As the fires of the second wave began to dim, I walked corridors that had been eerily silent a year before. The hospital had physically transformed — new oxygen plants humming with a mechanical heartbeat, centralised pipelines snaking through the walls like silver veins, the old building standing like a battle-scarred veteran. But the most significant changes were not made of brick and mortar; they were etched into the spirit of the institution.
I remember the first patient who arrived at our repurposed Covid block exactly a year before that walk: a sixty-four-year-old man from Washim, 225 kilometres away, who became, in a series of tragic firsts, our first admission, our first intubation, our first death. From the peak of the second wave, that single death looked like a distant, somber warning of the deluge to come. Over that year we admitted more than five thousand patients, delivered babies to infected mothers, vaccinated thousands — statistics that don’t capture the atmosphere of those months, the endless staff-room questions with no good answers: How long will this last? How do I hug my children without fearing I’m poisoning them? We were as uncertain as everyone else, and we learned that in a pandemic the only certainty is uncertainty itself.
By late January 2021 we allowed ourselves a sigh of relief — wards emptying, ventilators falling quiet, talk of normalcy returning. The virus was only catching its breath. The second wave arrived with a force that made the first look like a rehearsal, and we found ourselves sending “get well soon” messages to colleagues who, forty-eight hours earlier, had been standing beside us in the trenches.
THE FRAGILITY OF THE PUBLIC SQUARE
Looking back on two years as Medical Superintendent, the question worth asking is not how many oxygen cylinders we moved but what we actually learned. The clearest lesson was that a hospital is only as strong as the trust the community places in it, and that trust was under constant siege. A thirty-second WhatsApp video, stripped of context, could undo months of work — a tired resident or a crowded ward shared as “proof” of negligence, with no accounting for the exhaustion beneath the PPE. Transparency was our only shield. We had to explain, over and over, why we couldn’t hand over the dead, why we wouldn’t prescribe the miracle drug, why the choices we made were the right ones. Trust, once shaken, comes back slowly — one honest conversation, one consistent decision at a time. In a climate of fear, efficiency matters; integrity matters more.
THE MLA AND THE SPEECH
That fragility turned political more than once. Thrice a week I sat with the District Collector, the Civil Surgeon, and Wardha’s political leadership — a mix of genuine problem-solving and posturing. In one meeting, with all four district MLAs and the Member of Parliament present, a local MLA launched into a tirade against our nurses and residents for “not caring properly and compassionately,” speaking with the indignation of a man who had never worn a PPE kit in a non-air-conditioned ward.
I interrupted him — not as a subordinate, but as a shield for my staff. “Sir,” I said, “let me remind you of the reality. These nurses and residents work under pressure you cannot imagine. When they go home after a twelve-hour shift, their greatest fear is not the virus — it’s that they might carry it home to their own parents and children like a silent assassin. To question their compassion while they risk their families for your constituents is unjust.” I went further: the decision to administer medicine has to stay inside the hospital. When politicians dictate Remdesivir or plasma — treatments with no proven benefit — that isn’t help, it’s interference. Medicine is not a democracy, and it is certainly not a constituency service.
I spoke for fifteen minutes. The room, usually full of rustling papers and whispered asides, went silent. No one rebutted me. The MLA nodded, seeming to understand he had crossed the line between governance and expertise, and the criticism stopped from that day. That evening the District Collector called: “Congratulations on that speech. It was bold and blunt. As an administrator, I could never have said that to an elected official, but you did.” It was a small victory in a long war, but it affirmed something true — that sometimes the most compassionate thing a doctor can do is be rude to a politician.
THE INVISIBLE ARMY
When we talk about frontline heroes, we picture the consultant giving an interview. But the pandemic belonged as much to the residents and nurses who lived inside the Red Zones — to a second-year resident I remember slumped in a chair after a thirty-six-hour shift, his face marked with grooves from an N95 mask that hadn’t had time to heal before the next one began — and equally to the attendants who moved bodies in 45-degree heat, the drivers who navigated oxygen tankers through empty, locked-down roads, and the sweepers who scrubbed the Red Zones with a care that put many of us to shame. These were ordinary people doing extraordinary work, and my clearest lesson as an administrator was that resilience does not trickle down from the top; it bubbles up from the people holding the smallest, most essential tasks.
THE PRICE OF ABANDONING SCIENCE
The most sombre lesson was the cost of abandoning scientific temper. Black Fungus remains a tragic monument to panic-prescribing — proof that evidence-based medicine is not a luxury for peaceful times but a survival kit for a crisis. At MGIMS we held the line when the currents of misinformation ran strongest, saving patients from both medical toxicity and financial ruin by saying no to the noise. If our practice changed more in a single year than in the previous fifty, it was because the crisis forced us to rediscover our own core: the pursuit of truth at the bedside.
The War Room is dismantled now. The lecture halls are filled again with the voices of students. But the silence of March 2020 still echoes. We are a more sober institution than we were, having seen in equal measure the fragility of life and the stubbornness of the human spirit.
Had Dr Sushila Nayar been alive, I believe she would have walked these wards with a quiet nod — not of a flawless execution, because perfection was never possible, but of an institution that stayed. She founded this college on the idea that healthcare is a form of social service, a Gandhian Sadhana. In the pandemic we were asked to prove it. We did not falter. We learned, we stumbled, we corrected course, and we kept going. In the end it was not the protocols alone that sustained us, but an unspoken understanding that while perfection was impossible, abandonment was unthinkable. Sevagram stood tall when the world fell silent. That is the story I wanted to tell.