The stitches still itched.
He had bought the cloth only the previous day from the Khadi Bhandar in Wardha, had it stitched overnight, and arrived at the interview room wearing it with the self-consciousness of someone dressed in a costume he has not yet earned. The interview panel sat before him — Dr. Sushila Nayar, Mrs. Pratibha Patil, others — and he answered their questions as best he could. Then he turned to leave.
Behind him, he heard Mrs. Patil’s voice, low but not quite private: “This boy has never worn khadi before. He only stitched it to impress us.”
There was a pause. Then Dr. Sushila Nayar’s voice, clear and unhurried: “So what? At least he is telling the truth. Gandhiji always valued truth above appearance. Let us appreciate that.”
He had not, in fact, said anything about the khadi at all. He had simply worn it and said nothing. But Dr. Nayar had seen something in him that she chose to call truth — the truth of a boy who had done what he could to prepare, who had not pretended to a conviction he did not yet have, and who had at least been honest about his ordinariness.
That reading of him — generous, precise, entirely characteristic of the woman who had built this institution — followed Rajendra Prasad into Sevagram and stayed with him for fifty years.
From Naada to Sevagram
He was born on 26 March 1951 in Naada, a small village in Gaya district of Bihar — the eldest of four brothers, son of Binda Singh, a station master in Eastern Railway who moved from one small railway station to another with the patient regularity of a man who has made peace with impermanence. His early schooling was in the village, in Hindi medium. Later came Bihar National College in Patna — popularly known as B.J. College — for his pre-university and B.Sc. Part I. It was his first encounter with English as the medium of instruction. He struggled, and he endured.
There were no doctors in his family. But he had watched doctors move through his village with the particular authority of people who are needed in a way that most professions are not — respected, admired, trusted with things that could not be entrusted to anyone else. Somewhere in his young mind, without quite knowing when the decision was made, he decided he would become one.
He could not get into Patna Medical College, the only one in Patna. His uncle in Maharashtra — reading a newspaper one afternoon — found an advertisement for a new medical college opening in Sevagram, in Gandhiji’s village, and wrote to his father: Rajendra must apply.
And so, one summer day in 1969, his father and he set off from Bihar for Sevagram, staying at Annapoorna Hotel near Wardha station — two rupees a night, the particular economy of people for whom the journey itself is already a significant expenditure. He bought more khadi at the Khadi Bhandar. He had it stitched. He walked into the interview room. He walked out with his admission, and with Dr. Sushila Nayar’s reading of his character lodged somewhere he could not quite locate but could not forget.
The Long Journey and the Simple List
The first admission telegram had specified, with the precise practicality of an institution still organising itself, exactly what he must bring: khadi clothes, bedsheets, bucket, mug, plate, bowl, spoon, tumbler, and a hold-all. The admission fee for six months was five hundred and sixty-five rupees — a significant sum for a station master’s family in Bihar.
The journey from Bihar to Sevagram was an odyssey of connections: train from Patna to Gaya, another to Itarsi, another to Nagpur, and finally the Nagpur-Bhusawal passenger that deposited him at Wardha. Each change was a small logistical exercise in a country where trains ran on their own sense of time and the traveller’s business was to remain patient and resourceful.
When the hostels were not yet ready, he stayed with Varun Bhargava, a Nagpur boy. Only two years later, when a block of the Jawaharlal Nehru Bagh hostel was completed, did he get a single-seater room — his first private space, received with the quiet gratitude of someone who has not taken private space for granted.
The batch, he observed, was a colourful mixture: Gujarati boys like Gadhesaria, Haryanvis like Arun Aggarwal, Mumbaikars like Balkrishna Maheshwari. Some mischievous, some serious. He belonged, by his own description, to the cool and complacent type — a self-assessment that was, in the context of what followed, something of an understatement.
A Theft, a Confession, and a Lesson in Magnanimity
One incident from those years has stayed with him with the particular sharpness of moments that reveal, unexpectedly, something permanent about the place you are in.
A Gujarati friend suggested they go to Wardha together one afternoon. At the last moment, the friend told him to wait and went back to the hostel alone. What Rajendra did not know was that the friend had made a duplicate key of his hostel room. He went in, took the cash Rajendra had saved, and returned. That night, unable to bear the weight of his act, he confessed.
Rajendra was torn between exposure and protection. The next morning, on his walk, he encountered Dr. Sushila Nayar and Principal I.D. Singh. Dr. Singh stopped him. “Rajendra,” he said, “don’t lie to protect anyone. We know someone has stolen money. Be truthful.”
What followed was an open confession by the boy, before the assembled class — not extracted by punishment but offered, it seemed, because the climate of the institution was one in which honesty had been established as the only viable option.
Dr. Nayar did not punish him.
“This is Gandhiji’s college,” she said. “We believe in reform, not retribution.”
Rajendra understood that day what the word magnanimity meant in practice — not as an abstraction but as a specific act performed by a specific woman in a specific room, and what it cost her not to use the authority she had.
Studies, Literature, and the Examinations
Many of his batchmates were detained in the first MBBS because of the diversions that Sevagram’s social life provided in abundance. Rajendra kept his head down, studied with the focused application of someone who has not come from Bihar to fail, and cleared all examinations on the first attempt.
But textbooks were not his only world. He loved Hindi literature with the seriousness of someone for whom reading is not recreation but necessity. He read voraciously and wrote too — in 1969 and 1970, some of his articles appeared in Sudha, a Hindi literary magazine. A friend, Agarwal, was a brilliant poet; together they nourished what he called the literary flavour of their batch, the understanding that a medical education conducted without attention to language and meaning was a narrower thing than it needed to be.
Hostel evenings often ran late with debates, recitations, and arguments about politics, literature, and cricket. The teachers were a breed apart. Dr. Sushila Nayar’s warm presence, her deep commitment to Gandhiji’s ideals, left the impression that institutions could actually embody their founding principles rather than merely citing them. Principal I.D. Singh — brisk, probing, his questions arriving before you had finished formulating your answer — commanded both respect and the particular affection that forms around people who take you more seriously than you expected.
He got married in the middle of his internship. Professor Dhawan, the Head of Ophthalmology, granted him leave with the generosity of a man who understood that a doctor’s life was not only medicine. He returned. He finished.
Bihar, and the Long Service
After his MBBS in 1974, he joined Bihar government service. His first posting was as a medical officer in a primary health centre in Gopalganj — the real work, the unglamorous work, the work that the institution had always said was the point. He joined the smallpox eradication programme, travelling from village to village with vials and needles, part of the same historic campaign that Hardial Singh was conducting in other Bihar districts at approximately the same time.
He pursued his MD in Paediatrics at Darbhanga Medical College. Clinical work, teaching, and administration followed in the long, layered way of government medical careers in Bihar — posting following posting, each requiring a fresh adaptation, a new set of colleagues, a new patient population. He served as Deputy Superintendent of a district hospital, and eventually as Principal of a medical college.
Throughout, and uniquely among his Maharashtra colleagues, Bihar allowed private practice alongside government service. After duty hours, he saw patients privately — not as a contradiction but as a continuation, the same work in a different register, the same understanding that the person before you with an illness is the complete and sufficient reason you became a doctor.
Fifty years have passed since he walked out of the interview room with Dr. Nayar’s voice in his ears. He has thought often about what she said: Gandhiji always valued truth above appearance. He has tried, he has said, to live accordingly. The khadi that did not quite fit, the stitches that itched against his skin — these were, in their way, the most honest thing he brought into that room. She had seen it. And she had been right.
Dr. Rajendra Prasad completed his MD in Paediatrics from Darbhanga Medical College, Bihar. He served in Bihar government medical service for several decades, including postings in primary health centres, district hospitals, and medical colleges, rising to the position of Principal. He participated in the smallpox eradication programme in Bihar. He lives in Bihar.