From the Classroom We Shared
A talk about dying is supposed to end when the microphone goes off. Mine didn’t. I wrote last week about what it took to get in front of a camera in the first place — the failing light, the dog, the whole clumsy business of learning new tools at seventy. What follows here is what happened after I posted the recording itself: my GMC 1973 classmates, MGIMS alumni now scattered from Rewari to Jalna to Toronto to a general practice in the UK, and a few strangers who found the video some other way, wrote back — on WhatsApp, on Facebook, by email, on Twitter. I have gathered some of what came in below, tidied only lightly, because it says more about why this conversation matters than anything further I could add to it.
Dr Vimala Iyer, GMC 1973, called it an enlightening talk, and pointed to something I believe is at the heart of it: the family physician’s role in holding a family together across decades, not just treating what ails them in any given year.
Dr Pratibha Amin Deshmukh, also GMC 1973, put it more simply: “exactly the same line of thinking… ultimate finest expression.”
Two classmates, Dr Pradeep Deshpande and Dr Mahendra Sawarkar, sent me the identical sentence, word for word, within minutes of each other — proof, if nothing else, that the same thought had occurred to both of them independently: the talk explained, in their words, “the final event in everybody’s life” simply but effectively.
Dr Shilpa Saxena, a dental surgeon at MGIMS, wrote that she isn’t one for words but that the talk had touched her heart and soul. Dr Harish Motwani, a haematologist in Pune, reached for the old line — “as sure as death” — and its old irony: everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
Dr Shyam Bawage, an ophthalmologist from our batch, sent perhaps the warmest note of all, calling the talk an eye-opener and asking, as he has before, that I have it translated into Hindi and Marathi so he can forward it to his own circles.
What It Cost Them to Say
Not every reply was comfortable, and I was glad of that.
Dr Ratna Shekhawat, GMC 1973, wrote that in reality, no one wants to discuss death while they are healthy — and that children abroad often stay attentive only while their parents are useful to them, growing distant once they become dependent. She thinks the old idea of vanaprastha — withdrawal from attachment in later life, and putting one’s wishes in writing before illness forces the question — deserves to come back. She added something practical too: the family physician himself is disappearing, replaced by a rotation of specialists who each know one organ and none of the person.
Dr Prabhat Deshmukh, also GMC 1973, wrote in over several short messages rather than one: the talk was very effective, he said, and in time people will come to see this as exactly the right moment to have the conversation. But he was not finished — he wanted to know what happens to families without the means to have it gently. Poor and lower-income households, he said, will not digest this easily. Who tells them “enough is enough,” when saying so might look like abandonment rather than mercy?
Memories the Talk Loosened
Dr Sandhya Moghgaonkar Atre, GMC 1973, now in Canada, wrote that she had watched her own father live by exactly this philosophy. As a girl, she was shocked by how bluntly he spoke of it — quoting an old Marathi saying, that no law of nature has ever spared anyone, that however many patches you sew onto a withering leaf it will still fall, and that there is nothing left to do at that point except keep the household joyful around the person who is leaving it. She did not understand it then. She understands it now.
Dr Hema Deoras, GMC 1973, was reminded of her late aunt, Dr Shakuntala Gupta, a radiologist at Lady Hardinge Hospital in Delhi who lived to ninety-four. Her aunt had written her own wishes down for her daughter: in case of serious illness, do not try to save me — only keep me comfortable if I am in pain. Her doctors honoured it, and she died peacefully.
Dr Narayan Dongre, GMC 1973, wrote that he had spent years searching, on his own, for exactly this thought about the human sunset — how a fortunate life ought to end — and had never found it addressed by anyone in medicine before.
What They Plan to Do Differently
Two younger alumni wrote not about how the talk made them feel, but about what they meant to do with it.
Dr Shiv Rattan Yadav, MGIMS 1987 batch, practising in Rewari, Haryana, called it a genuinely inspiring talk and said he would try to bring it into his own practice. Making death a beautiful, least painful, and dignified event, he wrote, may well be more fulfilling than curing patients back to health.
Dr Mohammad Sami, MGIMS 1987 batch, from Jalna, Maharashtra, called it an innovative thought and hoped every teaching institution would take it up, even informally, if not yet as part of the curriculum. He added something I hadn’t considered: that talking about death while it is still far off doesn’t only prepare people practically — it softens both the person speaking and the person listening.
Beyond Sevagram
Some of the most striking replies came from physicians who have spent their careers exactly where this conversation is least avoidable.
Dr Agam Jung, MGIMS 1985 batch, a physician in the UK, was characteristically brief: this, he said, is the most vital conversation there is, and one that must be handled early. Then, a few seconds later, a second message: he hadn’t.
Dr Ashish Sachdeva, MGIMS 1983 batch, has been the medical director of a hospice in the United States for almost thirty years. He wrote that these are the same conversations he has, framed there as living wills and medical power of attorney, built into every patient’s annual physical — and that he has watched even American physicians take decades to grow comfortable having them. He told me the talk brought back Sevagram itself, especially the part about Dr Ingley.
Dr Radhika Marwah, MGIMS 1983 batch, an anaesthesiologist and now an addiction physician in Canada, called it another reflective and crucially important piece. Dr Anil Gomber, MGIMS 1985 batch, described it as an excellent way of reorganising how we think about our own lifetime, and the line we don’t get to see coming. And Dr Bharati Pandya, a urosurgeon and MGIMS 1982 batch alumna, wrote simply that she reads everything I post in our alumni groups, and that the talks reach the heart.
A Reach I Hadn’t Expected
Dr Ashish Verghese, MGIMS 1989 batch, an otolaryngologist, wrote that his son Arnav — a final-year student at CMC Vellore, studying AI applications in medicine for an ICMR project — had used an AI tool to help with something related to the talk. He called it timely, filling a void that exists in most medical training.
And a note arrived from someone who isn’t a physician at all. Sandya Mannarswamy, on Twitter, wrote that the talk was useful even for those outside medicine, and that it reminded her of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal — its account of how American medicine, too, struggles to let people die on their own terms.
Not Everyone Agreed
Dr Vipin Zamvar, a cardiac surgeon in Edinburgh and a cousin of Bhavana’s, pushed on the practical question directly. These conversations do need to become routine across India, he agreed — but he doubts family physicians can ever carry that alone. They might manage it for a handful of patients or relatives they know well, he wrote, but not for everyone. In his own hospital, every single patient has a documented end-of-life plan on file; for the vast majority it specifies full escalation, but for some, the team discusses and records a DNACPR order in advance. He offered to send me some of that paperwork.
Dr Bajarang Prasad Pandey, MGIMS 1970 batch, a retired professor of pharmacology at BHU Benares, sent the reply that pushed back furthest of all — and I was glad to have it. Only human beings dread death, he wrote, and diminish part of their lives in that dread; other creatures seem to carry no knowledge of it, and are free of that particular ruin. Death, in his view, is fundamentally a moral thought — people who live immorally do so partly because they behave as if they will live forever. To prepare for death struck him as distasteful rather than wise. He proposed a different exercise entirely: to study what a death actually did to the story of the one who died, and to everyone left behind in the world that person had lived in. That, he thought, might make for a genuinely interesting discourse in anthropology — a different discipline’s answer to the same question.
I began the talk by saying the best time to discuss death is when death is nowhere in sight. I did not expect, quite so soon, to be handed this much proof that people had been waiting for someone to say it — nor, from at least one classmate, proof that not everyone thinks it should be said at all.