“Sanju, tu Hindi bolata hai ki Marathi?“

The boy from Delhi asked this on the first day in the hostel, and the question landed with the precision of something that had been thought but not yet said. Sanjiv Thosar had introduced himself in the only register available to him: thick Raigad-Marathi, the accent of Konkan, a tongue that had never needed to be otherwise. The room erupted. He stood with ears burning and understood, without needing to be told, that the distance between where he had come from and where he now was measured in something more particular than kilometres.

Hindi was a rock face without ropes. English was approximately the same. He could manage written English with the caution of a student who has read it carefully and distrusted spoken approximations — but spoken English, in real time, in a room full of people who had been schooled in it from infancy, was the daily reminder that he was arriving somewhere from outside. It took three years to stop flinching when someone asked him a question in English. It took longer than that to stop rehearsing the answer before he gave it.

What carried him through the early weeks was not adaptation but stubbornness, which is a different quality and serves a different purpose. He had not driven himself from Konkan to Sevagram to be sent home by a language. He stayed. He sat with the discomfort. He allowed Sevagram to do what Sevagram did to everyone who remained long enough: it reshaped the person until the person could manage it.

Konkan Roots and a Central Government Nomination

He was born on 23 February 1963 in Rohi village of Raigad district, the younger of two children. His father, Sudhakar Thosar, was a postmaster whose defining qualities were honesty and the particular dignity of a government servant who carries his work seriously without needing anyone to notice. His mother Sushma worked in the Zilla Parishad office. Konkan in those years was a landscape of paddy fields, coastal light, and a pace of life that moved with the tide rather than against it. The family moved frequently with government transfers — Alibag, Khalapur, Pali, Panvel, Rasayani — and Sanjiv grew up with the light rootedness of a child who learns early that home is portable.

He scored 148 out of 150 in PCM in his 10th examination. This was the kind of score that opens futures, but the future it opened was not immediately clear. Engineering? Medicine? Commerce? He drifted without a map until his maternal uncle, Madhukar Bhave — a journalist at Lokmat — obtained a central government nomination on his behalf. Unlike most of his batchmates who had sat the PMT and wrestled the Gandhian Thought paper, Sanjiv arrived at MGIMS through this channel. He had not taken the entrance examination. Destiny’s passenger, as he has described it — without a ticket in hand, but on the train nonetheless.

The first day in Sevagram coincided with the radio announcement that Jimmy Carter had defeated Ted Kennedy. The India of 1980 received this information from crackling transistors in hostel rooms while students in white khadi tried to remember whether the esophagus was anterior or posterior to the trachea. Both facts — the American election and the anatomical relationship — have the same status in Sanjiv’s memory: they arrived together in a particular moment and have never since been fully separable.

The Trunk That Was Packed Three Times

The first MBBS year was marked by a regularity of departure that his father found bewildering. Sanjiv would pack his trunk, appear at the Wardha railway station, stand in the unreserved compartment for the Bombay direction, arrive at home in Panvel by morning, and be standing in the kitchen by the time his father came down for breakfast. “Have you gone to Sevagram to become a doctor,” his father asked each time, with the calm of someone who knows the answer but wants to make the question felt, “or do you want to stay home?” By the third occasion, the trunk was packed with the slightly sheepish efficiency of habit.

His roommate Shridhar Jagtap had the particular patience of a person who has decided that someone else’s weakness is not their problem to solve but is their problem to wait out. He waited. He did not harangue. He said, more than once, with the laughter of someone who finds the situation funny rather than exasperating: “We can’t keep running home for every sneeze.” Eventually Sanjiv stopped running. The trunk remained unpacked. The homesickness did not disappear so much as it transformed — into something that could be carried rather than something that had to be fled.

The first MBBS examination delivered what it delivered to a significant portion of the batch: failure. Biochemistry and Physiology. Ravindra Mulay failed. Sunil Bhartiya failed. Jitendrasinh Solanki and Vinod Yadav failed. Not a single girl failed. For a boy who had scored 148 out of 150 in mathematics two years earlier, the experience had the quality of a very precise correction. He had believed, without quite knowing he believed it, that intelligence in one domain was portable to others. Sevagram told him plainly that it was not.

He worked differently after that. He kept the radio on at low volume while he studied — not as distraction but as company, the soft murmur of Lata Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi in the background while the notes accumulated. He rose at seven, walked to the Indian Coffee House for two plates of upma and a steel tumbler of filter coffee, returned, slept until the afternoon, and then studied for sixteen hours. This routine was not disciplined in the way that students with timetables are disciplined; it was disciplined in the way that people who have found their method and know it works are disciplined. He repeated it for four years.

The Bansuri and the Parallel Life

Sevagram gave him music as unexpectedly as it gave him medicine. He had played the bulbul-tarang and mouth organ as a boy, without instruction, by ear. In his second MBBS year, he picked up the bansuri — the Indian bamboo flute — and did not put it down. The instrument requires breath control and patience, both of which he was acquiring in other contexts, and the two developments reinforced each other in ways he has never entirely analysed but has observed with satisfaction.

He played at the Indian Coffee House table late at night, in the hostel room when the studying was done, in quiet corners of the campus where the neem trees absorbed sound and returned silence. Sevagram in those years had a particular quality of quiet — the village’s smallness, the absence of traffic, the rhythm of a community that lived by early light and early dark — that made music feel natural rather than performed. He was part of the Marathi drama contingent: the annual function saw him on stage regularly, his comfort there increasing year by year as the language difficulty that had defined his first months receded and left behind a person who could inhabit a character in public without self-consciousness.

He studied German — briefly, without Dr. Kalantri’s class this time, on his own initiative and his own judgement — and found it less gripping than the bansuri. He has kept one and let the other go. This seems to him like the right outcome.

Neena and the DCH

During the posting in Hinganghat, the group of interns that included Ravindra Mulay, Dilip Gupta, Sweety Taneja, and Neena Naik began to cohere in the particular way that small groups cohere when they are the only people in a particular place managing a particular problem. Sweety was engaged to Mudit Kumar and transferred away midway. Neena remained. She was convent-educated, fluent in English, confident where Sanjiv still felt occasional residue of the old self-consciousness. Rounds together, case sheets together, the gradual intimacy of shared clinical work: these are not romantic scaffolding in any obvious sense, but they are how people learn who someone is in conditions that are not social performance but actual work. He learned who she was. She learned who he was.

In 1987, while they were still house officers, earning ₹750 a month between them, they married. The castes were different; neither family made this the point. Life in Sevagram had a way of making differences between people feel less determining than the institution’s own culture of common purpose — a habit of evaluation that they carried into the marriage.

He had wanted Paediatrics from early in his clinical years. The MD seats were gone before he reached them — Paresh Desai and Jayant Vagha had arrived at the specialty before him, and the slots did not multiply to accommodate demand. Dr. Chaturvedi recommended the DCH rather than trying to wait out another cycle. He took the diploma. He sat the Nagpur University examination and stood first — the first rank in the city for the DCH that year. It was, in its particular way, the completion of something that had begun with failure in first MBBS: the proof that the method he had found, and the patience he had developed, and the person he had become in Sevagram, were equal to what the work required.

Nagpur and the Prescription Pad

He returned to Nagpur after internship, attached himself to Mayo Hospital and then to multiple nursing homes in Kamptee, and built a paediatric practice on the foundations that Sevagram had laid. He does not over-investigate. He does not over-diagnose. He uses simple, affordable brands and resists the pressure — which is always present in private practice, always finding new forms — to substitute expensive pharmaceuticals for clinical judgment. Some colleagues, watching his prescription pad over the years, have said he is too idealistic for the market. He has not argued. He has simply continued.

The patients who travel from Pune, Raipur, and the north-east to ask him whether a test is necessary are doing so because someone told them he was the kind of doctor who would answer honestly rather than expensively. This reputation was not planned. It is the accumulated consequence of every prescription written with care across four decades.

He still plays the bansuri. He follows cricket analytically — the bowler’s grip, the batsman’s footwork, the field placement logic — and writes about it on his social media pages with the engagement of someone for whom sport is not passive entertainment but active thinking. He sings on collaborative apps, his voice joining strangers who become, over sessions and shared songs, something approaching friends.

The Indian Coffee House in Sevagram, where he once spent early mornings over upma and filter coffee, is a permanent feature of the interior landscape he carries. The two plates, the steel tumbler, the particular stillness of seven in the morning before the hostel woke fully — these details remain, clear and specific, as the evidence of a life that found its shape in a place and has carried that shape ever since.

Neena retired in 2020 as Director-Principal of Government Medical College, Chandigarh — the first woman to hold the position. He has said, without ceremony, that he has always understood her achievement to be at least partly his, and his to be at least partly hers.

Dr. Sanjiv Thosar completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, and his DCH from Nagpur University, where he ranked first in the examination. He e