The Mass Bunk

It was Shankar Raman who said it first, with the particular sparkle of mischief that his batchmates had learned to recognise as the beginning of something inadvisable.

“Arrey yaar, let’s all vanish for a few days. Mass bunk. We’ll go home.”

The idea spread through the hostel with the speed of ideas that are terrible in obvious ways and irresistible in the ways that matter to teenagers. That night, they smuggled their luggage out in twos and threes to Wardha railway station. By morning they strolled back to college with empty hands, pretending nothing was planned. At noon they slipped away and boarded trains to their respective homes.

The girls had a different arrangement. They came to the exam. They sat in their seats. They had simply not brought pens or pencils.

Four days later, telegrams arrived at parents’ homes across India: Your child has broken discipline. He will be rusticated if he does not return immediately. Families panicked. The students were packed off to Sevagram at once.

They returned sheepishly, only to discover that the punishment would involve a week of shramdaan at Karanji Bhoge village, three kilometres from Sevagram, diverting the course of a drain with pickaxes and shovels under the blazing Vidarbha sun. What was designed as punishment turned into the peculiar joy of hard labour in good company. They laughed, sang, teased each other in the mud and water. The sunburn faded. The memory did not.

Sheelmohan Sachdev lay in bed that evening, amused and slightly muddy, and thought: so this was how medical college taught discipline. Not through threat alone, but by making the punishment something you would later remember with affection.

From Kaithal to Ahmednagar to Sevagram

He was born in Kaithal, Haryana, in March 1951 — the eldest among six siblings. His father dealt in chemicals, a small business that kept them adequately afloat without excess. Childhood in Kaithal was simple: dusty playgrounds, school under ceiling fans that groaned more than they spun, evenings filled with the smell of burning dung cakes in mud stoves.

In 1966, his father shifted to Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. Sheelmohan moved with him, finished his pre-degree and B.Sc. Part I there, and dreamt of studying medicine. His first attempt at admission in Pune failed. That rejection could have been definitive. Instead, one day in Ahmednagar, a small advertisement in a local newspaper caught his eye: Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram — Admissions Open. He had never heard of the place. On a whim, he applied.

The entrance test was clubbed with AIIMS. He did well enough to be called for interview in Sevagram.

He arrived alone at Wardha station, clutching a steel trunk and his aspirations. He had bought a khadi shirt and trousers from Ahmednagar, a deliberate gesture toward what he understood to be Dr. Sushila Nayar’s preferences. During the interview, her sharp eyes rested on his attire. She smiled — the knowing smile of someone who has read this particular calculation many times and finds it endearing rather than calculating. The panel asked the standard question about why he wanted to be a doctor. He gave the most overused answer in the world — to serve humanity — and meant it. The dream had been declared by his grandmother at his birth: this child will become a doctor. That prophecy had followed him like a shadow until it became, in Sevagram in 1970, simply true.

Having grown up in Ahmednagar, he spoke Marathi reasonably well — a distinction in a batch where most North Indians were starting entirely from scratch with the language. This helped him bond across the regional lines that the campus’s geography of loyalties tended to draw.

The Quieter Gifts

In a campus where loud talent attracted attention — the debaters who filled halls, the cricketers who won intercollegiate matches, the actors who commanded the stage — Sheelmohan found his own register.

He wrote short stories. Two years running, the college magazine carried his work, each time earning first prize in English writing. He photographed: sunlight slanting across Sevagram’s mud paths, the play of shadows under neem trees, the unguarded smile of a friend caught between exams. His photographs won awards, as did the watercolours he brushed onto rough sheets — the stillness of the Ashram, the energy of the hostel courtyard. His solace was Indian classical music, which remains his companion even today.

His batchmates are vivid in his memory. Shankar Raman — brilliant, mischievous, the owner of a powerful Royal Enfield motorcycle, the man who slept eight hours before every exam and outperformed everyone who had burned the midnight oil. Akil Taher from Bombay, who had opened the batting at St. Xavier’s with Sunil Gavaskar, and whose wedding during final MBBS took them all to Bombay — wide-eyed village boys suddenly lost in the city’s glitter. Akil had married first among the batch, and when they teased him — first MBBS, then shaadi — he replied with a grin: first bride, then MBBS.

Wardha was their only escape. Three theatres — Durga, Vasant, Rajkala — were the landmarks. He mostly stayed away from the films. The glamour of cinema never held him. He preferred to walk, to observe, to find the frame of things that others passed without noticing.

He had cleared the ECFMG exam during his MBBS years — an act of preparation whose significance he could not have fully anticipated.

Two Days Before the Deadline

After MBBS and internship, he chose ENT. He took up a job at an ENT hospital in Bombay. Barely two months later, he was shown the door — the position had been earmarked for a politician’s relative.

He was newly married. He had no job, no security. Only his wife’s trust.

He went to the US Embassy. The deadline for doctors to travel to America without stringent new requirements was 9 January 1977. He made it by two days.

That is how he arrived in New York — carrying one suitcase and the memory of a Sevagram campus that had taught him, among other things, to survive misdirection and keep moving.

After a year in New York, he moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where he settled permanently. He completed a three-year residency in family medicine, became board-certified, and later specialised in hospice and palliative care — the discipline of accompanying people through the end of life with dignity and without unnecessary suffering. For nearly seventeen years, he served patients at the end of their lives, helping them die free of pain, surrounded by love rather than machines.

What Remained

From Kaithal to Ahmednagar, from Sevagram to Maryland and Delaware — it is a long way. What remains constant, across all the distance, is the fragrance of those years in Sevagram. The hostel jokes, the morning bhajans, the mass bunk and its aftermath in the mud of Karanji Bhoge village, the nervous interview before Dr. Nayar, the knowing smile at the khadi shirt, the quiet hours spent writing stories and developing photographs while others rehearsed their lines.

Sevagram shaped them. They were not just taught medicine — they were taught how to live simply, serve sincerely, and carry a part of Gandhi wherever they went.

When he learned that Sevagram had started its own palliative care services, his heart swelled. The same campus where they had once dug pits in villages was now offering morphine to the suffering, sparing families from the financial ruin and loneliness of ICU deaths. Next time he visits Sevagram, he has told himself, he must see this with his own eyes.

The bhajans that rose at dawn in the prayer hall all those years ago. The quiet hands of the dying people he accompanied in Philadelphia. Between them, a life.

Dr. Sheelmohan Sachdev completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the second batch of 1970. He completed his residency in family medicine in Wilmington, Delaware, USA, and specialised in hospice and palliative care, serving patients at the end of life for nearly seventeen years. He is a writer, photographer, and watercolourist. Throughout a prolific career spanning 42 years, Dr. Sachdev practiced medicine across Maryland and Delaware. He eventually specialized in Hospice and Palliative Care, a field he has dedicated himself to for nearly seventeen years. Although retired from full-time practice, he remains active in the medical community, currently serving as the Medical Director for a local hospice.

Beyond his clinical contributions, Dr. Sachdev is a versatile artist and storyteller, finding expression through writing, photography, and watercolors. He resides in Newark, Delaware, with his wife, Dr. Madhu Sachdev.