He still remembers that summer morning in 1979 when he first walked through the gates of Gandhi’s ashram at Sevagram. The neem trees stood tall, their shadows falling on the dusty path, and the place held a quiet that seemed to resist the morning. He had come for the orientation camp, uncertain of his own future, torn between the pull of Chennai’s engineering college and the quieter gravity of his family’s medical history.

He had been admitted to A.C. College of Technology in Chennai — one of only two boys from Maharashtra to get in that year. A seat at GMC Nagpur had been carefully held by his anxious father. And here he was, standing instead on the red earth of Sevagram, about to begin the same journey that four elder sisters had already made.

Four Sisters Before Him

Chandrashekhar — Chandu to everyone — was born on a date he does not volunteer, into a household in Amravati that was already, by the time he arrived, shaped by medicine. His father was a lawyer, well known in the district. His mother ran the household with quiet precision. His four sisters had all studied medicine at MGIMS before him: Kalpana in the 1969 batch, Aruna in 1973, Purnima in 1975, and Rajshree in 1977. Their textbooks, notes, and accumulated wisdom flowed into his trunk when it was his turn.

For some years, his heart had been set on machines rather than medicine. Engineering excited him — circuits, bridges, structures. He had secured the Chennai seat and was prepared to take it. But his father held firm. “We have already paid five thousand rupees to MGIMS. Do you think I can afford more?” It was, in the end, a financial argument that decided a medical career. Chandu accepted his fate, packed his trunk, and arrived.

Ashram Life and the First Adjustments

The orientation camp remade him more quickly than he had expected. They were given simple khadi kurtas and told to spin the charkha, sweep the verandas, and join the bhajans at dawn. At home, Chandu had never once picked up his plate after a meal, never washed a shirt with his own hands, never held a broom. Yet in the ashram atmosphere, surrounded by sixty classmates all doing the same, the adjustment happened without drama. Sweeping the red-earth paths became a matter of pride. Scrubbing his own plate became a discipline. Sevagram had a way of absorbing resistance.

After a fortnight, they moved to the hostel. The blocks were functional — iron cots, mosquito nets, long corridors of youthful noise. Meals were in the mess, where rice and dal were served in steel buckets and laughter echoed late into the night.

He gravitated quickly toward Jaideep Laxman, B.B. Sharma, and Pandurang Rao, forming a circle that held across the years. The 1979 batch had its social geography like any other: the Pune-Mumbai contingent, the Vidarbha locals, the rural-quota students from smaller towns. Ashalata Jagtap, whose father was Speaker of the Maharashtra Assembly, was with them briefly before leaving. Six students had come under the rural quota — Narayan Marathe, Sanjay Deshpande, Bhimrao Kolekar, Arvind Pandey, Anil Lokhande among them.

A Guinea Pig Batch

The 1979 batch discovered early that they were, in curricular terms, experiments. Theirs was the first batch to face the “separation papers” — Chemistry split from Physiology, Microbiology separated from Pathology, ENT removed from Surgery. Nobody knew how to prepare for the changes. Chemistry, in particular, claimed more failures than anyone had anticipated.

Chandu was spared. He had four sisters’ notes to draw on and four sisters’ warnings about which papers were most treacherous. The advantage was not always welcome — it also meant that his family had higher expectations of him than of most. He navigated both with the pragmatism of a youngest child who has watched others navigate the same terrain.

The Volleyball Terrace

If the classroom tested him, sport sustained him. Badminton was his game, and he was good enough to win trophies partnering with Anil Lokhande. On the volleyball court, he played with an energy that drew attention. Then there was the night after the championship win, when the batch gathered on the terrace of C-Block, pulled out drums, and played loud enough to wake the birds. The music lasted three hours. Its purpose was simple: to show the 1978 seniors that the 1979 batch now owned the sports cups. The music lasted long after the message had been delivered.

Politics found him too. At the instigation of their Physiology professor, Dr. Ingle, he contested — unopposed — for Joint General Secretary of the Student Council. The position brought less administrative responsibility than social drama. He served, concluded his term, and moved on.

The Summer Without Water

The summer of 1980 remains particularly vivid. The rains had failed, and by March, the campus taps had reduced to a trickle. Principal Amle Sharma called the students together and announced, with the weary candour of a man managing a drought, that the hostels would have to be vacated until July. Students could not run a college without water.

They packed their trunks and went home. Parents, accustomed to MGIMS’s strict routines, assumed they had done something wrong and been suspended. Chandu and his friends laughed and explained: not indiscipline, but drought. When they returned in July, the pace doubled — lectures at seven in the morning, clinics until noon, the same cycle repeated after lunch. They were worked to the bone, but the syllabus was covered.

The Stage

Acting was, for years, Chandu’s second vocation. He appeared in play after play at MGIMS, accumulating more than ten awards for acting and fancy dress competitions. He remembers particularly a Marathi play in which he played a forgetful Parsi bank manager — Gopi Gela Zala, directed by Rafat Khan and Shirole. The hall roared as he fumbled through his dialogues in character, forgetting lines perfectly, never forgetting the pleasure of an audience’s response. The plays changed. The applause was constant.

Radiology and the Long Career

After MBBS, he joined Indira Gandhi Medical College, Nagpur, for a diploma in Radiology, followed by his MD in 1989. His sisters had gone to the United Kingdom, and a visa for FRCS was ready for him too. He chose to stay in India.

His post-MD years were eventful — he worked at KM Hospital, Mumbai; shared accommodation with Lokhande and Suresh Jain; and juggled posts across Mumbai, Pune, and Nashik simultaneously. On 6 July 1991, he opened his own X-ray and ultrasound clinic in Nashik. Fifteen years later, he entered academics as an assistant professor. Wanderlust moved him through Bhilai, Khammam, Hyderabad, Udaipur, and finally to Dahod in Gujarat, where he serves now. He has examined more than 400 postgraduates in radiology over the years.

He married Shruti, an MGIMS alumna from Bhopal, who had briefly joined a different college in 1985 before returning to Sevagram’s orbit. “See how fate works,” he tells her often. Their elder daughter, Shreya, pursued oncology. Their younger daughter, Sowmya, became a financial consultant in London.

⸻

Dr. Chandrashekhar Gattani completed his MBBS from MGIMS Sevagram in 1984 and his MD in Radiology from IGMC Nagpur in 1989. He practised and taught across Maharashtra and Gujarat and has examined postgraduate students in radiology at multiple universities. He currently serves in Dahod, Gujarat.