The hour was late, the village asleep, and six hungry medical students were standing in the dark outside Babulal’s canteen, banging on a door that would not open. They had walked back from Wardha after a film, and the mess had long since shut. Sevagram in the early 1970s offered few consolations after nine o’clock. It was Dr. Indurkar who found them there — the Anatomy professor, out for a night walk, his eyes sharp in the dim corridor light.
He took in the scene: the sheepish faces, the empty stomachs, the hour. “Come,” he said, and turned back toward his house. Ten minutes later, they were sitting cross-legged on his floor while his wife, without a word of complaint, set a pan on the stove. The chapatis arrived hot, the bhaji steaming, and the six students ate with the particular gratitude of the young and famished. No one spoke much. There was nothing to say. The kindness was self-evident. Shivaji Deshmukh would remember that evening for fifty years. Not because it was unusual — it was not, at Sevagram — but because it was so completely usual. The boundary between teacher and student, between a professor’s home and a student’s hunger, was simply not there. That porousness, that human ease, was what Sevagram was.
A Suitcase of Transfers
He was born on 30 May 1949 in Pandharakwada, a village of dusty roads and unhurried mornings in Yavatmal district. His father had entered government service under the British as a Nayab Tehsildar and risen slowly through the ranks — collector of Amravati, Yavatmal, Nagpur, Akola, in turn. Childhood, for Shivaji, was a suitcase of transfers. Pusad for Class 4, Dharampur High School for three years, Manibai Gujarati High School in Amravati, then Yavatmal for Class 10 and 11. Each posting brought a new school, new classmates, new dialects. It was not a stable childhood, but it was a wide one.
By 1968, the family had moved to Akola, and Shivaji joined Government College for his Pre-University year. He was, by his own admission, a mediocre student. The cut-off for medical college that year was 62 percent. He had 50. The dream of medicine, which had settled quietly in him without his quite knowing when, seemed already foreclosed.
Then, in the summer of 1969, his father heard something. A new medical college was being established in Sevagram — Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences — under Dr. Sushila Nayar. It would be unlike any other. Selection, for the first batch, was by interview rather than rank alone. His mother did not hesitate. She thought of a man named Vasantrao Naik. Years earlier, when Naik — then a young law graduate, not yet in politics — had married a woman from a different community, he had been ostracized by his own. Shivaji’s parents had stood by the couple, offered their home, their loyalty, their quiet support. Naik had not forgotten. By 1969, he was Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Shivaji’s mother picked up the telephone. “Shivaji is appearing for an interview,” she said. “Don’t worry,” Naik replied. “I will call Dr. Sushila Nayar.” The Chief Minister’s office held a quota of five seats. Shivaji was among those five.
The Interview and the Bicycle
On 8 August 1969, he took a train to Sevagram with Gandhi’s life and teachings freshly read, braced for searching questions. The interview, when it came, was almost comically brief. What is your name? Where are you from? Why do you want to become a doctor? He answered honestly and politely, said yes to everything he was asked, and walked out into the afternoon sun. His father had raised him never to lie. He had brought that principle into the room and nothing else.
Outside the interview hall, he noticed a boy arriving on the rear seat of his father’s bicycle — collar buttoned to the top, a shy but self-possessed smile, the air of someone who had thought carefully about this day. His name was Shyam Babhulkar. They started talking. Within minutes, a friendship had begun that would last a lifetime. Most of those who entered Sevagram that August came from small towns, from families shaped by the freedom movement, from rural struggles they recognised in the dust of Gandhi’s village. The temporary hostel with its leaking roof and shared taps did not disturb them. They had not come expecting comfort. They had come, most of them only half-understanding it at the time, because somewhere in the idea of medicine practised in a village, in the spirit of Gandhian service, something in them had answered yes.
Khadi, Cricket, and Shared Conviction
Every Friday, the students walked to Gandhi Ashram for all-religion prayers. They spun the charkha. They swept the campus. Khadi was not optional. The shramdan — manual labour as daily discipline — was not imposed so much as absorbed, the way habits take hold when everyone around you shares them. Sevagram asked nothing of its students that it did not ask of itself. The teachers were a particular gift. Dr. Indurkar and Dr. Kane in Anatomy, Dr. K.N. Ingley in Physiology, Dr. Sharma and Dr. Khapre in Pharmacology, Dr. R.V. Agrawal in Pathology — many had been posted from GMC Nagpur and had faced derision for choosing a village college. They did not waver. They taught with a conviction that had something personal in it, as if proving something, and their students absorbed that energy without quite knowing they were doing so.
Principal I.D. Singh loved sport as much as he loved Physiology. During inter-college cricket matches, he stood at the boundary and called out advice — bowl the outswinger, trap him at first slip — and more often than not, it worked. He was telling his students something beyond cricket, though none of them could have said precisely what. Academically, Shivaji was still average. His Surgery practical, in the final year, loomed over him. Dr. Ravinder Narang was to examine him. Before the viva began, Narang walked over to the external examiner. “He’s our institute’s top sportsman,” he said. When Shivaji was called, the examiner held up a bone. Name it. He answered. Very good. You may go. That was the entirety of his Surgery practical. He understood that Sevagram’s idea of a doctor was larger than the sum of his examination scores.
The Stone Near the Hill
There was a large stone near the hill where the guest house now stands. In the evenings, the neem trees caught the last light, and the air carried the particular stillness of Vidarbha at dusk. It was here that Shivaji and Shalini Kohade began to meet. She had come from Raipur, the daughter of a small farmer and freedom fighter who had gone to jail during the Quit India Movement. Dr. Sushila Nayar had known her father, respected him, and Shalini had found her way to Sevagram partly through that connection. She and Shivaji were classmates, batch of 1969. Their friendship deepened slowly, in the way things deepened in Sevagram — without hurry, in the gaps between lectures and practicals, on walks to Wardha and evenings in the common room.
The stone near the hill became so well known among the junior batches that they joked about it: couples who sit there end up married. For Shivaji and Shalini, the joke was simply true. Nobody in Sevagram called him Shivaji. He was Bhau — the name that came from somewhere in those early days and never left. Even now, after five decades, it feels more like him than his given name. Some names are given at birth. Others are given by the places and people that make you who you are.
Instincts Carried Forward
After MBBS, he moved to Mumbai. New rules under Pratibha Patil, then Health Minister, reserved MD seats for doctors who had served in rural areas. He completed his MD in Medicine at KEM Hospital. Later, he joined IIT Powai — then a sleepy village, not yet the institution it would become — as its medical officer. Patients paid what they could: twenty rupees, sometimes nothing. He did not ask for more. The ethics absorbed in Sevagram — service before self, medicine as vocation — were not principles he had to remind himself of. They had become instinct.
In those early years, he sometimes thought of a classmate named Raju Choudhary, who had missed the 1969 batch by a single act of ordinary human weakness: he had spent the forty rupees meant for the MGIMS application form on a new pair of shoes, and had to wait a year. The story stayed with Shivaji not as a cautionary tale but as a reminder of how thin the line was between one life and another, how much of what we call destiny is simply timing, small decisions, and which way the wind blew on a particular afternoon.
More than fifty-five years have passed since Shivaji Deshmukh stepped off a train at Sevagram and walked into an interview room with nothing but his father’s honesty in his pocket. The batch of 1969 has scattered across continents, grown old in the work they chose, lost classmates and teachers to time. But the friendships formed in those years — forged in shared prayers and shared hunger, in the dust of the campus and the warmth of a professor’s kitchen — have not loosened.
When he thinks of Sevagram now, he does not reach first for the wards or the lecture halls or the examination results. He reaches for the stone near the hill. The neem trees in evening light. The sound of a principal’s voice on the boundary rope, calling out about an outswinger. Six students sitting cross-legged on a kitchen floor at ten o’clock at night, eating chapatis made by a woman who had not been asked and had not hesitated. Medicine, he learned in that village, is not only what you do in the clinic. It is how you live — how much you are willing to give, and to whom, and at what hour, and without being asked. Sevagram taught him that early. It never left him.
Dr. Shivaji Deshmukh completed his MD in Internal Medicine from KEM Hospital, Mumbai. He served for many years as a physician at IIT Powai, where he built a practice rooted in the values of accessibility and service he had first encountered at MGIMS. He lives in Mumbai. He is still called Bhau.