There was no notice board. No reception desk. No office with a fee register waiting on the counter.
When Varun Bhargava and his brother arrived at Sevagram in August 1969, following a letter that invited him to join the first batch of a new medical college, they found a modest house on the main road and a local villager who pointed them toward it. Varun knocked. A tall, dignified man in dhoti-kurta opened the door, took in the two young men on his step, and said — with the composed unhurriedness of someone who has been expecting something like this — “I think you are looking for a medical college.”
He was Panditji, who would later become rector of the boys’ hostel. He explained that they did not yet have a fee register. Come back tomorrow.
The next day, Varun’s brother went to Bharat Medical Stores in Wardha, borrowed a register, and drew the first columns in it by hand. Varun Bhargava’s admission was recorded in that register — one of the first entries in an institution that was, in August 1969, still assembling itself around its own idea.
He would spend the next five decades assembling things from whatever materials were available, in circumstances that consistently failed to provide what the situation seemed to require. It became, without his quite planning it, the method of his life.
He was born on 14 September 1951 in Haridwar — the second of five brothers, son of Dr. Chandra Prakash, a physician trained at Indore Medical College who had practised in Lahore before Partition. Ten days before Independence, on 5 August 1947, the family crossed to Firozpur. His younger brother was born a day later, wrapped in a bori rather than a hospital blanket. His father had left everything behind in Lahore — money, property, the accumulated substance of a professional life — and arrived in India with nothing but the determination to begin again.
That quality — the willingness to begin again from nothing — was the inheritance Varun received, though he would not have named it as such when he was a boy learning to take his father’s pulse in Class 9. His father was often unwell. Varun became his first patient, in the particular way that children of ill parents become attuned to the body’s signals before they have any formal reason to be. His father died when Varun was seventeen, in May 1969, just as he was preparing for the medical entrance examinations.
He had studied in Hindi medium and passed the UP Board’s twelfth examination with first class — a rare result in Saharanpur district. He applied to GMC Nagpur. The application was rejected: a mismatch between the UP and Maharashtra board mark evaluations made him ineligible by the state’s reckoning. He wrote a letter to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. An acknowledgement came. No remedy followed.
He enrolled in B.Sc. Part I at Dhanwate National College, Nagpur, was promptly promoted to Part II on the grounds that the UP Board’s twelfth standard was equivalent. Nagpur was steeped in English and Marathi; he knew only Hindi. He was navigating a new city, a new language, a new academic culture, in the year his father had died, with the particular loneliness of someone who has arrived somewhere without a map and cannot yet ask for directions in the local tongue.
Then his brother heard about a new medical college in Sevagram that welcomed students from outside Maharashtra.
Sevagram did not offer Varun Bhargava the social texture that it offered students who arrived with friendships already forming, with languages in common, with the communal ease of shared regional backgrounds. He was a loner, and he knew it. He did not sing, dance, act, or join festivals. He found his consolation in textbooks and in the particular self-sufficiency of someone who has learned early that need is not always met by asking.
From his first year, he wanted to be a surgeon. He rose at four in the morning to read Bailey and Love — the canonical surgical textbook — before the rest of the hostel was awake. He topped all three terminal examinations in surgery. Dr. Rajkumar, the Head of Surgery, was a stern man who had trained in the UK and held his department to exacting standards. He noticed.
One morning, he invited Varun for breakfast. It was not a summons Varun had been expecting, and he arrived with the nerves of a student uncertain whether he has done something right or wrong.
Dr. Rajkumar was gentle. He said: you are unwell often, and no one yet knows why. Go to Delhi for a full workup. Do not become a surgeon. The stress would be too much. Your heart may not take it.
A single breakfast conversation redirected a career. Varun turned to internal medicine.
What Dr. Rajkumar had observed from across the ward was a truth Varun had been managing quietly since childhood. He had lived with recurrent syncope — episodes of loss of consciousness that arrived without warning and departed without explanation. Palpitations accompanied him through his student years. In his second MBBS, he skipped an evening clinic because he was unwell. His Medicine teacher noticed his absence and remarked, in front of the class: “Should I have sent an ambulance?” After that, Varun stopped mentioning his symptoms to anyone. He managed them privately, as he managed most things.
He was hospitalised before the final examinations, short on attendance. Permission to sit the exam was obtained with difficulty. He took the surgery viva from a hospital bed. When the results came, he was told he had topped the university — and then told, a moment later, that he had been declared second. He accepted the correction without complaint.
During internship, he underwent cardiac catheterisation. The diagnosis came back: two abnormal heart valves. The heart that Dr. Rajkumar had worried about over breakfast was, it turned out, a heart that had been working harder than it should for as long as anyone could remember. It continued working. Varun Bhargava continued working. The valves, like the man, did not stop simply because the conditions were suboptimal.
He completed his MD in Medicine at PGIMER, Chandigarh — one of the finest postgraduate institutions in the country. When the DM entrance examination was announced, his Head of Department advised him not to appear. The timing was not right; the preparation was insufficient; the odds were not favourable.
He let it go. Then, two days before the examination, a friend urged him to try.
He sat the All India DM entrance unprepared, with two days’ notice and no particular expectation. The following morning, a senior professor of Cardiology called him into his office, closed the door, and showed him the answer sheets. He had topped the examination.
When the interview list was published, his name was not on it.
He was never given an explanation. He did not receive one then, and he has not received one since. He filed it in the same place he filed the letter from Indira Gandhi’s office, and the board mark mismatch, and the second-place result after being congratulated for first — the accumulating record of a man to whom institutional processes had repeatedly failed to deliver what they appeared to promise.
He moved forward. This was, by now, his established method.
Money was tight in the years that followed with a constancy that would have defeated someone less accustomed to scarcity. Twice, at two o’clock in the afternoon, he had no hundred rupees in his pocket. He waited until five, when patients came and fees arrived, and then he ate. He recorded this not as complaint but as fact — the arithmetic of those years, precise and unsentimental.
In 1980, he came to Nagpur with seven hundred rupees and started practice. It grew quickly, which surprised no one who had watched him work. After four years, he left — tired of what he described as the grind, seeking something more purposeful — and went to work with Dr. Khalilullah at GB Pant Hospital in Delhi. He returned to Nagpur in 1988, worked at CIIMS for four years, then at Ekvira Hospital. In 1991, he opened Varun Hospital — a simple outpatient setup, his name on the door, the accumulated experience of twenty years of medicine behind the desk.
Then, in 2004, he had an idea that most sensible people would have called impractical.
He telephoned twenty-two friends — none of them doctors. He explained that he wanted to build a hospital. They became investors. He had identified a building near Panchsheel Square in Nagpur — the Radhika Hotel, a structure that had been intended for hospitality rather than medicine and that arrived with its own complications: labourers protesting unpaid wages were blocking the entrance on the day he took possession. He had paid fifty-four lakhs. It took fifteen months to gain access to the building he had already paid for.
He converted it. A 105-bed hospital emerged from what had been a hotel, staffed initially by Kamal Bhutada, Ram Ghodeswar, Rajesh Singhvi, Nita Kochar, and his wife, Alka. Ganga Care Hospital — named for the river at Haridwar, the city where he was born, the city that had given him his first understanding of what it meant to begin with nothing and build steadily toward something. The hospital eventually joined the large Care group based in Hyderabad.
He borrowed money from well-wishers to launch it, and was prepared to sell property to repay them. In the early months, before seeing a patient, he read the relevant textbook pages to ensure his prescriptions were current. People laughed. He had no regrets.
Late in his career, Varun Bhargava built something that had nothing directly to do with medicine and everything to do with what Sevagram had given him.
He called it PEACE — the Programme of Ethics and Continued Education. He and a group of friends, including Randhir Jhaveri, Mamta Joshi, Vipul Seta, and Lalita Agrawal, took ethics education into sixty schools in Nagpur. Debates, dramas, songs, posters — the tools of the classroom and the assembly hall, deployed in the service of the same values that L.R. Pandit had enforced at morning prayers in Sevagram half a century earlier. The idea was not that schools lacked ethics instruction. The idea was that ethical habits, like all habits, require practice — repeated, visible, embedded in daily life rather than delivered as a lecture and then set aside.
Dr. Sushila Nayar had understood this about medicine. Varun Bhargava understood it about education. The understanding came from the same place.
His wife Alka has said, with the affectionate precision of someone who has observed a person closely for decades, that his middle name should be Trouble. Varun Trouble Bhargava. He laughs when she says it. The laughter of a man who knows exactly what she means and does not entirely disagree.
He came to Sevagram in 1969 with a borrowed fee register and a first entry drawn in columns by his brother’s hand. He left, five years later, with a medical degree and the particular resilience of someone who has been formed by an institution that asked nothing of him that it did not ask of itself — that woke before dawn, swept its own courtyards, lived within its means, and kept going.
The Ganga runs through Haridwar as it always has. The hospital named for it stands near Panchsheel Square in Nagpur, built from a hotel by a man with seven hundred rupees and twenty-two friends and the unshakeable habit, formed over a lifetime of impossible arithmetic, of showing up anyway.
Dr. Varun Bhargava completed his MD in Medicine from PGIMER, Chandigarh. He founded Varun Hospital in Nagpur in 1991 and, in 2006, established Ganga Care Hospital — a 105-bed facility that later joined the Care group based in Hyderabad. He also founded PEACE (Programme of Ethics and Continued Education), bringing ethics education to sixty schools in Nagpur. He practised cardiology in Nagpur for several decades despite living with two abnormal heart valves diagnosed during his internship. He lives in Nagpur with his wife, Dr. Alka Bhargava, a practising gynaecologist.