Some evenings, after the last case has been closed and the scrub nurse has wheeled the trolley back to the sterilisation room, Dr. Prakash Nagpure changes out of his theatre clothes, drives the three kilometres to Karanji Bhoge, and walks into his fields. The wheat stands in rows. The neem trees at the boundary hold the light of the late afternoon. His farmhand Shyamrao, who has worked this land longer than most junior surgeons have been alive, looks up and says what he says every time: “Doctor-saab, you operated this morning, and now you are here with the bullocks. How do you manage both?”

Prakash laughs. He has been answering this question for thirty years. “Surgery and farming are not so different,” he tells Shyamrao. “In the theatre, I cut and suture. Here, I plough and sow. Both need patience, both need hope.” The answer is not evasion. He means it completely.

He was born on 5 November 1962 in Karanji Bhoge, a village three kilometres from Sevagram. His father, Shankar Rao Nagpure, had threaded together several lives in sequence: schoolteacher under Gandhi’s Nai Talim programme, worker in the Khadi Gramodyog, manager of the oil press and spinning unit at Gopuri, then back to the land. Six children. The land in Karanji. The conviction that the soil gave something that employment could not. By the time Prakash was old enough to understand what his father was telling him, the lesson had already been absorbed through observation: a life built on what the earth provides is more honest than a life built on what institutions provide, and the two need not be mutually exclusive if you manage your time with care.

He studied at the Zilla Parishad school in the village through fourth standard, then Yeshwant Vidyalaya in Sevagram, then Gangabai Bulakidas Mohta Junior College in Hinganghat. He was a Marathi-medium student in a college that also ran English and Hindi sections, and the competitive pressure of the merit lists was something he resolved early: he would simply be at the top of them. Mathematics yielded to him completely; he held his hundred out of hundred in that subject across several years. Biology was less willing, a stubborn field that required more persuasion. He persuaded it.

The Boy from the Adjacent Village

Sevagram had been visible to him since childhood — its hospital, its dust, its students in white aprons cutting across the fields toward the wards. He had eaten samosas at Babulal’s canteen as a schoolboy, watching those students stride past. Whether this proximity constituted a gravitational pull toward medicine or simply a familiarity with the idea of medicine being practiced nearby, he cannot cleanly separate. What he knows is that when Manilal Pathak, his father’s acquaintance, said one afternoon: “Prakash is sharp. Let him fill the PMT form for MGIMS,” the suggestion did not require contemplation. He filled the form, sat the exam, and found that physics and chemistry came naturally. Biology, as always, required effort.

He was seventeen when he walked into the orientation camp at Gandhi’s Ashram in August 1980. He had slept two fields away from this place for his entire childhood and had never spent a night inside it. The first days had the quality of formal entry into a territory he had always observed from outside — not alien, but newly defined.

The batch came from across India. Bombay boys in their precise khadi. Delhi students who spoke English without hesitation. Students from Gujarat who understood the ashram’s rhythms as immediately as he did. They became a community in the way that Sevagram’s batch sizes always allowed: sixty-five people, small enough that anonymity was impossible, large enough that solitude was available if you needed it. He was a local boy among students for whom Sevagram was a posting. This gave him a particular poise — he did not need to adapt, because he was already home — that was occasionally useful and occasionally, in the way of young people in new collectives, slightly resented.

Kabaddi, Surgery, and What Dr. Chaturvedi Said

His game was kabaddi. While others gravitated toward cricket or badminton, he found in kabaddi the physical argument he wanted: the chant, the held breath, the sudden lunge, the whole-body commitment of crossing the line into the opposing half with nothing but your own nerve. He captained the team to the university finals and was named Best Player. Decades later, the memory of diving across the line — gasping, victorious — still arrives with the same clarity.

The academic years had their characters. Dr. G.K. Hari Rao in Anatomy drew the same diagrams with both hands simultaneously, the two halves of the brain appearing in parallel on the blackboard until they joined seamlessly. The first pre-term examination produced a mass failure: of sixty-five students, only nine passed, and Prakash was not among them. He had never failed anything in his life. That night, his roommate Sanju said, with the matter-of-factness of someone who has already digested the news: “In mathematics, numbers obeyed you. Here, bodies have their own mind.” He heard this clearly. He got up and worked differently.

After MBBS, the house jobs ran through Medicine and then ENT. His classmates Debjyoti Malakar and Nalin Chaudhary took MD Medicine. The orthopaedics seat had disappeared with Dr. Kush Kumar’s departure. Prakash was guided into ENT, a path he had not planned but which, once entered, he found absorbing: the precision of microsurgery, the satisfying mechanics of an airway restored, the particular craft of a mastoid operation done cleanly.

His MS guide was Dr. V.N. Chaturvedi, who told him at the end of the programme something that stung at the time but has since been proven correct: “Do not trap yourself in this small pond. Go out, learn more, then return.” The department must not stagnate. Prakash obeyed. He went to the District Hospital in Bhandara, then to a rural hospital in Deori on the Maharashtra–Chhattisgarh border, then to Western Coalfields in Chandrapur and Bhandara, where the salary was reliable and the professional life was adequate. Then Dr. Samal, former professor of gynaecology at Sevagram and now at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in Sawangi, found him. “Medicine may give you comfort,” she said, “but it will not give you purpose. Come.”

He left the coalfields and entered academics.

The Field and the Theatre

In 1995, his father died. The death pulled him back to Karanji Bhoge with a force that was partly grief and partly the recognition that the fields were now his responsibility. He began tending them as duty, and discovered, over a season, that the duty had become pleasure. The monsoon months, the smell of wet soil at first rain, the sowing of soybean and tur and cotton. The autumn crackling of dry pods, the winter wheat standing calm in the wind. Summers were harsh — the earth cracked, the cattle panted — but the predictability of the cycle, the fact that each season followed the last with or without your consent, had the quality of patience he had also been learning in the ENT theatre.

He built a small hut in the middle of the fields. He slept there on certain nights, the stars overhead, the air carrying the scent of flowering tur. He kept cows and buffaloes, sold milk in Sevagram, grew bananas and sugarcane alongside the staple crops. Colleagues asked about it with the slightly amused curiosity of people who practice one skill and find the idea of practicing two simultaneously more interesting in theory than they expect it to be in practice. He did not try to convert them.

When he stood in front of his students at MGIMS — returned eventually as Professor and Head of ENT, the same corridors he had walked as a seventeen-year-old from the adjacent village, now carrying different authority — he told them what the fields had clarified for him and what Sevagram had tried to tell him from the beginning. “Don’t fear English. Don’t fear failures. Look at me — a boy born in Karanji Bhoge, schooled in Marathi, once terrified of anatomy. If I can stand here, so can you.”

His son chose medicine and then surgery, returning eventually to practise alongside him. His daughter married an MGIMS alumnus. The institution that sits three kilometres from his birthplace has now produced three generations of his family’s doctors, which is not planning but simply the accumulated consequence of proximity and time.

Two Kinds of Rootedness

There is a phrase he returns to, not as an aphorism but as a description of experience: in the operating theatre, he stitches life back into bodies; in the fields, he stitches life back into earth. He does not know which skill he learned first and suspects the question is unanswerable, because the patience required for both was assembled from the same material — his father’s discipline, his mother’s steadiness, the Sevagram orientation camp in which a boy from the next village formally entered the territory he had been watching since childhood.

Shyamrao is still in the fields. The question is still asked. The answer is still the same.

Dr. Prakash Nagpure completed his MS in ENT from MGIMS and joined Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in 1991. He later returned to MGIMS as Professor and Head of ENT. Alongside an academic career, he continues to look after the family farm in Karanji Bhoge. His daughter, Pratibha, is an MGIMS alumna from the 2010 batch. She completed her MD in Anaesthesiology from Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and married her classmate, Dr. Piyush Gadegone, an orthopaedic surgeon and fellow MGIMS alumnus. His son, Pranav, belongs to the MGIMS Class of 2015. After completing his MD in Medicine from Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, he joined the DM Medical Oncology programme at Tata Memorial Hospital. Dr. Nagpure and Dr Shubhangi, his wife, an ophthalmologist, live in Sevagram.