Six young men, bored and restless on a Sevagram afternoon, climbed into a slowly moving goods train at the station with the intention of reaching Nagpur cheaply. When the guard found them in his cabin, he assumed the worst. The film Sholay was only a few years old, and bandits jumping trains were still fresh in the popular imagination. He pulled the vacuum brake. The train shuddered. Police arrived within minutes.

“We are medical students,” they said. “Not thieves. Not bandits.” They produced their college identity cards. They explained about cadavers, about professors, about the entirely legitimate reason they needed to reach Nagpur. The guard was not convinced. The interrogation took half an hour. The train remained stalled. They were eventually released, sheepish and stifled with suppressed laughter, into the Sevagram afternoon.

Manish Kothari tells this story with the relish of a man who has been telling it for forty years and sees no reason to stop. It captures something essential about the batch of 1980: resourceful, slightly reckless, and entirely convinced that the situation, however it developed, would eventually resolve in their favour.

The Mulund Boy

He was born on 23 January 1962 in Mulund, Bombay, the only son of Narayan Das Motiram Kothari, who spent forty-five years in the accounts department of Great Eastern Shipping, and Hiralaxmi, a homemaker whose quiet efficiency organised everything that mattered in the household. His maternal aunt, a general practitioner in Mulund, was the inspiration — the way she walked into a room, the relief that followed her, the satisfaction visible on her face after a consultation. “That,” he decided young, “is what I want.”

His schooling ran from Gurukul in Ghatkopar through SIES College in Sion, at both institutions accompanied by a classmate named Parag Shah, whose trajectory ran so parallel to his own that it was either coincidence or something stranger. They had been in school together, studied science together, applied to MGIMS together, interned together at Sion Hospital, and would carry the parallel well past graduation. When Parag once remarked on it, Manish agreed: they seemed to be living adjacent versions of the same story.

His first attempt at a medical seat failed. He was offered a place at a homeopathic college in Vile Parle, but homeopathy was not what he had imagined for himself, and he declined. He sat for every entrance available — Delhi, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Bangalore — in the manner of a man who has decided that the answer is yes and is working through the options until one agrees. Nisha Shah, his SIES classmate who had joined MGIMS the previous year, reported back warmly: the academic culture was serious, the values genuine, the Gandhian life manageable if not entirely comfortable. He wrote the PMT. He and Parag both made it.

The First Exams and the Artery

The first internal examinations delivered a shock that equalised the batch. Boys who had never scored below the top two ranks in school found themselves sitting with three or four out of fifty in anatomy. Nobody mentioned this in the weekly phone calls home, which happened on Saturdays and Sundays, each lasting barely three minutes because the trunk call charges accumulated and parents were already sending what they could.

The city-village divide manifested predictably: the Bombay contingent — Parag, Manish, Sujata, Meena, Amin, Kishore, Pankaj — gravitated together, spread newspapers across the floor of unreserved compartments on the Howrah–Bombay Mail, and returned from Bombay on Sunday evenings stuffed with home cooking, fortified for another week. The ritual acquired a particular texture: the train, the newspaper mattress, the slightly guilty pleasure of having been away.

One examination season produced a comedy that entered batch folklore. A telephone call from Nagpur, crackling over the trunk line, warned that the anatomy paper would carry a full question on the “auxiliary artery.” The batch spent the night memorising every branch, relation, and embryological nuance of this vessel. The question appeared the next morning, but it concerned the maxillary artery, not the auxiliary. The caller had misheard. After the first wave of despair, the laughter was long and genuine. It was, Manish has said, Sevagram’s own version of Sholay: the plan was excellent, the intelligence faulty, and the outcome both disastrous and somehow perfect.

Student Politics, Done Properly

By the final year, he had become General Secretary of the Students’ Association and editor of Pulse, the college magazine. This was the territory where his real talent announced itself: not in the examination hall but in the management of people, alliances, and information.

The MGIMS student elections were a miniature of Indian politics, complete with factional arithmetic and the careful deployment of goodwill. Ajit Saste — from Baramati, Sharad Pawar’s own constituency — served as the chief strategist of his era, and Manish watched and learnt. When Manish himself was contesting for General Secretary, Saste managed the opposing candidate with a promise that the result was assured, persuaded him to step away before the final count, and then let the votes decide. The count came to the last ballot. Manish voted for himself. He won by one vote. The candidate who had been reassured was back in Baramati when the result came in. Manish says this story with a mixture of admiration and mild guilt that is precisely the texture of having learned something from someone more experienced.

The Pulse editorship was less strategic but more dangerous. A sharp critique of the college management, contributed by Kishore Shah — six batches senior, a postgraduate in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, known for a pen that drew blood — was submitted. Prof. K.K. Trivedi, then in charge of the magazine, read it, and, to everyone’s astonishment, permitted it to go to print. The issue circulated. Manish still does not know why Trivedi allowed it. He suspects the professor simply thought the criticism was fair.

The City He Came Back To

After MBBS, he interned at Sion Hospital with Parag and then joined his aunt’s practice in Mulund, learning the rhythms of general practice from the person who had originally made him want to be a doctor. The choice between postgraduate studies and practice was made practically, without anguish: his marks did not open the clinical PG doors he might have wanted, and the practice was there, needed to be sustained, and was genuinely useful work.

The second vocation arrived through inheritance of a different kind. His parents and grandparents had long been investors on the Bombay Stock Exchange — his mother had received physical share certificates in her dowry, which says something about the household’s orientation. His father, for all his years in shipping, knew the rhythms of Dalal Street intuitively. Manish began helping, then learning, then trading. The BSE in those years was physical, vocal, athletic: the ring where bulls and bears settled their disputes through shouted bids and hand signals, where men like Harshad Mehta and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala moved with the confidence of people who understood things that others were still working out. He crowded into first-class compartments with Harshad, watching the arc of his rise and then his fall, and found the markets a more honest education than many classrooms.

Between 2014 and 2016 he ran a local newspaper, Mulund Meet, publishing astrology and market analysis alongside community news. He became administrator of the MGIMS alumni groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, a position requiring the same skills as student politics: keeping religion and ideology out, preserving the space for friendship and memory.

He married Meena in 1988. Their elder son Kushal is an MBA married to a chartered accountant. Their younger son Janak is a chartered accountant engaged to a dentist. The family’s two professions — numbers and medicine — have distributed themselves, in the next generation, without conflict.

He still practises, still follows the markets, still administers the alumni groups with the same watchful energy he brought to the student elections. He is, in whatever room he occupies, the person keeping track.

Dr. Manish Kothari completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram. He established a general practice in Mulund, Mumbai, which continues to the present. He has been an active investor and market analyst at the Bombay Stock Exchange for over three decades. He serves as administrator of the MGIMS alumni WhatsApp and Facebook groups. He lives in Mulund.