Contents
This page lists all thirteen chapters of Stetho in Sevagram in the order they were written. Each entry includes a short description of what the chapter covers. You can begin anywhere, though the chapters move roughly in time — from a childhood in Wardha in the 1960s to a life built around medicine, teaching, and the administration of a thousand-bed teaching hospital in Gandhi’s village — a life that began in 1982 and has never quite left.
Roots and Shoots
Growing Up Without a Map
Wardha in the 1960s. No doctors in the family, no plan. In Class 9, he chose biology over mathematics and inadvertently shut the engineering door. That left two options: medicine or a plain B.Sc. He was fortunate to get the first. He had not particularly planned for it.
The Crucible
Medical College, Nagpur (1973–1982)
GMC Nagpur. Eight years of MBBS, internship, house jobs, and residency. And hostels. Two educations run in parallel throughout: the one that appears in examinations, and the one learned at three in the morning beside a patient the textbook did not anticipate.
Arrival in Sevagram
A Brief Posting That Lasted Forty Years
1982. A young doctor arrives in Gandhi’s village for a year or two. He is still there. What kept him: patients who had nothing, a hospital that had little, and work that turned out to matter more than he expected.
Widening Horizons
Evidence, Journals, and the World Outside Sevagram
Evidence-based medicine arrives and makes clinical life harder and more honest. Workshop at McMaster. Journals edited between ward rounds. Staying current takes effort. Falling behind takes none.
Student at Forty-Seven
Back to the Classroom at UC Berkeley
Most physicians are settled in their ways at forty-seven. This one goes back to school. A year at Berkeley’s School of Public Health teaches less about answers and more about asking better questions — a shift that changes everything that follows.
Paper to Digital
Bringing Computers to a Hospital That Ran on Paper
Illegible registers. Power cuts that last half the day. Staff who see no reason to change. How a hospital’s information systems were built from nothing — slowly, stubbornly, by people who refused to give up.
The Administrator’s Chair
Twelve Years Behind a Desk He Never Wanted
He did not seek the post and never quite settled into it. But thirteen years left three marks worth noting: no med reps in the corridors, science conducted without sponsors, and a low-cost drug initiative that kept medicine within reach of patients who had walked miles to find it.
The Pandemic Years
COVID-19 Comes to Sevagram
Tracking oxygen tankers by phone at midnight. Staff falling ill. The mathematics of mortality played out in real time. How a rural hospital held its ground when everything around it was failing.
The Inner Circle
Family
Parents, siblings, children, grandchildren. Three generations under one roof in Sevagram. The people who made a modest life feel sufficient — and who were waiting each evening when the hospital finally let him go.
Beyond the Stethoscope
Cycling, Trekking, Reading, Cricket
Long-distance cycling at dawn. Himalayan treks with family. Books read for pleasure, not examinations. A physician’s life outside the ward — and why it matters as much as what happens inside it.
Unusual Patients
Cases That Changed How I Think
The patients who did not fit the textbook. Who recovered when they should not have, or did not when they should. Each one left something behind — a correction, a question, a permanent revision to what a physician thinks he knows.
Reflections
What Remains After the Noise
Two heart attacks. Medicine changing beyond recognition. The subject no one in a hospital likes to discuss: death, and what a physician learns from standing close to it for forty years.
Epilogue
Still on Call
Forty-five years on, the stethoscope is still within reach. The tests have changed, the treatments have changed, the anxieties have changed. The look in a patient’s eyes has not.
Ready to begin?
Read the Introduction →