5
Student at Forty-Seven
From professor to student
Leaving the dust and heat of Sevagram for the cool, mist-laden hills of Berkeley felt less like a journey across geography and more like a leap across dimensions. I had arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue my Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology. It was a time to pause, to step back from the bedside, and to look at medicine through a completely different lens.
At Sevagram, my world was defined by the individual patient in front of me—their pain, their fever, their immediate crisis. At the School of Public Health in Berkeley, the “patient” was no longer a single person; it was the population. I swapped my stethoscope for Stata, and my clinical intuition for confidence intervals.
The shift was jarring but exhilarating. I remember sitting in lecture halls, surrounded by brilliant minds from across the globe, learning that good intentions were not enough in medicine; we needed evidence. We needed to understand denominators as much as numerators. This was my initiation into the rigorous world of Evidence-Based Medicine—a philosophy that would later become the bedrock of my teaching and practice back home.
Life in Berkeley was a world away from the austere simplicity of Sevagram. The intellectual freedom was intoxicating. I spent hours in the libraries, soaking in not just epidemiology but the energy of the campus itself. Yet even as I sat in coffee shops and climbed the steep road up to the university, my mind kept slipping back home.
I had left behind Bhavana, who was battling the early teething troubles of launching our new Hospital Information System at Sevagram. I had left Ashwini, who had appeared for the MGIMS PMT and was still unsure of admission. And I had left Amrita at Lloyd’s School in Wardha, in the middle of her tenth standard. The thought returned again and again, usually late at night, in the quiet after a long day of classes: was I improving my career at the cost of my children’s peace?
In September, barely a month after I landed in Berkeley, Dr Ramji Singh, my friend and Professor of Physiology at MGIMS, broke the news. Ashwini was in. First year student at MGIMS. For a moment I simply stared at the email, hardly trusting my eyes. A weight I had been carrying without admitting it lifted at once. Amrita, too, was doing well. She was almost always among the top three in her class and continued to stay there. And Bhavana, as she always did, held the home and the hospital together, juggling both with the quiet competence that women somehow manage without asking for applause.
With that reassurance, I could breathe again. I wasn’t in Berkeley only for a degree. I was gathering tools. I knew every lesson in biostatistics and study design would eventually have to survive the harsh realities of rural India, and prove its worth in the wards of Kasturba Hospital.
That year was not just about earning an MPH. It was about widening my horizons. I realized that training was limited – a physician treats an illness, an epidemiologist tries to understand the “why” and the “how” behind the illness. I returned to India not just with a diploma, but with a new pair of eyes—ready to marry the art of healing with the science of certainty.