A Letter from a Radio

The voice came through crackling static, soft and unhurried, on a humid Kerala evening in the mid-1970s. A woman was speaking about a slim booklet published somewhere in Gujarat — a directory of medical colleges in India, listing each one’s selection procedure. K.P. Madhusoodanan, then a young man preparing for entrance examinations in Koodal, fetched a pen, jotted down the address, and posted a request.

The booklet arrived within weeks. He read it cover to cover. One entry stopped him: Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram. Selection not by marks alone, but by an understanding of Gandhian values. He was intrigued. He bought the books listed in the MGIMS prospectus and read them in his room in Koodal — a small town in Kerala, tucked into the hills, as far from Wardha in texture and temperament as it is possible to imagine.

That is how Kozhuvattasseril Padmanabhan Madhusoodanan came to Sevagram. Not through coaching classes or a mentor’s guidance. Through a radio programme, a booklet, and the quiet certainty that medicine was what he was meant to do.

The Roots

He was born on 28 May 1956, the fifth of eight children, in a household distinguished by its Ayurvedic heritage. His father, Padmanabhan, was a businessman; his mother, Savithri, a homemaker. The family name was known in Koodal for its association with traditional medicine. One brother was an Ayurvedic doctor, another an engineer, a third worked in Bahrain. His four sisters were teachers — one of them a Chemistry professor at a local college.

The first seed of medicine was planted not in a library but in a sickroom. When Madhusoodanan was four years old, he developed nephrotic syndrome — puffy eyes, swollen limbs, a long trail of hospital visits. The doctor who treated him was calm, kind, and competent. That image never left. Somewhere in the years that followed, watching that doctor’s unhurried confidence, a quiet decision formed.

His father’s illness deepened it. Padmanabhan suffered from urinary retention, underwent a suprapubic catheter insertion, and then a fall, a fracture, complications. He died after prolonged suffering that his family could do little to ease. Madhusoodanan watched medicine from both sides — as something that could comfort, and as something that sometimes arrived too late.

He studied in the local schools of Koodal, with no coaching, no entrance examination guides, no peers who had walked this path before him. Rural Kerala in the 1970s offered little of the infrastructure that the urban student took for granted. He simply read, prepared as best he could, and trusted his own steadiness.

A Number and a Gamble

When the interview card arrived, his candidate number was 505. His heart sank. Less than twenty-five seats. If numbering started at one, he had no chance. He was about to set the card aside when it occurred to him — what if numbering began at 500? He took the train to Wardha.

He was the second candidate called.

He was right.

The interview itself has dimmed in memory. What remains is the sensation of confidence — not arrogance, but the particular steadiness that comes from purpose. He walked out uncertain of the result but certain of himself.

The bus back from Sevagram to Wardha rumbled through flat terrain that looked nothing like home. He had come nearly a thousand kilometres. He would wait, and see.

Arrival and Adjustment

The pre-admission orientation camp at Gandhi Ashram was unlike anything Madhusoodanan had experienced. The bell at five in the morning. Cold water baths — for some students, a shock; for him, something he could absorb. Evening prayers in the ashram’s quiet courtyards. The days felt unhurried and purposeful at once.

On the second morning of the camp, a commotion broke the calm. Rakesh Sood, a batchmate from Delhi who had not realised that another student’s bucket of water had been heated, poured the boiling contents over himself. His screams pierced the dawn. He spent the following two weeks in the Surgery OPD having burns dressed. The camp bell disappeared around the same time — no one confessed to removing it, and no one was pressed too hard to do so.

Madhusoodanan was allotted a room in A Block, Boys’ Hostel. The advice among students was that the warden lived in A Block, which offered some protection from ragging. In practice, what protected him was his limited Hindi and English. When seniors approached, he looked confused and replied in Malayalam. They gave up.

The real challenge was academic adjustment. His world before MGIMS had been small — one district, one language, a sheltered domestic life. Now he sat alongside students from Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Gujarat, and every corner of Maharashtra, in lecture halls where English was the medium and the pace unrelenting. He was slow to adjust, and he knew it.

What helped was not any single strategy but a set of friendships. Varinder Singh Bedi, Rakesh Sood, Paul Ragnauth, Batila Joel in his own batch. Gautam Daftary, Narayan Vinchurkar, and Girish Majumdar from the batches that followed. People who made Sevagram feel less like a foreign place and more like a community he had joined.