Dr. KV Desikan. Ninety-one-year-old man. This morning, I spent an hour and a half with him—forgetting our age differences—and spoke to him on a variety of topics—his tryst with Sevagram, his leprosy work, his medical maladies and how he copes with them, and the modern doctors. With organisational and administrative skills and energy as enormous as his humility, over his six-decade long career, Dr. Desikan has touched almost every aspect of leprosy—screening, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. Remarkably articulate and coherent, he described his early days: how he would go to villages around Sevagram—Yesamba and Jaipur—on his cycle when there were no roads, no street lights and no bridge over the swollen Dham river. “I arrived in Sevagram in the late forties, he said, “and was the first person to walk to each village, visit people door-to-door and examine each member of the family trying to figure out if the Mycobacterium Leprae had left behind its footprints on their body. Although I was a trained Pathologist, I became a leprologist- a decision I never regretted in my life.”
“These days, I do make occasional mistakes in my spoken English, but when my fingers begin to dance on my desktop keyboard, they fix every typo and grammatical mistakes. So, even today, I write perfectly correct prose,” Dr. Desikan proudly said. Even in his nineties, Dr. Desikan walks three kilometres every morning, writes in his study and is remarkably well-informed about the happenings. We shared jokes, laughed merrily and made fun of each other. As I left his Sevagram home, I felt very motivated and inspired! I had spent my Sunday morning with a man who did not work for fame or recognition, but because it was the “right thing to do”.