This Sunday, Dr. Sudhakar Joshi passed away. An alumnus of the GMC Nagpur class of 1969, he was four years senior to me.

Between 1979 and 1982, during our postgraduate years in Medicine at Government Medical College, Nagpur, we found ourselves gravitating more toward the residents and lecturers than the professors. They were closer to us in age, but light years ahead in skill.

They were closer to us in age, but far ahead in skill. They moved briskly through the wards, supervising as we checked vitals, tapped fluids, read ECGs, filled forms—sometimes all at once. And they taught us the beauty of bedside medicine and the art of writing prescriptions.

Among them was Dr. Sudhakar Joshi. Always a step behind the crowd, he rarely spoke loudly. But when he did, we listened. There was a composure about him, as if silence itself leaned toward him.

He was part of the celebrated GMC Nagpur class of 1969—alongside names like Dr. Uday Mahorkar, Dr. Sachin Suryavanshi, Dr. Harminder Dua, Dr. Golhar, and Dr. Viresh Gupta. As young lecturers and senior residents, they dictated notes, supervised lumbar punctures, stitched errant records, and steadied our hands when consultants towered over us. That middle rung—firm, present, and often unsung—bridged the gap between nervous students and towering professors.

Even in this distinguished company, Joshi stood apart. He never asserted his knowledge, though it was obvious he carried plenty. He could quote Harrison or Cecil-Loeb from memory, but rarely did. Instead, he would draw a stool close to the bedside, examine a pulse, close his eyes for a moment, and speak softly—as if the diagnosis was revealing itself to him in prayer.

There was something profoundly still about him. He moved gently, almost meditatively—humble, self-effacing, and courteous to a fault. If a resident stumbled before a professor, Joshi would quietly intercede, absorbing the heat without fanfare. If we succeeded, he faded into the background. If we failed, he stood between us and rebuke.

He married Sudha Joshi, three years his junior—also a GMC alumna. She brought with her the quiet steel of Wardha. Her mother, Shashikala, delivered babies at Matru Seva Sangh; her father, Dr. Nana Joshi, cared for people with leprosy, never once seeking credit for his devotion. Hers was a home shaped by Gandhian values—rational, austere, committed to service.

Sudhakar came from a different stream. A well-trained physician, yes—but also a deeply religious, orthodox Brahmin. He read sacred texts with reverence, performed his daily rituals with discipline, and drew solace from prayer. He didn’t reserve his faith like a sowla worn only for rituals—he wore it lightly, yet daily, like a second skin. His spirituality was not performative; it was seamlessly woven into the fabric of his days.

So when he resigned from his lectureship in the mid-80s to move to Bhandara for private practice, we were stunned. He seemed ill-suited for the private world. Too gentle, too inward, too honest. The traits that made him the perfect academic physician—a test-match player of the old school—seemed out of place in the hurly-burly of private practice, which demanded visibility, hustle, and at least a little guile. We thought he would not last. Surely, he would fail and repent his decision.

He proved us wrong.

He took to practice as a duck to water. Patients came. Word spread. They found in him what they rarely did in private clinics—integrity, calm, and care coloured not by commerce, but driven by ethics. There was no bluff, no spectacle. Just clean medicine. In time, the Joshis—he the physician, she the obstetrician—became a household name across Bhandara. The town needed them, and they quietly filled a void it had long lived with. Bhandara could not have asked for more, and it would not have settled for less.

He carried on in the same unadorned way, even through adversity. In 2016, he lost a leg in a road accident. In the final months, he bore the pain of metastatic kidney cancer. But his spirit remained unshaken. His faith, far from being an escape, gave him the strength to face suffering with grace. He did not want to die encircled by tubes and machines in the ICU. He wished for an end amidst loved ones, not monitors—and so it was. The end came with dignity, on his own terms.

He leaves behind Sudha; their son Ameya, an endocrinologist in Mumbai; and their daughter Sai, an engineer with Infosys.

But for me, he also leaves behind the sound of his voice in Friday afternoon clinical meetings—low, steady, without flourish. I see him still in those sunlit corridors of GMC Nagpur— wards 13, 23 and 25 and ICU. Sleeves rolled, stethoscope dangling, changing how we learned medicine—not by commanding attention, but by quietly imbibing the art and science of medicine.

Goodbye, Sudhakarrao. You were so soft. So gentle. So serene. So self-effacing. Almost invisible. But always, always there.