It was the second week of August 1979. The orientation camp was already halfway through. A young man stepped out of an auto at Sevagram in jeans and a jacket, a cigarette between his fingers, trailing smoke as he asked a passerby where the medical students were lodged.

The passerby stopped.

He was not a student. He was Dr. Sutikshna Pandey, Professor of Physiology, in charge of the orientation camp. His eyes blazed.

“Young man, do you know where you are? Sevagram! And you stand here smoking? Throw that cigarette at once.”

Narayan Vinchurkar froze. He threw the cigarette. That, as he would say for years afterward, was his true first lesson at MGIMS: Sevagram was not Pune or Bombay. City airs had no currency here.

A Father Lost, a Mother’s Grit

He was born on 4 August 1961. By the following year, his father, Wing Commander Ganpat Narayan Vinchurkar of the Indian Air Force, was dead. Narayan grew up without a single living memory of him. His mother, Sharadabai, took up the battle of four children alone — not just the logistics and the finances, but the endless court cases over ancestral property that followed. She had no law degree, but she earned a reputation in Nashik as a lawyer’s equal. Her children learned their character from watching her.

The family history carried old grandeur: Sardars under the Peshwas, ancestors who had ridden with Bajirao I and Shahu Maharaj, a forefather who had fought at Panipat and been rewarded with lands at Vinchur near Nashik. Palaces, courtyards, Ravi Varma portraits, fountains, and Sabha Mandaps had once made up the estate. By the time Narayan was a boy, that glory had become rubble and legend. But in his mother’s fire, he could still feel its embers.

He studied to the tenth standard at St. Xavier’s School, Nashik, and moved to Pune for his eleventh and twelfth at Loyola College. He was not a student who sat easily with books. Disco, rock music, dancing, debates, long conversations over coffee — these were the things that animated him. When his serious classmates took the examination for BJ Medical College and succeeded, he did not. He joined Fergusson College and even considered law, enjoying the spectacle of argument.

Destiny, as it tends to with people who are not looking for it, arrived from an unexpected direction. His mother discovered that wards of defence personnel held reserved seats in certain medical colleges. She wrote letters, knocked on doors, and secured a Central Government nomination. That is how Narayan Vinchurkar arrived at MGIMS — not through the PMT, not through preparation in Gandhian thought, but through his mother’s stubbornness and a dead pilot’s entitlement.

A Cigarette, a Professor, and the Start of Something

The cigarette had been thrown away. The orientation camp resumed. Within days, Narayan found his footing. Anil Ballani was the other Central Government nominee in the batch, and they gravitated toward each other immediately. Girish Muzumdar, whom Narayan had met years before at a camp in Bhosla Military School in Nashik — where his mother had once served Girish home food — was suddenly a batchmate. The thread that had formed at that camp without either of them noticing it had held across years and now pulled them together again.

He thrived in the social world of the hostel. Debates, dramas, dances — any platform that offered an audience drew him forward. At an inter-college debate in Balarshah, he and Ashutosh Raguvanshi won the championship, Narayan taking “Best Speaker” for himself. He directed English plays with juniors including Monica Ahuja and Ashok Gowdi. In examinations, when his preparation was thin, his English sometimes rescued him. He still recalls Dr. Kulkarni asking each student, one by one, to spell knuckle. They stumbled and fumbled. Narayan said: “K-N-U-C-K-L-E.” Kulkarni laughed and asked nothing further.

There were motorbike rides — triple-seat to Wardha, pushing the machine past every sensible limit. Trips to Nagpur for Bruce Lee films. Ice cream at Dinshaw’s. Video screenings of English films in Wardha hotels. Rules were broken, always collectively, always with laughter. The bus driver-conductor duo on the campus-Wardha route invited students to their homes for meals — lavish thalis served without any expectation of return. Narayan has found this kind of hospitality rarely elsewhere.

A Strike, a Regret

There is one chapter in his Sevagram years that Narayan does not recount with pleasure. As General Secretary of the Student Council, he was part of the storm that led to Dr. K.K. Trivedi’s departure from the institute. Students raised slogans, a strike unfolded, and in the heat of mob frenzy, a brilliant teacher was driven away. Looking back, Narayan says he cringes at the immaturity of it — the inability to separate legitimate grievance from the cruelty of what was done. He would erase that memory if he could.

The Birthday Telegram

After completing his internship, he stood at a crossroads. House jobs in Surgery and Gynaecology were behind him. Postgraduate seats at MGIMS were scarce, and the frustration of watching them pass to others had been accumulating for months.

On 4 August 1983 — his birthday — a police constable arrived at his quarters on a roaring Bullet motorcycle, carrying a telegram. It was from his maternal uncle, Mr. Bhishmaraj Bam, Director General of Police (Intelligence), Maharashtra, and a sports psychologist whose name would later appear in association with Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Anjali Bhagwat, and P. Gopichand. His uncle had learned through his wife of a DMRD seat at Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai — a seat that had just fallen vacant. His mother heard, and with the quiet firmness that had defined her entire life, urged him: “Beggars can’t be choosers. Grab it.”

He did.

Radiology and Nashik

At Tata Memorial, under Dr. Nikhil Merchant, he discovered that radiology was not the passive specialty its reputation suggested. The machines fascinated him — CT scans, MRIs, angiograms. He completed his MD in Radiology by 1990, with Dr. Merchant as his mentor and lifelong guide.

Back in Nashik, he established Vinchurkar Diagnostics — the first comprehensive radiology centre in North Maharashtra. From a boy who had arrived at Sevagram with a cigarette and a leather jacket, he had become a radiologist with an MRI scanner humming in his clinic. MRI technology arrived. CT scans followed. The centre grew.

His wife Anuradha, once an active trekker in the Himalayan ranges, manages the hospital and its finances. Their daughter Kshitija chose radiology, following her father into the specialty. Their son Samihan chose law — echoing, with an odd tidiness, Narayan’s own youthful flirtation with the subject before medicine claimed him.

The circle that formed in Sevagram’s first weeks — Anil Ballani, Girish Muzumdar, Prithviraj Ranglani, Raju Shah — has met monthly in Bombay for thirty-five years, their spouses in tow. What began in the dust of Sevagram’s orientation camp has proved, in their case, essentially permanent.

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Dr. Narayan Vinchurkar completed his MBBS from MGIMS Sevagram and his MD in Radiology from Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, in 1990. He founded Vinchurkar Diagnostics in Nashik, the first comprehensive radiology centre in North Maharashtra, where he continues to practise.