system running toward a cliff, as I noted in The Fall of the MD Thesis. We force students to "cook" data to satisfy a disinterested examiner, teaching intellectual dishonesty before the career has even begun.

We would serve our students better if we abandoned this bound volume of fiction. Instead, we should teach them to critically appraise a paper on diagnostics or clinical trials. If we taught them how to read a study and apply its truth to the patient in front of them, we would produce physicians who practice with wisdom. A doctor who can interpret a likelihood ratio at two in the morning is far more valuable than one who has spent three years assembling a thesis that will never be read again.

Amar Jesani was the kind of man you didn’t forget after meeting once. If the Medico Friend Circle (MFC) was the soul of public health activism in India, Amar was its restless, unrelenting conscience. I had known him since the early 1980s, and his annual visits to Sevagram were events we looked forward to—with a mix of intellectual excitement and a little nervous respect.

He was physically striking. Behind thick, scholarly glasses sat large, searching eyes that always seemed to be reading between the lines of your soul. When Amar spoke, he didn’t just fill a room; he commanded it. His voice was a unique instrument that could pivot from profound empathy for the marginalized to a searing, white-hot anger at the medical establishment’s indifference.

In the breaks between sessions, he would step outside to smoke—a lean, quintessential leftist figure wrapped in a cloud of tobacco. Amar specialized in calling a spade a spade, and he had a particular talent for cutting people down to their proper size if he sensed a hint of pretension. I often sat in the audience, fascinated and slightly terrified, wondering: How does he say these things so openly? I was careful by temperament; Amar was a storm.

Decades later, that bond remained. During the height of the pandemic, he invited me to deliver a talk on the Ethical Challenges of Research in a Pandemic and to co-author a critical editorial with Sahaj Rathi on the ethics of clinical research and practice in India during Covid-19.

***

The Birth of a Rebel Journal

In the early 1990s, Amar and a group of like-minded colleagues in Mumbai founded the Forum for Medical Ethics. By 1993, they had birthed a newsletter called Medical Ethics, which evolved into Issues in Medical Ethics (1996), and finally took the name it is known by today—the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME)—in 2004.

The journal was a rebel from the start. It refused to behave like a typical medical publication. It didn't charge authors a paisa to publish. It made its content freely available online in an era of expensive paywalls. Most radically, it refused a single rupee of advertisement money from drug companies or medical device manufacturers. In a world where journals often survive on the patronage of Big Pharma, IJME chose a precarious independence. It ran on a shoestring budget: a few donations, two underpaid staff members, and a mountain of volunteer hours.

***

The Reluctant Editor

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, Amar approached me with an offer that felt more like a summons.

“We want you to join as an Associate Editor,” he said.

The Editor-in-Chief then was Dr. Samiran Nundy—the former head of GI Surgery at AIIMS and a towering figure in Indian medicine. I felt completely out of place. I was a physician from a rural medical college, a man of the wards, not of the printing press. I had never edited a national journal. I had only recently acquired an email account and was still learning how to navigate the digital world without embarrassing myself.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I told Amar.

He didn’t accept my refusal. Sandhya Srinivasan, the journal’s executive editor, didn’t accept it either. Between the two of them, they pushed me—gently but firmly—into the role.

***

Learning the Craft

Those three years were a steep, sometimes grueling tutorial. Sandhya became my guide. She was sharp, quick-witted, and possessed a mind that often moved faster than I could follow. She taught me the invisible craft of editing: how to tighten a paragraph without strangling the author’s voice, and how to remove clutter without removing meaning.

My job was to solicit manuscripts and support Dr. Nundy. In the beginning, I felt like a clumsy intruder. I was plagued by the sense that I had been "prematurely recruited"—that they wanted a voice from the public sector and a teaching hospital who shared their philosophy, even if that voice lacked the technical polish of an experienced editor.

I often felt I wasn't doing enough. I wasn't a "natural" at the blue-penciling and the back-and-forth of peer review. When I eventually stepped down in 2003 to leave for my sabbatical at UC Berkeley, I did so with a lingering sense of embarrassment. I felt I hadn't quite lived up to the towering expectations Amar and his colleagues had for the role. Looking back, I realize I was perhaps too hard on myself; I was learning a new language in the middle of a crowded room.

***

Keeping Medicine Human

Despite my self-doubt, those years were transformative. I found colleagues who became lifelong friends—people like Dr. Sanjay Nagral and Dr. Sanjay Pai. Our connection went beyond the exchange of emails; we were all trying, in our fragmented ways, to keep medicine human.

I started writing, too. I co-authored pieces on the ethical quagmire of government-funded antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS and explored the uneasy culture of medical consumerism in an article titled, “When is enough, enough?”

When I look back, those three years with IJME feel like a vital turning point. If Evidence-Based Medicine taught me how to treat, IJME taught me why we treat—and, more importantly, who gets left behind when the system is rigged. By the time I boarded the flight for California, I felt quietly prepared. Bhavana had dragged me into the digital world; Madhukar Pai had sharpened my clinical lens; and Amar Jesani had made sure my moral compass stayed wide awake.

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Recognition is a strange thing; it feels good for about five minutes before it starts asking questions you didn’t plan to answer. In May 2008, the institute nominated me for the Best Teacher Award of the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences (MUHS), Nashik. It was a significant honour. In a state crowded with medical colleges, being singled out as the "best teacher" is no small compliment.

But my satisfaction was short-lived. I soon learned that my close friend and colleague, Dr. M.V.R. Reddy, the Head of Biochemistry, had also been considered. The rules were simple and rigid: one institute, one nomination. I could immediately see the awkwardness this would create—two friends vying for one title, leading to forced smiles, careful conversations, and that invisible comparison in the staff room that no one admits but everyone feels.

Reddy wasn’t just "good at teaching." He made biochemistry—a subject most students flee from—feel alive. He possessed that rare gift of making enzymes and pathways sound like a story rather than a syllabus. So, I wrote to the Dean and asked him to withdraw my name, stating plainly that Reddy should be the nominee. An award is never worth disturbing a friendship that had quietly become family.

On July 30, 2008, MUHS announced the winner: Dr. M.V.R. Reddy. I felt genuinely happy. I wrote a congratulatory email to the faculty and meant every word. Watching him receive the award, I didn’t feel I had "lost" anything; if anything, I felt lighter.

Bureaucracy, however, has stamina. The Dean tried again the next year, and then again. Finally, on February 22, 2009, I sent a direct email declining the nomination permanently. I explained that I did not consider myself an exceptional teacher—only an average one—and that singling out one person often obscures the quiet, collective work of a faculty. It wasn’t false modesty; I have simply always believed that teaching is a team sport.

***

A Call I Couldn’t Refuse

Fourteen years later, in September 2022, I was in Chandigarh visiting my daughter Amrita when I received a call from Dr. R.B. Kalamkar. He was my senior from the 1971 batch in Nagpur, someone I had worked alongside during my residency.

"The Association of Physicians of India (API), Vidarbha Chapter, wants to honour you," he said.

My reflex was ready. No, no… please don’t… I had practised this refusal for years. But then he added a line that stopped me cold.

"It is the Dr. B.S. Chaubey Award."

Dr. Chaubey’s name has a way of straightening your spine, even decades later. He was my mentor, my examiner, and—on some days—my nightmare. He shaped the way I think as a physician. His standards were brutal, but they were never casual. Over the next few days, calls poured in from friends and colleagues—Dr. Viresh Gupta, Dr. Nikhil Balankhe, Dr. Deshpande—all urging me to accept. This was not a distant university selecting names from a file; this was my own fraternity. These were people who had watched me grow older, slower, and greyer, yet still turn up to work.

So, I said yes.

***

Ward 23 Returns to the Stage

The ceremony took place in Chandrapur. My former teacher, Dr. S.M. Patil, handed me the citation while the audience applauded. The words were generous—too generous, if you ask me. When my turn came to speak, I had no desire to list achievements or sound like my own obituary. Instead, I took them back to Ward 23 of GMC Nagpur, circa 1980.

I was a first-year resident then. I had admitted a young patient with leg weakness and a distended bladder—a classic case of acute transverse myelitis. But standing in front of Dr. Chaubey, my brain went blank, the way it does when fear hijacks reason. When he demanded the diagnosis, I blurted out, "Guillain-Barré syndrome, sir."

He didn’t shout immediately, which would have been easier. He went quiet first—the dangerous kind of quiet. Then he pulled back the sheet, pointed out the signs I had missed, and turned to Dr. Patil.

"Patil," he said, his voice cutting through the ward, "God save this student. Poverty of thoughts and bankruptcy of ideas."

The audience in Chandrapur laughed when I narrated this. I smiled too, but inside, I remembered exactly how it felt that morning: the hot flush of shame, the dry mouth, and the desperate wish to disappear behind the case sheet. That sentence stayed with me for years—not as an insult, but as a warning. That day I learned a simple truth: in medicine, ignorance is not harmless. It can hurt people. The fact that it embarrasses you in public is merely the smaller problem.

***

The Circle Closes

When I looked at the award later, I didn’t see a trophy. I saw a long road. I saw myself refusing a nomination in 2008 because I didn’t want an award to stand between friends. And I saw myself accepting one in 2022 because it carried the name of the teacher who once scared the nonsense out of me.

The MUHS award would have been just a certificate. The API award felt like something else entirely. It was a full stop. And, in a quiet way, a return to Ward 23.

The Man Who Changed the Trajectory

I first noticed Madhukar Pai at an annual meeting of the Medico Friend Circle — one of those gatherings where idealism and exhaustion arrive in equal measure, and where the conversations that matter happen not in the sessions but over tea.

He was younger than me by thirteen years, but he carried himself with the quiet certainty of someone who had already decided what kind of doctor he wanted to be. A Madras Medical College graduate from the 1987 batch, he had chosen Community Medicine at CMC Vellore over the safer, shinier clinical specialties — a choice that, in Indian medicine, requires either courage or indifference to peer opinion. Madhu had both.

He spoke about public health, epidemiology, and biostatistics with the ease of a man discussing the weather. Most clinicians treat these subjects the way they treat difficult relatives: greeted politely at family functions and avoided thereafter. Madhu treated them as the most interesting problems in medicine. Slowly, over several such meetings, his enthusiasm began to do what enthusiasm sometimes does — it became contagious.

---

The Workshop That Started Everything

Around 2000, between sessions at one of those MFC meetings, Madhu turned to me and said: "Why don't we do a workshop on epidemiology at MGIMS?"

I said yes before he could change his mind.

What followed became a small legend in Sevagram. For three days, thirty residents from Medicine, Paediatrics, and OBGYN sat through eight-hour sessions and — remarkably — did not attempt to escape. Madhu had a gift I have rarely seen in academic medicine: he could make a P-value feel like a story. He explained how bias enters a study the way a draught enters a room — quietly, through gaps you did not know existed. He turned confidence intervals from a source of examination anxiety into something you could actually use at a bedside.

For residents drowning in their MD theses, he was not simply a visiting faculty member from Canada. He was a lifeline.

I watched him work. I watched how he held a room — not through authority, but through clarity. I noticed how he nudged my younger colleagues, Rajnish Joshi, Kaustubh Gokhale, and Anurag Bhargava, not with instructions but with questions. Have you thought about this? Have you read that? Have you considered why the study was designed this way? He was building researchers the way a good gardener builds a garden — by improving the soil, not by pulling at the plants.

Somewhere between the tea breaks and the chalkboard scribbles, a friendship formed. I did not fully understand, at the time, where it would lead.

---

The Email That Crossed the Digital Divide

The internet arrived at Sevagram around 2003 — late, unreliable, and rationed like electricity during the monsoon.

I remember the day I opened a Rediffmail account for the first time. I typed the address into the browser with the concentration of a man attempting a procedure he had never tried before. Then I wrote to Madhu in Canada and pressed send. The screen flickered. Somewhere across the world, a server received what I had written. I sat back and waited, not entirely sure I believed it had worked.

I had held a USA.net account before that, but rarely used it, and whatever was exchanged there is lost now — Rediffmail offers to retrieve old messages for a fee, but two decades have defeated even that. What I do have is the memory of what came back.

Madhu's reply arrived like a small celebration.

He wrote,"When I received your email, I almost fell off my chair! I know downloading a 10 MB PDF takes ages at your end, but it is worth the wait. I am so happy MGIMS has joined the World Wide Web."

It was through this thin, fragile thread — dial-up connection, flickering screen, the occasional power cut mid-sentence — that he planted the idea that would alter the course of my professional life.

It did not arrive as a grand proposal. It came as a single line, almost casual, tucked at the end of a message:

Apply for an MPH at Berkeley.

Six words. I read them twice, then a third time. I was not sure if he was serious

---

The Hesitation

I sat with that suggestion for longer than I should have.

I was a full professor with a ward full of patients, a department that depended on its routines, and a family in Sevagram. My daughter was young. Bhavana was managing a career and a household simultaneously, as she always had. Leaving for a year felt selfish in the specific way that only physicians understand — the guilt of abandoning the people who need you, compounded by the knowledge that someone else will manage, and the uncomfortable suspicion that they might manage perfectly well.

But something had begun to shift in me. I had spent two decades practising medicine with skill and sincerity, but I had not always known why some things worked and others did not. I wanted to understand research from the inside — not just read papers but know how to interrogate them. I wanted to ask better questions. I wanted to know how to answer them honestly, with the right tools, in the right sequence.

Madhu understood this before I had fully articulated it to myself. He did not lecture me or send a prospectus. He simply kept the door open — a question here, a paper there, a gentle nudge at the right moment. He had received support from the Fogarty AIDS International Training Program, which had taken him first to UC Berkeley for an MPH and later a PhD. He knew what the year could give a person. He wanted me to find out for myself.

In the winter of 2003, I finally wrote back.

"I'm ready."

---

The Paper Chase

The application process was not romantic. It was paperwork, queues, and the small humiliations that Indian bureaucracy reserves for its most motivated citizens.

First came IELTS. I scored 8 out of 9 and felt absurdly pleased — the particular satisfaction of a man in his late forties who has just proved something to no one in particular.

Then came the real test: transcripts.

I needed validated mark sheets from Nagpur University and Government Medical College, Nagpur. The records were a tangle. At one counter, a clerk informed me with complete administrative serenity that I had not completed a mandatory rural posting and owed a fine of several lakhs. I stood there for a moment, genuinely trying to remember a rural posting I had apparently skipped without noticing, in the middle of a career spent almost entirely in rural Maharashtra.

It was a clerical error. The rule did not apply to my batch.

My classmate Dr. Abhimanyu Niswade, then Professor of Paediatrics at GMC Nagpur, stepped in and quietly untangled the knots. Without him, my Berkeley dream might have ended its life in a dusty government file, stamped and shelved and forgotten.

While I chased signatures in Nagpur, Madhu was doing his own quiet work in California. He spoke to Dr. Art Reingold, Dr. Warren Lee, and Dr. Jack Colford Jr. about me — mentioning my name in rooms I would never enter, building a small argument on my behalf with people whose opinion mattered. I did not know this at the time. I learnt it later, gradually, the way you learn most of the important things people have done for you.

---

The Manifesto

On 5 November 2003, I sat down to write my Statement of Purpose.

It was not simply an application form. It was, as these things sometimes become when you take them seriously, an argument with myself — written neatly, in the hope that someone in California would find it convincing.

I wrote that MGIMS had a tradition of service but that clinical research remained thin because we lacked trained mentors. That in India, for too many doctors, the MD thesis was the first paper and the last. That I wanted to return from Berkeley with the tools of evidence-based medicine and build, in Sevagram, a culture of inquiry — the habit of asking not just what but why, and then finding a rigorous way to answer.

It sounded ambitious on paper. But it was honest. And honesty, as I have learnt, is the one quality that a good Statement of Purpose cannot disguise.

---

The Golden Ticket

On 12 February 2004, the letter arrived.

I had been accepted.

The School of Public Health at UC Berkeley had opened its doors. The Fogarty programme offered a stipend of $2,519 per month for living expenses and $200 per semester for books. I read those numbers again and again, half expecting them to rearrange themselves into something more modest.

The final hurdle was the US Consulate in Mumbai. I had heard enough horror stories about visa interviews to lose sleep over them. On 2 July 2004, I walked into the embassy with my heart doing something that felt less like beating and more like insisting.

The officer looked at my papers. He looked at me.

"Where are you going?"

"UC Berkeley," I said.

He smiled — the particular smile of a man who likes the answer he has just heard — and handed everything back.

"Good luck. You are going to a great university."

That was it. No drama. No interrogation. A simple sentence that unlocked a door.

---

Roots and Wings

News travels fast in Wardha. Pride travels faster.

The Maheshwari Mandal insisted on a felicitation. I tried to protest — I had achieved nothing yet, I told them; I had only secured admission — but they were not interested in my logic. A function was arranged. Dr. Ved Prakash Mishra was the Chief Guest, and Shri Narayandasji Jajoo presided. Dr. Mishra spoke for forty-five minutes in his grand, rolling Urdu-Hindi, turning my scholarship into a victory for the entire city. I sat in my chair, shrinking by degrees, embarrassed by the praise yet genuinely warmed by the affection behind it.

When my turn came, I spoke for three minutes. I thanked them. I promised to do my best. And I understood something clearly that evening, in the way you sometimes understand things not when you think about them but when you are forced to speak about them in public: Berkeley might give me wings, but Sevagram would always be my roots.

In the first week of August 2004, I boarded a British Airways flight from Mumbai to San Francisco. I left behind my hospital, my ward rounds, my routines, and my family. I flew, at forty-seven, towards a new identity.

Somewhere in Canada, I imagine, Madhukar Pai already knew I would be fine

I met Madhu at the annual meetings of the Medico Friend Circle. He was younger than me, but he carried himself like someone who already knew where he was headed. A Madras Medical College graduate from the 1987 batch, he had chosen Community Medicine at CMC Vellore over the safer, shinier clinical specialties. He spoke with ease about public health, epidemiology, and biostatistics, subjects most clinicians treated like distant relatives: greeted politely and avoided thereafter.

Around 2000, at one of those MFC meetings, Madhu said, “Why don’t we do a workshop on epidemiology at MGIMS?”

I said yes before he could change his mind.

That three-day workshop became a small legend in Sevagram. Thirty residents from Medicine, Pediatrics, and OBGYN sat through eight-hour days and, surprisingly, did not try to escape. Madhu made P-values less frightening, explained how bias creeps in quietly, and turned confidence intervals into something you could actually trust. For residents drowning in their MD theses, he wasn’t just a visiting faculty member. He was a lifeline.

Somewhere between tea breaks and chalkboard scribbles, a friendship grew. Madhu had wit, stamina, and a stubborn desire to pull others up with him. He became a mentor to my younger colleagues, Rajnish Joshi, Kaustubh Gokhale, and Anurag Bhargava, nudging them towards good questions, good methods, and the right people. He himself had received support from the Fogarty AIDS International Training Program, which took him to UC Berkeley for an MPH and later a PhD.

***