The clerk looked up from his files, adjusted his spectacles, and said four words that ended a journey of several days: “Today is the last date.” Nalin Chaudhary, seventeen years old, from Sindri township in Jharkhand, standing in the principal’s office at MGIMS Sevagram on the final afternoon of July 1980, had made it with nothing to spare.

Mr. Gawli, the clerk, checked the certificates, found them in order, and admitted the boy whose name had appeared on the merit list but whose arrival, until that moment, had seemed in question. Nalin walked out into the corridor, and a tall senior approached. “Bihar se ho kya?” “Yes.” A pat on the shoulder, a reassurance that classes ran on time here and that Bihar need not be thought about anymore. The senior’s name was Abhoy Sinha. He was from the 1974 batch. The chance encounter was the first reassurance that arrival was possible.

He had been born in a different part of the country, in Moga, Punjab, then grown up in Sindri, where his father worked in the fertilizer factory. Sindri was a self-contained township: neat rows of houses, factory sirens marking the hours. His schooling ran through Rajendra High School in Sindri and then St. Xavier’s College in Ranchi, under Belgian Jesuit fathers who treated the English language as a precision instrument and expected their students to treat it the same way. Their patience in teaching him to frame a paragraph, to construct an argument, to write with care — this patience, absorbed across years of morning classes, would turn out to matter enormously.

Bihar’s examination system had its own particular rhythm: results arrived one or two years after sitting, the uncertainty spreading like weather across the entire academic calendar. By the time his pre-medical marks were confirmed, students from other states were already applying. He sat for every available entrance: AIIMS, JIPMER, BHU, AFMC, AMU, and MGIMS. For the MGIMS paper, the Gandhian Thought section was the one he had prepared most carefully. His father — a double MA in English and Hindi — had guided him through Gandhi’s life since childhood: the autobiography, the associates, the philosophy. He wrote the paper in fluent Hindi, at length, without hesitation. He ranked first in that section. Fourth overall among the sixteen students admitted from the non-Maharashtra open category.

Arrival, Language, and the Library of Slates

The orientation camp at Gandhi’s Ashram was, for Nalin, genuinely resonant rather than merely obligatory. He found among the ashram’s inmates men who had participated in the freedom struggle, who spoke of Gandhi’s vision of village health not as history but as living obligation. He had read about these things. To encounter people who embodied them was something different.

In the hostel, the batches mixed without much formality. From the 1974 batch, Abhoy Sinha; from the 1978 batch, Haresh Sidhwa and Jaideep Laxman; from 1979, Subodh Mohan; from 1980, his own classmates — and from 1981, Sandeep Dey; from 1983, Sudip Ghosh. The friendships crossed years without effort because the campus was small enough that everyone occupied the same dusty paths, the same canteen tables, the same late-night conversations.

Hindi was his natural language; Marathi was the language of most of the hostel staff, the shopkeepers, the bus conductors. He learned it by necessity and managed it adequately within months. English he could write and read with confidence; speaking it was harder, which is the particular disadvantage of a literary education in a language learned on paper. He worked on this quietly, without drawing attention to the work, because he had decided it was something he could do and would do, and that was enough.

Paper was a luxury. For anatomy drawings and practicals, the strategy was slates: sketch, memorise, wipe, sketch again. His handwriting was beautiful — the Jesuit fathers had required it — and his notes circulated. Debjyoti Malakar borrowed them and scored well. He did not mind. Paresh Desai, whose own family circumstances allowed him some room, provided books and instruments without being asked and without making a transaction of it. A Littmann stethoscope appeared one day. He accepted it and kept it for years.

The examinations rewarded his preparation. First MBBS: tenth in the batch, with a distinction in Biochemistry. Second MBBS: second in the batch. Third MBBS: second in the batch again. For someone who had arrived in Sevagram on the final afternoon of the last day, clutching certificates that had taken too long to be released, this was a statement of accumulated quiet.

The Orthopaedics That Was Not To Be

After MBBS, he was drawn toward two specialties: Medicine and Orthopaedics. Dr. Kush Kumar, the orthopaedic surgeon — slightly heavy, spectacles thick-framed, moving with a deliberate authority that was part surgical and part philosophical — had made orthopaedics visible to him in a way it had not been before. The clinical thinking, the examination, the layering of diagnosis: he watched Kumar teach at the bedside and understood that this was what he wanted to do.

Dr. Kush Kumar resigned from MGIMS. There was no longer a guide. The orthopaedics postgraduate seat ceased to exist. Nalin spent two months in dilemma, then chose MD Medicine — the bird in hand. His mother was aging. His father had retired. The longer road was not available.

The three years of medicine residency that followed were shaped by four people who became, in different ways, permanent. Dr. O.P. Gupta, his thesis guide, directed him toward immunology and bronchial asthma with the patient thoroughness of someone who has already proven himself and now concentrates on proving students. Dr. A.P. Jain was sharp-tongued, precise, and capable of a one-line observation that stayed with you for a decade. Dr. Ulhas Jajoo — in whom Sevagram’s founding commitment to village health had become clinical practice — moved through the wards with a quiet insistence that the patient’s social context was not separate from the patient’s disease. And Dr. S.P. Kalantri drilled the art of bedside examination into them until it became instinct.

One evening, Nalin brought his thesis draft to Dr. Jain. He came back the following week with revisions. And the week after that. Dr. Jain read every handwritten line, word by word, refusing to sign until the standard was exactly what it needed to be. The discipline was understood as respect, which is the only way discipline of that kind can be productively received.

The Resident Who Led a Strike

The years after MD ran through Bihar, through a posting at Holy Family Mission Hospital in Patna, through marriage in 1992 to Poonam Kumari Jha, and then through a decision to pursue neurology that came from the MBBS years and never entirely left him. The DM Neurology entrance, all-India, placed him 29th in the country. He chose neurology over nephrology: not the procedural discipline of machines, but the intellectual discipline of localisation — of finding the lesion in the nervous system through clinical reasoning alone.

At KEM Hospital in Mumbai, under Dr. Praveena Shah and alongside teachers like Dr. Eddie P. Bharucha, Dr. Sunil Pandya, and Dr. Ranjit Nagpal, he trained in a department that took neurology seriously as both science and craft. In 1995, junior doctors across Maharashtra went on strike over stipends — ₹1,100 every six months, an amount that made survival contingent on outside support. Nalin became secretary of the Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors and spent two months holding the position together. The Shiv Sena government relented. Stipends rose to ₹8,000 with annual increments. He had not thought of himself as an activist; the situation had made him one, and he had responded with the same steady persistence he had brought to everything since Sevagram.

In Warangal, where he eventually settled, he founded the TNC Medical Foundation — named for his father, Tej Narayan Chaudhary — which became a centre serving children with autism, patients with neurological disabilities, and the broader community of those for whom specialised neurology would otherwise be inaccessible. Beyond medicine, he has accumulated degrees in Hindi, LLB, LLM, journalism, and economics, and is currently working toward a PhD in Law. Learning, he has said, has never stopped; it has been the one constant through everything else.

Dr. Nalin Chaudhary completed his MD in Medicine from MGIMS, Sevagram, and his DM in Neurology from KEM Hospital, Mumbai. He served as secretary of the Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors during the 1995 stipend agitation. He founded TNC Medical Foundation in Warangal, focused on neurology and special needs care. He lives and practises in Warangal, Telangana.