The Man in the Khadi Shirt — A Farewell to Dr. Ulhas Jajoo9 min read

I have known Ulhas Jajoo for nearly five decades, and in all that time I have never seen him wear a shoe.

This creates a problem at retirement. The usual cliché — he hung up his boots — simply does not apply. For days I searched for the right phrase and found nothing that fit. Then, yesterday evening, I saw him at a dinner that Dr. Sachin Agrawal, an MGIMS 1999 alumnus, had hosted in Wardha to celebrate his parents’ golden wedding anniversary. There was Ulhas — pristine white khadi kurta and pyjama, chappals on his feet, that familiar luminous warmth on his face. He was in the middle of a conversation, and whoever he was talking to had his complete attention. He is always like that. He makes you feel, when he looks at you, that you are the only person in the room.

The phrase arrived, quietly and without effort.

He slipped into his kurta and pyjama.

This is not an affectation. It is not a performance of simplicity. It is simply how Ulhas moves through the world — chappals on the polished floor, khadi against his skin, arriving on his scooter with the unhurried confidence of a man who has never once felt the need to impress anyone. In a profession that routinely confuses designation with dignity and a good car with a good character, this is rarer than it sounds. Much rarer.

On 28 February 2026, after forty-eight years at MGIMS, he retired. Seventeen thousand, eight hundred and forty days — from 26 April 1977 to 28 February 2026. By any measure, a long innings. Not the innings of the flashy strokemakers, the ones who light up a ground for an afternoon and are gone. The innings of Sunil Gavaskar and Rahul Dravid — men who stayed at the crease long after others had come and gone, who accumulated quietly and without theatre, who were still there, unhurried and immovable, when the light finally faded.

The Department of Medicine will continue. The ward rounds will continue. The residents will arrive each morning with their lists and their anxieties, as they always have and always will. But the particular quality of attention that Ulhas brought to a bedside — that steadiness, that stillness, that absolute refusal to be anywhere other than precisely where he was — that will take some replacing.

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How He Arrived Here

Ulhas was not supposed to be a doctor. He was headed to the Laxminarayan Institute of Technology in Nagpur to study engineering — mathematics was his passion, his marks were excellent, and his future seemed settled. Then Dr. Ramchandra Wardekar, a family friend and founder of the Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation, came to visit.

In the way that a single conversation can sometimes redirect an entire life, Wardekar told Ulhas that his late grandfather had influenced Wardekar’s own path to medicine. He urged Ulhas to consider whether intelligence, in his hands, might best serve people rather than machines.

Ulhas had one objection: he was afraid of frogs and dissections.

Wardekar told him the fear would pass.

It did. Ulhas withdrew from LIT, spent a year at JB Science College in Wardha learning about earthworms and cockroaches, cleared the entrance examination, and arrived at Government Medical College Nagpur — from the same institution, incidentally, from which I graduated five years later. We did not know each other then. We would spend the next four decades as colleagues in the same department, which is a different kind of knowing.

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The Khadi and the Ragging

Medical college in those years had its rituals, and one of them was ragging. For most students it was an inconvenience. For Ulhas, wearing khadi — a three-generation family tradition — it became a daily ordeal. He was mocked, jeered, and laughed at. At seventeen, humiliated by the daily ritual, he made the practical decision to buy a white cotton shirt and trousers. He went home and told his father.

His father — an economics professor, the son of a Gandhian — listened quietly.

“How long will you allow fear to guide your path in life?”

Ulhas returned the terrycot clothes. He put on his khadi again. The ragging eventually ended, as these things do. The khadi never came off.

I have thought about that moment many times over the years. Most of us, when tested at seventeen, make the reasonable compromise. Ulhas made a different kind of decision — not heroic, not dramatic, just quietly irreversible. That quality, I came to understand, was the foundation of everything else.

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The Teacher

When I think of Ulhas in the ward, I do not think of diagnoses first. I think of the way he walked in.

Untucked khadi shirt, chappals on the polished floor, no stethoscope around his neck until he needed it. He would arrive at a bedside and become still — genuinely still, in the way that patients notice and remember. He listened to them the way I have rarely seen a physician listen: not waiting for the symptom that would confirm his working diagnosis, but actually attending to the person in front of him.

He called his residents sherus — lions. He taught them to stain their own slides, count their own cells, identify malaria parasites under the microscope. In an era of increasing subspecialisation and technological dependence, he insisted on self-sufficiency. Not because technology was unavailable, but because he believed a physician who cannot examine without a machine is only half a physician.

His teaching rounds became the stuff of MGIMS legend. He used the Socratic method — asking questions rather than delivering answers, pressing residents to press each other, visibly delighted when a student proved him wrong. That last quality — the genuine pleasure he took in being corrected by someone younger — I found remarkable in a senior colleague, and I find it remarkable still.

Every February 14th — his birthday — former students and residents post their memories of him on social media. What strikes me about these posts, year after year, is what they do not mention. They rarely describe a clever diagnosis or a treatment he got right. They describe moments — a question he asked, a phrase he used, the way he stood at a bedside, the way he made them feel that the patient’s story was the most important thing in the room. This is not the legacy of a clinician. It is the legacy of a teacher. The two are not the same thing, though Ulhas spent his career insisting they should be.

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The Community and the Letters

Within a year of joining MGIMS, in September 1978, Ulhas wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Sushila Nayar outlining his vision for village healthcare. He was twenty-seven years old. The letter proposed a three-tier system — village health workers, a mobile health team, and the hospital — and argued for community involvement and self-contribution rather than charity and external funding.

I read that letter years later. It was not the letter of a young man performing idealism. It was the letter of someone who had already thought carefully about why good intentions so often fail — and had a practical alternative to offer.

He and his students rode hired cycles to villages in the rain, across slippery tracks and flooded paths, to understand why people were ill. What they found, repeatedly, was that health was not the villager’s first priority. The daughter’s marriage was. The bank loan was. The subsidised seeds were. Ulhas absorbed this without cynicism. He understood that medicine practised in isolation from its social context is a partial medicine — better than nothing, but not what the situation required.

Dr. Sushila Nayar, recognising what she saw in him, tried for years to persuade him to move from internal medicine to community medicine. She offered to mentor his postgraduate thesis. She offered to make him head of the department. Ulhas declined. He had concluded that a public health professional without a firm grounding in curative medicine would always be working at one remove from the patient. He stayed in medicine. He took the community with him into the ward.

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The Final Years of His Parents

I watched Ulhas care for his parents in their late eighties, and I learned something from it that no textbook had taught me.

He did not hospitalise them. He did not reach for the ICU when it was not needed. He sat with them. He talked with them. He explained, gently and honestly, what was happening and what it meant. His brother Suhas — a plastic surgeon — was beside him throughout. Together they became sons, physicians, nurses, and companions, in whatever proportion each day required.

Ulhas had read Manu Kothari on death and Atul Gawande on mortality. He had thought carefully about what a good ending looks like, and he applied that thinking at home, without fanfare. His father died with dignity. His mother followed four years later. They died at home, surrounded by their family.

For a physician, this is the hardest kind of knowledge to carry — knowing enough to prevent an unnecessary intervention, and caring enough to resist the instinct to do something, anything, when the right thing is simply to be present. Ulhas carried it without apparent effort. I suspect it cost him more than he let on.

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What Remains

On 28 February, Ulhas slipped his chappals on for the last time as a MGIMS faculty member and walked out of the Department of Medicine. He plans to spend a few hours a day at his younger brother’s clinic, seeing outpatients. I have no doubt he will be just as good at it as he was at everything else.

Manu Kothari, reviewing Ulhas’s 2012 book Towards Holistic Rural Health, called him a modern-day Schweitzer — embodying the spirit of Gandhi, the vision of Vivekananda, the clarity of Vinoba. It is the kind of sentence that can make a man sound impossibly distant, impossibly good. The truth is simpler and more useful: Ulhas was available. To his patients, to his students, to his colleagues, to his parents, to the villages around Sevagram. He showed up, consistently, for forty-eight years, in his chappals and his khadi, with nothing to prove and everything to give.

The ward will carry on. But for those of us who knew what it felt like when he walked in — that particular quality of stillness and attention — something will be missing. Not loudly. Not dramatically.

Just quietly, the way the best things leave.

S.P. Kalantri

1 March 2026