He had already been inspired by Gandhi before he ever applied to MGIMS.

This was not a common thing in 1977, when applicants were reading Gandhi on overnight trains and buying books at platform bookstalls as examination preparation. Rajendra Borkar had been wearing khadi since he was eighteen — something, he notes with quiet precision, that was very unusual for a boy of that age. He had visited Sevagram Ashram before he was ever a student. He had travelled to Paunar and met Vinoba Bhave in person. The Gandhian formation that Sevagram worked to achieve in its incoming students was, in his case, already present before he sought admission.

And yet Sevagram almost did not happen for him at all.

He was born and brought up in Hinganghat, where he completed his eleventh grade before moving to Nagpur. At the Institute of Science in Nagpur he began his B.Sc., completing first year and appearing for the entrance examination at Government Medical College, Nagpur. He was not selected. The following year, 1977, he appeared for the MGIMS PMT.
He was not selected for the first list. His name was on the waiting list.

He returned to the Institute of Science and continued his B.Sc., which is the reasonable, adult thing to do when a door closes — to turn to the one that is still open and proceed through it. Months passed. His classmate at the Institute, Satish Tiwari, had made it into the 1977 MGIMS batch and offered what comfort he could. “One day you will also become a doctor,” Tiwari told him. Borkar thought these were kind but empty words. The waiting list had gone quiet. He had stopped expecting it to move.

Then, one morning in January 1978, a telegram arrived from MGIMS. The waiting list had moved. Borkar had been at position six; the list had come to number five, which meant he was now eligible. His joy was absolute, and he knew exactly what it cost to feel it — months of continued study, months of watching a friend go where he had wanted to go, months of telling himself that the door had been closed when in fact it had only been shut.
He arrived in Sevagram as part of what the institution called the “modified referred batch” — a small group of three students, himself among them, who had entered through the waiting list. Later, three students who had failed in the regular 1977 batch joined them, making a cohort of six. It was not the standard entry. It was not the orientation camp at the Ashram, the communal first arrival, the shared bewilderment of sixty people discovering a new world simultaneously.
This was what he missed, and he has not made peace with it entirely.

He had not been interviewed by Dr. Sushila Nayar. He had not attended the orientation camp in Gandhiji’s Ashram. He had not stood cross-legged in the Ashram courtyard at dawn, hearing prayers in several languages, learning the daily disciplines that formed the basis of the Sevagram character. These experiences, which alumni of every batch describe as foundational — the first encounter with Badi Behenji, the first morning prayer, the first shramdan — were missing from his formation.

He understood what this meant. The interview with Dr. Sushila Nayar was not merely an administrative process; it was an encounter with the institution’s living conscience, a moment in which the college looked at you and you looked at it and something was established between you that carried forward through five years of study. The orientation camp was not merely an introduction to Gandhian philosophy; it was the period during which the class cohered, during which the friendships that would last fifty years were first made. He had entered after that cohering, as an addition rather than a founding member.

He says, even now, that he is sorry he missed these moments. He says it without self-pity, which makes the regret more real.

There is another loss that Borkar carries from his Sevagram years, and it is not his own.
Before he entered MGIMS, he had three close friends: Satish Tiwari, Rajesh Gupta, and himself. Satish had made it into the 1977 batch; Borkar had made it, eventually, through the waiting list. Rajesh Gupta had not made it at all. The day he understood that his two closest friends would become doctors while he would not — the day the door had finally, conclusively closed on his own dream — Rajesh had wept on their shoulders.

“I am a donkey,” he said. “I will remain a donkey all my life. This is my fate. This is my destiny.”

They consoled him. They told him that a life without a medical degree was still a life, that other paths led to other things, that they would not lose him to the divergence. But words, in that moment, are thin.

What happened to Rajesh Gupta is the story that redeems Borkar’s account of his own narrower passage. Rajesh became a successful industrialist — pharmaceutical industries in Bangalore, Madurai, and Mumbai — and the friendship held. When Borkar visits Hyderabad, he stays with Rajesh. When Rajesh visits Wardha, he stays with Borkar. The thing that Rajesh feared — that the divergence of their paths would make him less than his friends — turned out to be the beginning of a different, equally successful life.

Borkar spent his MBBS years doing what Sevagram required of all its students, making what he could of the formation that was available to him. He had arrived already carrying the khadi habit, already carrying the Gandhian values, already having met Vinoba and walked the Ashram paths. What he had not done was arrive alongside the batch of sixty, in the swirl of first impressions and shared discovery, with everything ahead of him. He had arrived six months later, with the batch already formed, the first friendships already established, the institutional culture already absorbed by the others.

He made his own way in, as late arrivals must. He built friendships where he could, practised medicine with the seriousness that his pre-existing Gandhian formation had given him, and graduated into a career that has not been recorded in detail in the raw material available — a gap that this profile notes and trusts the subject to fill.
What the archive holds is the shape of his arrival and the particular quality of his regret about the things he missed. In the Sevagram archive, where every other alumnus begins their account with the interview, the orientation camp, and the first encounter with Badi Behenji, Borkar’s account is distinctive precisely in its absence of those things. He knows what was there. He was not.

He has spent decades knowing what he missed and continuing anyway, which is, in its own way, the Gandhian practice: you work with what you have, in the place where you are, and you do not make the absence of ideal conditions a reason for less than your best.

Dr. Rajendra Borkar completed his MBBS at MGIMS Sevagram as part of the modified referred batch of 1977–78. He had worn khadi since the age of eighteen and had met Vinoba Bhave at Paunar before entering the institution. He practises in Wardha.