Dr. Mukund Karambelkar

Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences

Dr. Mukund Karambelkar

The Calligraphic Scholar of the Stage

Batch Year 1974
Roll Number 27
Specialty Obstetrics & Gynaecology
Lives In Chalisgaon, Maharashtra, India

A Nomadic Childhood and the 10% Gap

I was born on 8 December 1955 in Sidhpur, a small town in Karnataka’s North Kanara district. My father was a medical officer. In those days, government service meant living out of trunks. I spent my childhood moving from place to place: primary school in Bolthan, eighth grade in Niphad, ninth and tenth in Chandwad, and finally back to Bolthan for the eleventh.

Medical admissions were a grim business. Nashik lacked a medical college, so I moved to Thane to join Bandodkar Science College. It was a new setup tied to Pune University, which at the time boasted exactly two medical colleges: AFMC and B.J. Medical College. The competition was savage. We all lived in dread of the “10% Gap.” Pune closed its doors to applicants at 72%, while Bombay took them at 62%. If you came from the Pune stream, falling short by a single mark meant a dead end.

I fell short by exactly two marks.

I did not pack up and go home. Instead, I moved to Bombay, betting that its wider array of colleges—Grant, GS, KEM, and Nair—offered better odds. I enrolled in a junior BSc course at Somaiya College, but my real campus was the vocational guidance centre at Bombay VT Station. I spent my days staring at notice boards, hunting for any national entrance exam that would take me: CMC Vellore, JIPMER Pondicherry, and of course, MGIMS Sevagram.

The Railway Strike and the Bicycle Rescue

In May 1974, George Fernandes called a nationwide railway strike. Bombay’s local trains stopped dead, cutting off my commute from Dombivli to VT. I simply packed my bags and moved to my uncle’s house in Bandra. Politics was fine, but I had exams to pass. I sat for every Pre-Medical Test going. When the results came out, I had cleared both AFMC and MGIMS. For Sevagram, I ranked second in the Maharashtra category.

The interview telegram arrived. My father and I took a train to Wardha, putting up at the Mahila Ashram with his friend, J.L. Ranade, a classical singer. At nine o’clock on the morning of the interview, we stepped out onto the street, waiting for a rickshaw. None came. Half an hour ticked by. I was the second-rank holder in the Maharashtra category, standing helplessly on a pavement.

A local college professor saw us stranded. He had no car or scooter, but he lent us his bicycle. My father and I pedaled to the medical college gates on that single bike, arriving breathless and covered in dust. I walked up to the clerk.

He checked his list and looked up. “You are already marked absent.”

The Linguistic Slip and the Gandhian Paper

My father explained to the Principal that Wardha had no transport. The Principal was sympathetic but refused to alter the interview schedule. We were told to wait. We sat outside his office for seven hours, watching other candidates go in and come out. Finally, at half-past four, they called my name.

The panel seated the heavyweights of the institute: Dr. Sushila Nayar, Manimala Choudhary, and Dr. M.L. Sharma. My English was poor. My Marathi was strong but useless in this room. Dr. Nayar spoke to me in Hindi. She listed the Gandhian rules: no alcohol, no tobacco, wear Khadi, attend morning prayers, and live simply.

I wanted to say I had no objection. Instead, my nerves mangled my Hindi.

“Mujhe isse koi ikraar nahi,” I declared. (I have no agreement with this).

She paused, amused. “Why do you have no ikraar with this?” she asked.

I realized my blunder. I had swapped the word for objection (inkaar) with agreement (ikraar). Flustered, I quickly explained that Somaiya College had enforced a similar discipline, right down to a strict ban on wearing bell-bottom trousers.

They ignored the butchered vocabulary. It likely helped that I had scored 42 out of 50 in the Gandhian Thought paper—the highest in the batch. I had spent months reading Gandhi’s autobiography, and my neat calligraphy made my answers easy on the examiners’ eyes. I was admitted. The next morning, my father paid the 1,200-rupee tuition fee.

The Orientation: Unlearning the City

The orientation camp at the Gandhi Ashram was my real introduction to Sevagram. I had spent my school days in small talukas of Nashik and my college years in Bombay. Those two weeks worked like a brisk course of treatment for any grand illusions I had about the medical profession.

Nobody treated us like future consultants with stethoscopes dangling from our necks and self-importance in our heads. We cooked our own meals, swept the floors, scrubbed blackened pots, and cleaned the toilets. Sevagram believed that before you could deliver babies, prescribe medicines, or save lives, you should first learn how to hold a broom.

At the ashram prayers, the academic hierarchy vanished. The Anatomy and Physiology teachers sat beside us on the floor. The Pharmacology and Pathology professors memorized every student’s name before the first lecture even began. MGIMS called this “Social Service.” In practice, it meant that before a doctor was allowed to treat a patient, he first had to learn how to clean up his own mess.

Music, Drama, and the Friday Prayers

When the first year began, I found my crowd. People knew me for my singing and my obsession with Marathi drama. Suresh Dhakate, Hemant Brahmane, V.S. Agrawal, and Ravindra Jain became my closest friends. Together with Kishore Shah and Pradip Joshi, I spent my free hours putting on college plays. Anatomy and physiology were brutal; the stage was a welcome escape.

Friday evenings belonged to the Sarva Dharma Prarthana. If Mukunda Oke was absent, the job of leading the prayers fell to me. I sang the hymns alongside Lalit Kose, with Ravindra keeping time on the tabla. I still remember the smell of incense and the low hum of voices in the twilight. It was a simple routine, but it anchored my week

Residency in Sevagram

I chose Obstetrics and Gynaecology for my post-graduation. At the time, the department itself had barely been conceived. Post-graduate training at MGIMS was a new, uncertain experiment. There were exactly two seats.

Dr. Shakuntala Chhabra, then a Reader, supervised my MD thesis. Residency in those early days was a tight, chaotic affair. Meena Kurudwarkar, from the 1973 batch, claimed the very first seat. Kishore Shah (1974) and I followed her in. Later, the roster expanded to include Anita Kant (1975), Gopa Chatterjee, and Nitin Gupte (1976).

Because the postgraduate program was in its first trimester of existence, there were no inherited systems or comfortable routines. We absorbed the institutional labour pains. We put in the gruelling, unscripted hours required to drag a new academic program into the light. But we pushed through. Eventually, we delivered.

Decades later, history repeated itself with clinical precision. In 2003, my son, Mandar, entered MGIMS. When his time came, he walked into the same maternity wards and chose the same discipline. He too earned his MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology from Sevagram. A father and a son, two men studying the mechanics of childbirth in the exact same rural hospital—it remains a beautiful, statistical rarity

A Way of Life in Chalisgaon

After MD I moved to Chalisgaon to establish my practice. But the lessons of Sevagram never left me. Whether it was the discipline of the “Code of Conduct” or the empathy I learned while cleaning utensils in the ashram, those years shaped the way I treated every woman who walked into my clinic.

Looking back, I remember every convoluted railway route I took from Karwar in Karnataka just to reach Wardha. I remember the bicycle ride that almost cost me my career. Most of all, I remember the wonderful friendships that have lasted fifty years. MGIMS Sevagram gave me more than a medical degree; it gave me a moral compass and a way of life that continues to guide me every single day.

The Fertile Batch of ’74

Dr. SP Kalantri tells me that before my time, twenty-three MGIMS graduates had chosen obstetrics and gynaecology. Six of them were men: Omesh Verma, Ashok Sardey, Ajit Kulkarni, Vidyadhar Ranade, Krishnakumar Dhemare, and Pradeep Vaishwanar. In those days, a man entering a labour room as a trainee obstetrician was almost as unusual as finding a calm husband outside one.

I became the seventh man from the institute to take up an MD in the subject. Or perhaps the eighth. Kishore Shah and I belonged to the 1974 batch, and we did our residencies together. To this day, I cannot say with certainty who technically arrived first. Like many obstetric matters, the chronology remains slightly blurred.

Something in the air that year drew us toward the labour rooms. From our batch alone, three men entered the specialty. While Kishore and I stayed on in Sevagram, Ashok Taksande, the ninth male gynaecologist from Sevagram, went to Government Medical College Nagpur for his MD.

The women of our batch were no less drawn to the field. Nanda Deotale Vinayak completed her MD from Nagpur, while many others went on to earn their DGOs: Alka Chavan, Bhakti Sharma Tiwari, Kamini Kaushal, Kishori Ghirnikar Bendre, Maya Band Sapkal, Mukta Khapre, Sarala Deshmukh Agrawal, Sucheta Patil Bhonde, and Sunita Babbar.

When I look back, the numbers are striking. Four MDs and nine DGOs emerged from a class of sixty. Other batches produced surgeons, physicians, paediatricians and pathologists. Our batch, however, seemed to have only one calling: labour pains, delivery tables and sleepless nights. As far as obstetrics was concerned, the batch of 1974 was extraordinarily fertile.

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