If the 1990s were about digitising hospital records, the early 2000s were about upgrading the software of our minds. In 2000, the Medico Friends Circle (MFC) held its annual meeting at Yatri Niwas in Sevagram—a modest guest house across the road from Gandhi’s Ashram.
MFC meetings had their own distinct flavour: simple arrangements, serious conversations, and a fierce, unvarnished idealism. We sat cross-legged on the floor, arguing about social determinants of health over endless cups of tea, while ceiling fans pushed warm air from one corner to another in a futile attempt at cooling. It was in this sweltering, intellectually charged atmosphere that I met Dr. Madhukar Pai—known to everyone simply as Madhu.
He was a young graduate from Madras Medical College, then pursuing his MD in Community Medicine at CMC Vellore. Madhu spoke with a clarity that was almost startling. He wasn’t loud or dramatic; he was simply sharp and well-structured, his thoughts organized like a perfect clinical note. We began talking about medical research, and I confessed my growing fascination with Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), a concept I had stumbled upon in 1996 through the writings of David Sackett.
Madhu’s eyes lit up. He was already a pioneer in his own right, conducting workshops on epidemiology and statistics. In that small room, with the scent of chai and the low buzz of activists outside, we decided to collaborate. It was a casual decision, made between sips of tea, that quietly shifted the trajectory of my professional life.
***
The Workshop That Woke the Wards
In February 2000, we organized a three-day workshop on Statistics and Study Designs at Sevagram. Thirty residents signed up—a mix from Medicine, Paediatrics, OB-GYN, and Surgery. Most arrived with the expression I knew well from thesis season: a mask of polite interest thinly veiling a deep sense of dread. They expected a dry diet of p-values, t-tests, and academic boredom.
Madhu had other plans. He didn’t teach statistics as a punishment; he taught it as a torch. He showed the residents how bias can bend the truth, why randomisation is simply fairness written into a study design, and how to read a medical paper without being seduced by confident conclusions. He made confidence intervals feel like common sense rather than a mathematical hurdle.
For eight hours a day, the residents stayed awake—fully, vibrantly awake. In Sevagram, that was a minor miracle. By the end of the third day, the fear had softened. They began to see research not as dry mathematics, but as curiosity armed with discipline. Many pleaded for Madhu to join MGIMS full-time. I realized then that we were no longer just treating patients; we were learning to interrogate our own habits.
Three years later, the pull of this new world took me to its birthplace—McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where EBM had been shaped into a global movement. That trip — the missed connection at Heathrow, the workshop with Gordon Guyatt and Deborah Cook, and the UK alumni tour that followed it, ending with two hours on snakebite in Oxford — is a story worth telling properly, and it takes up the next two chapters.
I returned home with a suitcase full of books and a new lens. The evidence revolution had begun in Sevagram, but for me, it was merely the prelude to an even bigger adventure: a year at UC Berkeley.
***