“Give her a spinal, Mathpati,” Professor Arun Tikle said, in a voice as calm as if he were asking for a cup of tea.

Shivraj Mathpati froze. Tikle’s wife lay draped on the operating table, prepared for a hysterectomy. His palms turned clammy inside sterile gloves. He was a house officer — barely a few months into Anaesthesia — and here was the Head of the Department entrusting him with the spinal block for his own wife.

“Sir… me?” he whispered, hoping he had misheard.

Tikle adjusted his spectacles. “Yes, you. Who else? You will give it. I will sit here.”

In the silence of the operation theatre — the trolley ready, the spinal needle waiting, his heart louder than the ventilator — Shivraj felt Tikle’s eyes on him. Something in that steady gaze produced, against all reason, a kind of calm. He positioned the patient. He gave the spinal. It worked perfectly.

That day, he understood what trust can do to a frightened person. It was the lesson that would define his career.

Cloth Shop to Medical College

He was born on 13 March 1960 in Nawegaon, a small village in Ahmedpur taluka of Latur district, Marathwada. His father ran a tiny ready-made cloth shop — barely enough to sustain a family of three brothers and three sisters. His mother, a primary school teacher, rose to become a headmistress. Ours was not a family of doctors or professionals, he has said. Nobody before him had dreamt of wearing a stethoscope. His family had roots in Bidar, Karnataka, but had migrated to Marathwada after Independence in search of livelihood.

He moved through the Zilla Parishad school in Chakur, then Jagat Jagruti Madhyamik School in the same town, and then D.B.F. Dayanand College of Arts and Science in Solapur, completing his twelfth in 1977. The private medical college in Solapur was a possibility only in theory — its fees were astronomical. His elder brother, an engineering professor, spotted an advertisement in the Times of India for MGIMS Sevagram. “Shivraj, this is your chance. Physics, Chemistry, Biology — you handle these well. Apply.”

He bought the prospectus. The PMT for BHU and for MGIMS were held in Nagpur within four days of each other. He appeared for both, reading Gandhi’s books late into the night before each, and on 26 July 1979, a telegram arrived. He had cracked the Sevagram exam — first on the Maharashtra merit list.

Reaching Sevagram was an adventure of its own. There was no direct train from Solapur to Wardha; he changed trains twice before giving up and boarding a Maharashtra State Transport bus that rumbled all night. At 2:30 in the morning, bleary-eyed, he arrived at Wardha bus stand.

“Sevagram?” he asked the bus stand officer.

“At 5:45 the state transport leaves,” the man said. “Or a cycle rickshaw. Or one tonga.”

They took the bus. At dawn, Shivraj laid eyes for the first time on Sevagram Ashram — its mud paths, neem trees, and the particular quiet of a place that has decided never to hurry.

The Ashram and the First Batchmates

The orientation fortnight at the ashram suited him, though he was far from home in every way that mattered. At 5:30 each morning, they sang bhajans, then swept the campus, scrubbed the latrines, cleaned the prayer room. He grumbled at first, as everyone did, and then the meaning of it slowly entered him — the discipline, the equality of the broom, the lesson that no task was beneath a doctor-in-training.

The first batchmate he met was Shiv Pratap Singh Chauhan from Mathura, who spoke chaste Hindi while Shivraj replied in broken Hindi thickened with a Marathi accent. Neither understood the other for the first few hours. Relief came when he spotted Narayan Marathe, who spoke his language.

On Independence Day, they saw Dr. Sushila Nayar for the first time, hoisting the tricolour on the staff club ground. She lived at Prerna Kutir. The name meant something — it always would.

After the fortnight in Gauri Bhavan, he moved to Jawaharlal Nehru Hostel. Bele and Premdas — one tall, the other short — were the hostel clerks who called names from the merit list. He was assigned Room 20 in A Block. Marathe was in 19. Chauhan in 23. The monsoon poured that year. In the mornings, steaming chai and pakoras arrived in the mess, brought by Mr. Junagade from the Dean’s office, whose squinted eyes behind thick spectacles held warmth for first-year students.

The Ragging, the Stage, and a High-Mortality Batch

Ragging was vigorous. Seniors from the 1977 and 1978 batches appeared at midnight, fingers working through ventilators, unlatching doors from outside. Books were balanced on heads and students marched through corridors in mock parade. There was laughter everywhere, and a strange comfort in its cruelty. Strange enough, one senior from the 1974 batch — Deepak Fuljhale, who had been struggling to clear his examinations for years — never ragged them at all. He warned them instead: “Vidya is tough. Study, study, study. Else you will drown.”

Festivals offered relief. He acted in the Marathi play Zopi Gelela, Jaga Jhala. The Dahi Handi on Janmashtami one year produced a casualty when Prem Bhattad, six feet tall, attempted to break the pot from twenty feet, fell, and fractured his pelvis. Dr. Sutikshna Pandey, with his dry wit, remarked that one who wanted to be Krishna Kanhaiya had received the appropriate reward. Bhattad managed a grin from his hospital bed.

The 1979 batch acquired, over time, an unofficial and unhappy distinction. Of the sixty students who began, only twenty-nine reached internship. They called themselves a high-mortality batch — not without dark humour. Biochemistry had claimed its first victims in first MBBS. Forensic Medicine claimed more in second. Teachers who arrived in those years were formidable — Dr. G.K. Hari Rao drawing anatomy diagrams ambidextrously, both lungs and liver simultaneously, leaving the room in something close to awe.

Dr. Tikle and the Ether Era

Dr. A.C. Tikle, who became head of Anaesthesia after Dr. Shetty left, welcomed Shivraj as a member of his family from the first day. Every Sunday, he found himself at Tikle’s home, where his wife set a proper meal. His mentor attended his wedding in Solapur, staying with the family like a relative. When Tikle later died, Shivraj mourned as though he had lost a father a second time.

The operating theatre in those years was bare by today’s standards — no monitors flickering, no pulse oximeter, no ventilator in the corner. A Boyle’s apparatus stood alone in the room. On the trolley sat the Schimmelbusch mask, its wire frame stretched with gauze, over which ether dripped in its sharp, sweet vapour until the patient’s breathing deepened. Halothane had just arrived, so precious it was kept locked in the head of department’s cupboard. Shivraj and his colleagues occasionally helped themselves to a few millilitres, laughing at their own daring.

Red rubber endotracheal tubes, boiled so many times they had lost their suppleness, were pressed into service again and again. Stainless steel lumbar puncture needles were used until they would barely pierce skin. The disposable culture had not yet arrived. Technicians like Yadavrao Kale and Chandorkar were the backbone of the OT — always present, always encouraging, the first to arrive and the last to leave.

This was, as Shivraj calls it, their dabba-batli anaesthesia. It produced something that modern equipment often does not: the necessity of knowing your patient’s body without machines to tell you what it was doing.

Solapur and Fifty Years of Practice

On 1 January 1987, he returned to Solapur and began freelancing as an anaesthesiologist. He had married Suvarna, a BAMS graduate, the year before. She runs an Ayurveda fertility centre. In April 1988, he was appointed chief anaesthesiologist and intensivist at N.M. Wadia Hospital, a 400-bed institution. For twenty-three years he worked there — building ICUs, upgrading operating theatres, introducing modern anaesthesia protocols, making the hospital a CPS training centre. More than a hundred students trained under him across Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh.

Every Guru Poornima, calls arrive from former students. “Sir, pranam. Without you we wouldn’t be here.” Each call carries the warmth he once felt under Tikle’s gaze in that Sevagram operating theatre.

He authored a textbook of Community Medicine — reluctantly at first, at the urging of colleagues. Mathpati’s Textbook of Community Medicine is now in its fourth edition, accepted by Maharashtra University of Health Sciences as a reference text. From ether drops to textbooks — the trajectory surprised even him.

His elder son Sumit is an orthopaedic surgeon in Solapur. His younger son chose a different path.

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Dr. Shivraj Mathpati completed his MBBS from MGIMS Sevagram and his postgraduate training in Anaesthesiology there. He was appointed chief anaesthesiologist at N.M. Wadia Hospital, Solapur, in 1988, where he served for twenty-three years. He authored Mathpati’s Textbook of Community Medicine, now in its fourth edition. He lives and practises in Solapur.