The letter was brief and the handwriting was deliberate, the kind that carries the weight of a man accustomed to being taken seriously. Rafiq Zakaria, Minister for Urban Development in the Maharashtra cabinet, had written it personally: I know Rajendra Agrawal’s father well. They come from a reputed family. If he could be accommodated, I’d be grateful. It was 1969, Rohit Agrawal was seventeen years old, and the piece of paper tucked into his shirt pocket was about to change everything.

A Household of Verses

He had been born on Christmas Eve, 1951, in Aurangabad — a city of tombs and gardens, where Mughal grandeur meets the flat horizons of the Deccan. His father, Chandmal Chandr Agrawal, was not a civil servant or a physician but a poet — and not merely an amateur one. He moved in the company of Hindi literary giants: Balkavi Bairagi, Santosh Anand, Pradeep Chaubey. At home, verses circulated as freely as conversation. Rohit grew up in the particular atmosphere of a household where language was attended to, where a well-turned line mattered, where the difference between the exact word and the approximate one was a genuine concern. He absorbed all of this without quite knowing he was absorbing it, in the way children absorb what surrounds them before they have words for what they are learning.

He studied from Class 1 to 10 at Saraswati Mahavidyalaya in Aurangabad, then moved to Government College for the science stream. He was a good student, though not an exceptional one — good enough, he had assumed, for Government Medical College, Aurangabad. When the results came, he had missed the cutoff by a single mark. One mark. The waitlist inched forward slowly, and the politic thing would have been to wait it out. Seventeen-year-olds are not, as a rule, patient. He was not. Then his father heard something: a new medical college was opening in Sevagram, founded on Gandhian principles, with admission by interview rather than rank alone. No entrance exam. Just marks and a conversation with the selection committee. And, in this particular case, a letter from a minister.

The Efficient Interview

The principal’s office at MGIMS was modest — a room that smelled of fresh whitewash and purpose. Dr. Jivraj Mehta was there, a man whose name was already associated with the highest levels of Indian public life. There were others on the committee. Rohit walked in, the letter in his pocket, and the proceedings were brief. She read the letter. A look passed between the principal and Dr. Mehta. That was all. He was in.

Later, he would joke about it — admitted without a single question asked, no interrogation about Gandhi’s relevance or his commitment to rural service, no test of his ideals. He had simply carried a letter into a room and walked out a medical student. It was the most efficient interview of his life.

What met him in Sevagram was a world he had not prepared for. The campus was spare, the village smaller than he had imagined, and the distance from Aurangabad was not merely geographical. He had grown up in a city of considerable history and social texture. Sevagram was quieter, more elemental, built on a different set of assumptions about what mattered and what didn’t. The first nights were hard. Homesickness settled in like humidity — pervasive, difficult to locate precisely, impossible to simply decide against.

His local guardian was Shri Narayandas Jajoo, an old acquaintance of his father’s, which helped. But the real lifeline was his sister’s family in Nagpur. She had married Ratan Lal Agrawal, owner of Vidarbha Paper Mills, and the couple — childless, warm, and generous — treated Rohit as their own. Every other weekend, he would take the bus to Nagpur, eat until he was satisfied, sleep in a proper bed, return with his spirits restored. The city was close enough to be a refuge, far enough that returning to Sevagram always felt like re-entering something — a discipline, a commitment, a particular way of being that the village imposed on everyone within its borders.

Roommates and Resilience

He was allotted a room in the boys’ hostel — a modest triple-seater, as were all of them. His roommates were Laxmikant Anantwar and Vijaykumar Misuriya. Later, Ashok Hingwasia joined them. The khadi uniform, at first, was an annoyance — rough against the skin, designed for principle rather than comfort. He wore it because he had to. Within a few months, he wore it because everyone did, and then because it had become simply what you wore. Peer pressure, in Sevagram, had a way of aligning with something deeper and calling itself conviction.

The friendships came faster than the conviction. By the second year, a group of six had cohered — boys from different corners of the country, different languages, different habits — and the bond was of the kind that only forms when people are young and in a place together that requires them to rely on one another. They played, argued, laughed to the point of tears. By the third year, none of them wanted to go home during vacations. Sevagram had become, without anyone announcing it, the place they belonged.

Sports gave the days their rhythm. Rohit opened for the college cricket team, arriving at the crease each match with an opener’s particular combination of responsibility and licence. He and Jolly Mathew played table tennis until midnight, sometimes until the hours when the campus had gone completely quiet and the only sounds were the table, the ball, and the two of them. When the institute could not afford sports equipment — and this happened, in those early years — Subhash Srivastava’s father stepped in and gifted the college bats, balls, gloves, and pads. The gesture was noted. In Sevagram, generosity of that kind was not taken for granted.

The Poet’s Son on Stage

Rohit was his father’s son in ways he did not always recognise. The literary instinct, the feel for language, the ease in the company of poets, the pleasure of standing before an audience — none of these disappeared because he was studying Anatomy and Physiology. They remained in the background, waiting for their moment.

He had grown up in a house where poetry was not an ornament but part of daily life. His father was a poet himself and knew Bal Kavi Bairagi personally. Through that friendship, some of the best-known names in Hindi poetry and film lyrics drifted in and out of their world. As a boy, Rohit heard their verses long before he saw them in person.

By 1972, he was in final MBBS at MGIMS. Sevagram was still a small medical college in a village, far removed from the literary circuits of Delhi, Bombay, or Bhopal. Cultural programmes were modest affairs. Big names did not come to places like Sevagram. But Rohit’s father managed what few others could. Through his literary connections, he brought both Pradeep Chaube and Santosh Anand to MGIMS.

It was Santosh Anand’s visit that caused the bigger stir. He had just written the songs of the film Shor, and his lyrics were everywhere — on radio stations, in tea stalls, in college hostels, in buses carrying students home for the holidays. When word spread that he was coming to Sevagram, the campus buzzed for days.

Rohit organised and anchored the programme “Nagma-e-Nisha.” The auditorium filled long before the event began. Santosh Anand sat in the front row while his songs, words, and presence held the audience spellbound. In a village where little out of the ordinary happened, this felt extraordinary.

For weeks afterwards, people spoke about the evening and about Rohit. In that brief season, he was no longer just another final-year student. He was the boy who had brought Santosh Anand to Sevagram.

The moment mattered not because it fed his ego, but because it revealed something Sevagram had quietly been building in him all along: a confidence that did not need family name or pedigree to justify itself, and a willingness to stand up and be seen that had nothing to do with marks, ranks, or merit lists.

Rigour and Reach

He completed his MBBS and pursued his MD in Paediatrics at GS Medical College and KEM Hospital in Mumbai — one of the best training grounds in the country for the specialty. KEM in those years was formidable: enormous wards, complex cases, a pace that did not slow for sentiment. It sharpened him in ways Sevagram had not needed to. Sevagram had given him values and friendships and a way of being a doctor. KEM gave him the clinical rigour to match.

The decades that followed were spent in clinical practice and, increasingly, in the larger life of the profession. He became involved with the Indian Academy of Paediatrics, contributing to the shaping of national vaccination policy, speaking at medical forums across India and abroad, working on teaching texts that would reach doctors he would never meet. A practitioner’s work is, in one sense, confined to the patients before him; in another sense it extends, through teaching and policy and the slow accumulation of evidence, far beyond any single consultation room.

He remained active in practice well into his later years. And he remained, with a consistency that his friends found unsurprising, a person in whom the cultural ease of his father’s household was entirely intact — the man who had sung before Santosh Anand still visible inside the senior paediatrician.

When he closes his eyes and reaches for Sevagram now, what comes back is not the curriculum or the examinations. It is the crack of a cricket bat on a Sunday morning on a campus still cool from the night. It is Jolly Mathew across a table tennis table at midnight, the ball crossing between them in the lamplight. It is Pradeep Chaubey’s voice filling an auditorium in a village that most of literary India had never heard of. It is the hostel corridor, six friends who could not be separated, laughing at something whose specifics have long since blurred but whose warmth has not.

Some memories don’t fade, he has said. They grow deeper, like roots. And Sevagram was where mine took hold.

The poet’s son became a doctor. The doctor remained, in some essential way, the poet’s son. Sevagram had room for both.

Dr. Rohit Agrawal completed his MD in Paediatrics from GS Medical College and KEM Hospital, Mumbai. He built a sustained clinical practice in the city while remaining closely engaged with the Indian Academy of Paediatrics, contributing to vaccination policy, postgraduate education, and paediatric teaching materials. He has spoken at medical conferences across India and internationally. He continues to practise in Mumbai.