There is a particular irony in being born in the hospital where you will one day train as a doctor. Shyam Babhulkar entered the world on 17 August 1949 at Sevagram Hospital — the same compound, the same red earth, the same neem-shaded lanes he would walk two decades later in a white apron and a khadi kurta. Whether this amounted to destiny or mere coincidence, he could never quite decide. Perhaps in Sevagram, the two were not so different.
His father, Keshaorao Babhulkar, worked in the Gandhian institutions of Wardha — the Khadi Bhandar, the Swarajya Bhandar, the Oil Ghirani at Kakawadi. He did not preach values; he lived them, which is a different and harder thing. His mother, Pramilatai, taught in government schools scattered across the district, her sari always carrying the faint smell of chalk dust and warm afternoon air. And there was his uncle, Shankarrao Babhulkar — fiery, resolute, a man who had spent five years in jail during the freedom struggle.
As a child, Shyam had not fully understood what those years in jail had meant. He came to understand it slowly, as you understand most important things: not all at once, but by degrees. That was his world — frugal, principled, and rooted in the particular dignity of those who have chosen simplicity not because they cannot afford otherwise, but because they believe in it.
The Discipline of the Rifle
He studied at Buniyadi Vidyalaya, then New English High School, then Craddock High School in Wardha. Among his classmates were Abhay Bang and Ulhas Jajoo — names that would later carry weight in Indian public health. He was athletic from early on, and one of his accomplishments was unusual: he had topped an All-India rifle shooting competition and earned a university colour. Precision, stillness, the held breath before the trigger — these were disciplines that had nothing to do with violence and everything to do with concentration. He would discover, later, that they had a great deal to do with surgery as well.
At J.B. Science College in Wardha, he made an impulsive switch from Mathematics to Biology. It may have been fate, or it may simply have been the way things happen when you are nineteen and standing at a fork in the road without a map. He spent two years there — pre-university and B.Sc. Part I — and applied for GMC Nagpur. He missed the seat by a single mark.
One mark. Had it fallen the other way, he would have sat beside Abhay Bang and Ulhas Jajoo once more in Nagpur, and the story would have been a different one entirely. It was a sultry afternoon when he saw the advertisement in Tarun Bharat. A new medical college, it said, was beginning at Sevagram. Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. He read it, set the paper down, picked it up again, then got on his bicycle and pedalled the dusty road to Sevagram to buy the prospectus. The application form cost forty rupees — money saved from small tutoring and errands.
The Interview and the Irony
The interview call came a few weeks later. That morning, he wore an ironed khadi kurta, still faintly scented with starch. He carried a folder of press clippings and certificates — rifle shooting, football, cricket, basketball — each neatly arranged. The panel that received him was formidable: Dr. Sushila Nayar, Dr. Jivraj Mehta, Dr. Narayandas Jajoo, Dr. Santoshrao Gode, Dr. Manimala Chaudhary. His palms, he admitted later, were sweating.
“Tell us about rifles,” someone said.
He blinked. Rifles. At a Gandhian institution committed to non-violence, the first question concerned a firearm. He took a breath and spoke — about precision, about breath control, about patience, about the inner stillness required to hit a target. He did not try to explain away the irony. He let it stand. He thought they saw both the irony and the discipline beneath it.
Mr. Gode and Mr. Jajoo knew his father, knew the family — the man who walked to the Khadi Bhandar each day in the same worn chappals, who never asked for more than his share. They may also have remembered his uncle: the man who had spent five years in a jail cell alongside history. What they saw in Shyam Babhulkar that morning was, perhaps, a continuation of something they already knew and trusted. He was admitted to the inaugural batch.
The Inaugural Days
The first day brought its own gift. Outside the interview hall, he saw another boy — arriving on the rear seat of his father’s bicycle, collar buttoned to the top, a shy but self-possessed smile. His name was Shivaji Deshmukh. They started talking, and within minutes a friendship began that would last, without interruption, for the rest of their lives.
There was no hostel ready that first year, no orientation camp, no elaborate ceremony. Students were told to bring their own plates, spoons, and bowls from home. Each meal was eaten cross-legged on the floor of the dining hall, thalis carried from room to dining table and back, washed under a shared tap. They slept on their own mats. They sang bhajans in the ashram at dawn. They performed shramdan — manual labour — every day.
There was no khadi shop in Sevagram, so students rode bicycles to Wardha to buy the mandatory khadi. Shyam’s father worked at the Wardha Khadi Bhandar, and soon every student in the batch knew him by name. “Uncle,” someone would murmur, short of funds, “we’ll pay next month.” And Keshaorao Babhulkar would nod, smile, and say: no hurry, beta. Trust was the currency then. Simplicity was not imposed at Sevagram so much as it was woven into the texture of daily life, until you could no longer feel the thread.
The Dust of Mundhari
He was an athlete in Sevagram as he had been before it. He threw the javelin and the discus, cleared the high bar, stretched for the long jump, and — in one of Sevagram’s more characteristically eccentric competitions — mastered the art of slow cycling. He won gold medals in each.
In his third year came the Mundhari camp — a medical outreach posted at a village twenty miles from Bhandara. Dr. Karunakar Trivedi, who headed Surgery, summoned four students one morning: “You boys will come with us. There is a camp. Be ready.” Shyam went with Vilas Kanikdale, Yadunath Telkikar, and Rajendra Deodhar. They piled into a jeep — with Dr. A.D. Ranade, Dr. K.K. Trivedi, Dr. S.P. Shirolkar, Dr. S.P. Nigam, and Chinamma the staff nurse, whom everyone called Mausi — and rattled down unmade roads in a cloud of dust.
When they arrived, the village square had been transformed into a makeshift hospital. Straw mats were laid, villagers waited in patient rows. The first operation began under a kerosene lamp. The four students stood wide-eyed, their rubber gloves too large for their hands, learning to be still when they wanted to tremble. When the day ended, Shyam understood something that no lecture hall had yet taught him: that medicine, taken out of the hospital and placed in a dusty village courtyard, changed in nature. It became more urgent, more intimate, and somehow more itself.
The Spotlight and the Magazine
Theatre came to him through Professor K.N. Ingle, the Physiology teacher, who believed that students who could not perform could not truly teach. Between 1971 and 1975, Shyam was a constant presence on the Sevagram stage. He played the lead in Doctor Salamat to Rogi Pachas, written by Prof. Madhukar Keche, which won first prize at an Inter-Rotary competition in Wardha. He was given the Best Actor award. Later came Awkashachi Pokali Ani Khamb by Vijay Tendulkar, and Teen Chauk Tera. Each play left its residue — the voices, the missed cues recovered, the applause from a hall that smelled of dust and kerosene.
He also edited the Marathi section of Sushruta, the college magazine. M.L. Panara edited the English section, M. Govinda Pillai the English columns, Shivani Bharagava the Hindi section. They got it printed at Babanrao Kahate’s press in Ramnagar, Wardha. It was a small thing, perhaps, but it was theirs — proof that the batch of 1969 had something to say and knew how to say it.
A Life of Precision
The final MBBS exams came and went. Balkrishna Maheshwari topped the university. Gopal Gadhesaria came second. Madhavan Pillai took a gold medal in Medicine. The skeptics in Nagpur who had dismissed the village college were, for a time, quiet.
After MBBS, Shyam Babhulkar pursued his MS in Surgery, then devoted the decades that followed to neurosurgery — a field that requires the same patience and precision he had first learned on a rifle range in Wardha. He built a career of sustained clinical achievement, earning recognition both within Maharashtra and in national surgical circles. He remained, throughout, the kind of doctor his parents had embodied without ever having held a stethoscope: someone for whom service was not a philosophy to be argued but a habit too deep to examine.
He eventually returned to Vidarbha, building a distinguished practice in Nagpur that spanned several decades. Throughout his career, he remained a pillar of the professional medical community, contributing extensively to postgraduate training and the leadership of various surgical bodies. Yet, for all his professional acclaim in the city, his “Sevagram cord” remained remarkably intact.
His connection to his alma mater is not merely one of memory, but of active, weekly service. As a member of the Kasturba Health Society and a visiting neurosurgeon to MGIMS, he travels back to the campus every Thursday. To the students and residents, he is a senior consultant; but to the red earth of the campus, he is simply a son of the soil coming home.
This legacy of service has now moved into the next generation. His daughter, Snehal, followed his footsteps to the same campus, joining the MGIMS class of 2003. When he thinks of Sevagram now, he thinks of more than just his own youth; he thinks of a shared family history rooted in the same wards and the same values.
He continues to live and practice in Nagpur, but a part of him—the part that understands medicine as a vocation of the heart—stays permanently in Sevagram.
When he thinks of Sevagram now, he thinks of his father standing behind a counter at the Khadi Bhandar, nodding at a student who could not yet pay. He thinks of Mausi in a village square at dusk, scolding four young men into competence. He thinks of a bicycle ride on a sultry afternoon, a newspaper advertisement, forty rupees carefully saved, and the strange logic by which a missed mark at GMC Nagpur became a life in Sevagram. He was born here. Perhaps, in some sense, he never left.
Dr. Shyam Babhulkar completed his MS in General Surgery and his MCh in Neurosurgery from GS Medical College and KEM Hospital, Mumbai. A distinguished neurosurgeon based in Nagpur, he serves as a member of the Kasturba Health Society and continues to serve MGIMS as a visiting professor every week. His daughter, Snehal, is also an alumna of MGIMS (Batch of 2003).