The question, when it came, was about cricket.

Ravi Gupta had answered the usual questions: why he wanted to become a doctor, how he would serve rural India, what he understood about the obligations that came with studying at a Gandhian institution. He had answered them adequately — not brilliantly, he thought, but honestly, drawing on what he had actually read and actually believed. And then one of the professors, perhaps sensing his Delhi roots and the particular confidence with which Delhi boys discussed the national sport, asked: “What is the importance of a one-down batsman in cricket?”

He answered well. He must have. Shortly afterwards, he was packing his bags for Wardha.

He was born on 22 September 1957 in Delhi. His father was both a Chartered Accountant and a Company Secretary — a man of numbers and balance sheets, as Ravi describes him — whose work carried the family through Baroda, Ahmedabad, and Bombay before they settled definitively in Delhi. Ravi had moved with them: middle school in Baroda and Ahmedabad, grades nine to eleven in Bombay, then back to Delhi for Zakir Hussain and Hansraj College. The itinerant childhood had made him adaptable, a collector of friends in different cities, comfortable in different registers of language and culture.

He had, in school, refused to choose between Biology and Mathematics. This dual ambition had taken him to Delhi College of Engineering — then near ISBT — where he discovered, with some clarity, that trigonometry and he had not been made for each other. He withdrew quietly and joined B.Sc. Part I at Hansraj, uncertain of direction but not of determination.

He tried Aligarh Muslim University: the environment, he felt, was not conducive to study. He missed the Delhi quota for Meerut Medical College by one or two marks. The margins were thin and the disappointments were real. He was scanning the newspaper one morning — a voracious reader, someone who moved between Premchand’s earthy tales and Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s lyrical verse — when he saw the MGIMS advertisement.

He wrote the entrance paper on Gandhian thought in Hindi. Perhaps it was the Hindi, or the fluency with which he moved through the language, that carried him through the written round. His love of literature in his mother tongue had, by accident or design, prepared him for an examination that no coaching class had anticipated.

At Sevagram, he found a cohort that felt like a continuation of his life in different cities. Atul Agrawal, Samir Mewar, Deepak Sarin, Rakesh Sood, Mukesh Agrawal — some he had known before, in other contexts: Sarin and he had sat together at Sachdeva Coaching Classes on Pusa Road; Samir Mewar had once shared a wooden bench with him at Zakir Hussain College. Sevagram had assembled them from the scattered points of north Indian student life and placed them in a village in Vidarbha, which had no neon signs and no cinema near enough for anything but an expedition, and had given them the rare gift of an entire formation to go through together.

The campus received him as it received everyone: khadi, prayers, shramdan, the gradual surrender of the habits you had brought from home in exchange for the habits of this particular place. For Ravi, coming from a family that had lived in several cities and carried no fixed attachment to any of them, Sevagram’s rootedness was a novelty. The place knew what it was. It was not in transition toward something else. This gave it, he came to feel, a stability that more ambitious institutions sometimes lack — the stability of an institution that has decided, once, what it is for, and does not renegotiate the question.

Cricket remained his first love, and at Sevagram it found new expression. He had begun opening the innings in school matches in Ahmedabad, played for Hansraj College, represented local leagues in Delhi. But it was at the Sonnet Cricket Club — a nursery of Delhi cricket — that the game had taken on the quality of a serious pursuit. He had shared nets there with players who would later wear India’s colours: Manoj Prabhakar, Surinder Khanna, Bhaskar Pillai, Ashish Nehra, Ajay Sharma. He had been in that company without necessarily belonging to it, but had absorbed from them a seriousness about the game that his Sevagram years sustained rather than diminished.

During his MGIMS years, he played for clubs whose kits were generously supplied by organisations that had understood the value of sport as a binding agent in institutional life. He remembers Suraj Paul, a dashing batsman who seemed to score centuries at will. He remembers a match against VRCE in Wardha — sometime in the late 1970s, the precise year blurred now — when he opened the innings and carried his bat for an unbeaten 62. Shortly after, he was called to play for Nagpur University. A feeler came from the Ranji selectors. The trajectory of a life that might have gone differently is visible in that moment, and he has looked at it calmly across the years without regret.

Medicine was the choice he had made. The cricket was the life within it.

After MBBS, he returned to Delhi. He completed his internship at ESIS Hospital, then house jobs in Orthopaedics and Surgery at Hindu Rao Hospital. The pull of Sevagram was strong: he went back, determined to specialise in Orthopaedics. What followed was not the straight drive of a batsman who has read the pitch correctly but a long, hard-fought innings — a court battle for the right to the seat he had been promised. He does not elaborate on it, noting only that it is another story for another day. What matters is that he fought and that the values Sevagram had given him — the persistence, the clarity about what was owed and what was not, the refusal to concede a wicket that had not been fairly taken — sustained him through it.

He joined Roshanara Club in Delhi after his postgraduate years, a ground of historic significance: it had hosted India’s first unofficial Test match and witnessed the founding of the BCCI. For a man who loved cricket with the particular intensity of someone who has played it well enough to know exactly what it requires, the ground itself was almost sacred. He played there for years. He plays still, in whatever form the game takes when the body is no longer twenty.

What Ravi Gupta carries from Sevagram is not a single story but an orientation. The Hindi-medium Gandhian thought paper that opened the door. The one-down batsman question that confirmed the entry. The friends assembled from the scattered addresses of north Indian student life. The long innings in court. The Roshanara ground. The literature — Premchand and Bachchan — that was always there alongside the anatomy textbooks, that has never entirely separated itself from the clinical practice of medicine.

He was the boy who could not choose between Biology and Mathematics and ended up, in the long run, not needing to. Sevagram does not ask you to choose between the things you are. It asks only that you bring all of them, honestly, through the gate.

He brought cricket and Hindi literature and an opening batsman’s patience. The institution found a use for all three.

Dr. Ravi Gupta completed his MBBS at MGIMS Sevagram with the batch of 1977. He pursued postgraduate training in Orthopaedics from his alma mater, following a period of legal contest that he characterises as “another story for another day.” He played cricket at Roshanara Club and represented Nagpur University. He practises in Delhi.