Reflections on Medicine and Life by Dr. S.P. Kalantri
“I’ve done more than 30,000 tubectomies,” my classmate said over tea in Sevagram today. The number hung in the air between us. We are both from GMC Nagpur’s 1973 batch. But my friend wasn’t a postgraduate gynaecologist or a surgeon — just a plain MBBS doctor. In the early 1980s, he quit his surgical postgraduate … Read the essay
Watching The Odyssey with my twelve-year-old granddaughter led to an unexpected conversation about the similarities between Greek and Indian mythology. A week later, Devdutt Pattanaik explored the same idea in a thought-provoking video, reminding me that stories travel farther than civilizations.
She walked into my outpatient clinic carrying a file thicker than a city telephone directory. She was forty, stood five-foot-two, and weighed 130 kilograms. Her blood sugars were soaring, her blood pressure was dangerously high, and her serum creatinine—a marker of how well the kidneys are holding up—was creeping north. A recent ultrasound showed her … Read the essay
“I am not sure what it is.” I utter these words whenever I encounter a medical puzzle I cannot solve. “This is beyond my competence,” I reply to the WhatsApp messages flooding my phone at all hours. My patients hate it. They do not visit a clinic to buy hesitation. They want a physician who … Read the essay
This afternoon I sat in a mall in Wardha and watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Near the end, Odysseus picks up the old bow that no suitor in his hall could bend, and strings it in one unhurried motion. The theatre went quiet. I had not expected that a film shot across six countries, on … Read the essay