Remembering the Ones Who Came First

In January 2023, after four decades at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, the rhythm of my life changed. I stepped away from the world of hospital administration and returned to the place where I have always felt most like myself: the intensity of a postgraduate seminar room.

I did not retire; I simply went back to being a teacher and a physician. But the transition brought with it something I had almost forgotten how to handle: time.

When the phone stops ringing with crises and the long stream of meetings finally halts, you discover that the day is partly your own. At first, I was restless. But as I walked the corridors of Sevagram, I realized that I was surrounded by a history that was rapidly thinning.

It wasn’t the official history found in shiny annual reports or rehearsed speeches. It was the human kind — the kind that lives in the tremor of an old professor’s voice, in the sharp wit of a retired technician. Or in the stories alumni tell only when you sit beside them and wait for the silence to break.

Each month brought another condolence message, another name quietly slipping out of the hospital directory and into the past. I realized that if someone didn’t write these stories down now, they wouldn’t just be forgotten — they would vanish as if they had never happened.

So I began to ask.

I started with the pioneers — the men and women who built this institution in a Vidarbha village when MGIMS was more of an audacious idea than a brick-and-mortar reality. I sat with the founders. I also sat with the people who watched it all from the edges: the barber, the tea seller, the hospital attendants, and the man at the Indian Coffee House who has been pouring chai since before many of us were born. I even sat with Babulal, who once fed the first batches and now visits my OPD as a patient in his eighties.

Then I turned to the students.

The first ten batches — 1969 to 1980 — were the founding generation. They arrived when there were no paved roads, no cinemas, and no certainty. I spent hours on the phone with them, listening as they remembered the smell of the hostel kitchens, the dust on the Wardha road, the terror of anatomy dissections, and the quiet romances that bloomed under the neem trees.

For the batches from 1974 onwards, the conversations were different. I had taught them, examined them, failed a few, celebrated a few, and watched them grow into the healers they are today. We weren’t just documenting an institution; we were retracing our own lives.

MGIMS shaped me as much as it shaped them. I argued in these rooms and taught in these wards. Like them, I built my life in this village.

This digital archive is not a formal census. It is a personal collection of those I could find, those I knew, and those who were kind enough to be found. It wasn’t commissioned by any committee, nor endorsed by MGIMS. It is simply my attempt to capture the light before the sun sets.

It was slow, absorbing, and — to be honest — one of the most satisfying things I have done in a long career. This archive is about the making of a community. It is about ward boys and world-class surgeons, about chai sellers and scholars. It is about the small acts of kindness that build a hospital.

If you find a name missing, or if you know a story that belongs here, write to me. This archive is unfinished, and in a place like Sevagram — where the work is always larger than any one person — it probably should be.