The Awards Paradox

The nomination I didn’t want (2008)

Recognition is a strange thing. It feels good for about five minutes. After that, 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 big honour. In a state full of medical colleges, being singled out as “best teacher” is not a small compliment.

Then I heard something that made me uncomfortable. My close friend and colleague, Dr M.V.R. Reddy, the Head of Biochemistry, had also been considered. The rules were simple: one institute, one nomination.

I could already see the awkwardness it would create. Two friends, one title. Smiles that are slightly forced. Conversations that become careful. And in the staff room, that invisible comparison that no one admits but everyone feels.

Reddy wasn’t just “good at teaching.” He made biochemistry—of all subjects—feel alive. Students who normally ran away from enzymes and pathways would sit up in his class. He had that rare gift: he could make a dry topic sound like a story.

So I wrote to the Dean and asked him to withdraw my name. I said, plainly, let Reddy be nominated. An award is not worth disturbing a friendship that had quietly become family.

On 30 July 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 later, I didn’t feel I had “lost” anything. If anything, I felt lighter.

But bureaucracy has stamina. The Dean tried again the next year. And then again.

Finally, on 22 February 2009, I sent a more direct email. I wrote that I did not consider myself an exceptional teacher, that I was only an average one, and that there were many others who deserved it more. It wasn’t drama or false modesty. I have always felt teaching is a team sport. Singling out one person often hides the quiet work of many.

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A call I couldn’t refuse (2022)

Fourteen years later, in September 2022, I was in Chandigarh, visiting Amrita, when I got a call from Dr R.B. Kalamkar—my senior from Nagpur, someone I had worked with during residency.

He said, “The Association of Physicians of India (API), Vidarbha Chapter, wants to honour you.”

My reflex was ready. No, no… please don’t… I had practised this refusal for years.

Then he added one line that stopped me.

“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. But he also shaped the way I think as a physician. His standards were brutal, but they were never casual.

Over the next few days, friends and colleagues called—Dr Viresh Gupta, Dr Nikhil Balankhe, Dr Deshpande—and said, “Accept it.”

This was not a distant university selecting names from files. This was my own fraternity. People who had watched me grow older, slower, greyer—and still turn up to work.

So I said yes.

Ward 23 returns to the stage

The ceremony happened in Chandrapur. My former teacher, Dr S.M. Patil, handed me the citation. People clapped. The words were generous. Too generous, if you ask me.

When my turn came to speak, I didn’t want to list achievements. I didn’t want to sound like my own obituary.

Instead, I took them back to Ward 23, GMC Nagpur, around 1980.

I was a first-year resident. I had admitted a young patient with weakness in the legs and a distended bladder. It was a classic case of acute transverse myelitis. But standing in front of Dr Chaubey, my brain went blank—the way it does when fear takes over.

When he asked me the diagnosis, I blurted out, “Guillain-Barré syndrome, sir.”

He didn’t shout immediately. That would have been easier. He went quiet first—the dangerous kind of quiet. Then he pulled the sheet, pointed out the signs I had missed, and turned to Dr Patil.

“Patil,” he said, “God save this student. Poverty of thoughts and bankruptcy of ideas.”

The audience laughed when I narrated it. I smiled too. But inside, I remembered how it had felt that morning: hot shame, dry mouth, and the 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 learnt something simple: in medicine, ignorance is not harmless. It can hurt people. And it can embarrass you in public, which is 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 because I didn’t want an award to come between two friends. And I saw myself accepting one because it carried the name of the teacher who once scared the nonsense out of me.

The MUHS award would have been a certificate.

The API award felt like something else.

A full stop. And, in a quiet way, a return to Ward 23.

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