A reader’s guide to the recurring figures and locations in Stetho in Sevagram
Family
Gooldasji
Dr Kalantri’s father, whose quiet discipline and love shaped the boy who would become a physician. His presence runs through the early chapters like a watermark.
Parvati
Dr Kalantri’s mother, whose warmth and steadiness anchored a household that valued learning above comfort.
Bhavana
Wife, companion, and the person without whom the Sevagram chapter of this memoir could not have been written. She traded a city life for Gandhi’s village and never complained.
Ashwini and Amrita
Son and daughter, who grew up in the peculiar freedom of campus life, between hospital corridors and mango trees.
Diti, Nivi, Krit, and Samanvi
The grandchildren, in whose faces the long arc of this memoir quietly arrives at its destination.
Mentors
Dr B.S. Chaubey
Physician, unit head, and thesis guide at GMC Nagpur. The teacher who first showed a young student what clinical medicine, done with rigour and humanity, actually looks like.
Dr Sushila Nayar
Gandhian physician, health minister, and one of the founding moral forces behind MGIMS. Her belief that medicine must serve the poor was not a slogan — it was a programme.
Dhirubhai Mehta
President of the Kasturba Health Society, who knew the Kalantri family since the 1960s. As Medical Superintendent, Dr Kalantri worked under him for fourteen years with complete freedom to build the hospital as he believed it should be built. Sorely missed.
Parmanand Tapdiya
Associated with the Kalantri family since the 1960s, he still remembers with gratitude what Gooldasji did for him. A man who stood by Dr Kalantri through thick and thin, and the person he turns to whenever he needs counsel.
Dr Madhukar Pai
Epidemiologist, strong believer in evidence-based medicine, and the friend who helped Dr Kalantri win the Fogarty scholarship that opened the door to Berkeley. A quiet force behind some of the most important turns in this memoir.
Dr Rajnish Joshi
Physician and fellow traveller in the cause of evidence-based medicine. One of the small circle of colleagues who believed that rural India deserved the same rigour of clinical thinking as any teaching hospital in the world.
Friends
Dr Ulhas Jajoo
MGIMS physician and, in every sense that matters, more brother than senior colleague.
Suhas Jajoo
A friendship rooted in Wardha from school days, long before either of them wore a white coat. Some friendships are chosen; this one feels like it was always there.
Places
Wardha
The district town that gave Dr Kalantri his early world — its libraries, its cinema halls, its quiet streets, and Gandhi’s ashram just down the road.
Nagpur
Where medicine began, at the Government Medical College, in classrooms and wards that turned students into doctors the hard way.
Sevagram
Gandhi’s village and the home of MGIMS. The place this memoir is ultimately about — chosen over a city, returned to again and again, and never regretted.
Berkeley
The University of California campus where Dr Kalantri completed his MPH in 2004 under Dr Art Reingold, on a Fogarty scholarship. The city that widened his horizons and confirmed what he had long suspected — that the questions being asked in rural Wardha were as serious as any being asked anywhere in the world.