The khadi shirt did not belong to him.
It had been lent by Dr. Ulhas Jajoo — then a second-year student at GMC Nagpur, whose family knew the Maheshwaris through their shared native place of Erandole — and Balkrishna had put it on that morning in 1969 with the particular care of someone wearing borrowed confidence. He had heard the rumour, as everyone had: Dr. Sushila Nayar had a soft corner for candidates who came in khadi. He did not own any. The Jajoo family, who had already done him one good turn by sending the application form through Shri Narayandas Jajoo, had now clothed him for the occasion as well.
He walked into the interview room at Sevagram in that shirt and trousers, carrying a handwritten letter from Shri Shivaji Bhave — younger brother of Vinoba Bhave — who wrote warmly of his father’s involvement in the Bhoodan Andolan and the family’s long-standing Gandhian ties. The note was on a torn piece of paper, the handwriting deliberate, the sentiments simple. When Dr. Jivraj Mehta and Dr. Sushila Nayar read it, something shifted in the room. He would remember their expressions for the rest of his life — not the expressions of administrators evaluating a candidate, but of people recognising something they already knew and trusted.
He answered a few questions about Gandhi and rural India. Then it was over.
What he could not have known, walking out of that room into the Sevagram afternoon, was that getting through the interview was only the first of several obstacles between him and a seat in the inaugural batch of MGIMS. The second was already being constructed, in an office somewhere, by a clerical error that would very nearly cost him everything.
Born in a Goshala
He was born on 11 November 1950 — not in a hospital or clinic, but in a cowshed in Dhulia. The goshala was run by Shivaji Bhave, who still lived in Dhulia before his move to Paonar. It was a simple, open shelter, and the birth that took place within it was unremarkable except for the fact that the man who would later write a letter on his behalf was present in the same building.
His father, Narayan Navalram Maheshwari, had come from Erandole in Jalgaon district — the first freedom fighter from his village. His grandfather had been a wealthy landowner and moneylender. His father turned his back on all of it. He chose khadi, simplicity, and the Gandhian life. He worked for Khadi Gramodyog in Dhulia without accepting so much as a government rupee, and he died in 2011 at ninety-three, content and dignified in his chosen poverty.
There were four siblings. A younger brother became a radiologist, one sister an orthodontist, the other a teacher. All of them grew up learning, by necessity and by the particular instruction of their household, to live with little. Money was always short. On Sundays in Erandole, Balkrishna sold tea. During Shravan, on Mondays, he sold coconuts. Outside the school gate, he traded used notebooks. These were not odd jobs. They were necessities. He had been raised with strong values — honesty, hard work, and the absolute prohibition against begging or borrowing — and those values had to coexist, in that household, with the daily arithmetic of scarcity.
He studied Class 1 in Dhulia, then returned to Erandole for Class 2 through 11 at Ramnath Trilok Chand Kabre Vidyalaya. For his first year of science, he joined Pratap College in Amalner. After that came Bombay — a significant leap for a boy from Erandole. He stayed at the Marwadi Hostel in Mulund and set his sights on JJ Hospital Medical College. He studied hard. And then, in the way of many young men in those years who had done everything correctly, a single administrative detail undid him: he did not have a permanent Bombay address, and the admission was refused on those grounds.
The dream did not die. It simply needed another door.
The Clerical Rescue
The advertisement appeared in The Times of India. A new medical college was starting in Sevagram — no entrance exam, admission by interview, sixty seats, a founding anchored in Gandhian principles. The application was brief and cost something he could manage to pay. He applied, almost on impulse.
And then the clerical error happened.
His name was Balkrishna Narayan Maheshwari. His address was Erandole, District Jalgaon — in the pre-PIN code era, when addresses were approximations and office staff at newly founded institutions were doing their best with limited training. Another applicant, Subhash Maheshwar Shrivastava from Nagpur, had also applied. The office conflated the two names, and Subhash Shrivastava received not one admission letter but two — one correctly addressed to him, the other meant for Balkrishna, misdirected under the name “Maheshwari S.S.”
Balkrishna heard nothing.
It was Shri Narayandas Jajoo — professor of economics at G.S. Commerce College, Wardha, father of the same Ulhas Jajoo who had lent his khadi shirt — who noticed the inconsistency and understood what had happened. He accompanied Balkrishna’s father to the principal’s office. They sorted it out. The seat was confirmed.
The Jajoo family had now intervened in his admission twice: once by sending the application form, and once by rescuing the seat from a bureaucratic accident. It was a debt Balkrishna would carry with pride and affection for the next fifty-five years, long after the shirt had been returned and the form had yellowed and the college had become a different kind of place from the provisional institution that had admitted him.
When he finally joined in September 1969, there was no room in the transit hostel. He shared a small cottage behind the Mahadev Bhavan with Rajendra Deodhar. Meals were served in a hut opposite Dr. Sushila Nayar’s guesthouse — the students sat cross-legged in khadi, brought their own plates, ate simple vegetarian food, and washed their utensils under a shared tap. Only after a follow-up visit by Dr. Jivraj Mehta did the arrangement improve: dining tables appeared, chairs were found, and — most welcome of all — eggs arrived for breakfast. It was the kind of institutional evolution that happens not by planning but by someone of authority noticing what is missing and quietly ensuring it arrives.
Improvisation and Passion
Sevagram in those first months was a world held together by improvisation. Four buses a day ran from Wardha, eight kilometres away. The grocery shop opened for two hours and carried barely enough. Babulal’s canteen — a bamboo hut shared with a tailor, its menu limited and its atmosphere irreplaceable — was the only gathering place the students had. It functioned not only as a canteen but as a social institution, a lending office, and a refuge for anyone who had nowhere else to be.
Classes took place across makeshift venues: the Mahadev Bhavan, a lecture hall above the Physiology lab, the Adhyayan Mandir. The Adhyayan Mandir would later receive Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; in those first months, it received the first batch of MGIMS, working through Anatomy and Physiology and Biochemistry in rooms that smelled of fresh whitewash and institutional possibility.
The teachers were passionate. The practicals were conducted seriously. Clinical training happened regularly at Civil Hospital and Kasturba Hospital. The multi-faith prayers — morning and evening — punctuated the days with a rhythm that most students eventually stopped noticing, which is the surest sign that something has been absorbed.
Corridors of Connection
In 1972, something happened that had nothing to do with anatomy or ward rounds but stayed with Balkrishna for decades.
A woman named Mrs. Nanda Mehta was admitted to the Medicine ward under Dr. S.P. Nigam. Her husband, Dhirubhai Mehta, came to be by her side and remained for nearly a fortnight. Balkrishna, doing his rounds, shared meals with Dhirubhai in the way that proximity and illness create their own intimacy. At the time, Dhirubhai Mehta was unaffiliated with the Kasturba Health Society — a man visiting his wife in a hospital bed, ordinary in his grief and his waiting.
He later became President of the Kasturba Health Society and played a major role in the growth of MGIMS.
Balkrishna thought of this often in later years — how the formative encounters of an institution’s early life are almost never the ones announced on notice boards. They are the ones that happen in hospital corridors and makeshift canteens, between people who do not yet know what they will mean to each other.
The years at MGIMS also brought the kind of public health work that distinguished a Sevagram training from any other. They built compost pits in villages. They conducted health check-ups in the surrounding districts. They organised hydrocele surgery camps — painstaking, unglamorous, necessary work that taught them, more reliably than any lecture, that medicine practiced without public health is medicine practiced on a fraction of the need.
The student magazine — Sushruta — gave the batch a voice, a record, a small assertion that they were not merely passing through. The annual sports day, the cultural gatherings, the cine club that emerged once it became clear that no other entertainment was available — all of these were student-made solutions to the problem of being young in a place that offered almost nothing by way of diversion.
And through all of it, Babulal’s canteen remained the fixed point. The bamboo walls, the tailor in the corner, the man himself — generous with credit and quieter than you expected him to be — who fed the students when they were short of money and sat with them when they needed someone to sit with.
The Borrowed Shirt Fits
Balkrishna Maheshwari completed his MBBS and went on to pursue his MD in Paediatrics, after which he spent five decades practising in Mumbai. He moved far from Erandole and from the borrowed khadi shirt and from the Sunday mornings selling tea at the village crossroads. But the distance was only geographical. The values his father had chosen over prosperity, the discipline of scarcity, the particular gratitude of someone who knows precisely how many interventions were required before he could take his seat — these things did not travel poorly. They were what made him the doctor he became.
When he thinks of the Jajoo family now, he thinks of a khadi shirt that did not belong to him and a seat that had been nearly lost before it was found. Two debts, he has said, that no professional achievement could fully settle. And perhaps the right response to a debt like that is not to settle it but to carry it forward — into every consultation room, every child patient, every question answered at a teaching hospital bedside.
The borrowed shirt, he often thought, fit better than anything he owned.
Dr. Balkrishna Maheshwari completed his MD in Paediatrics and built a sustained clinical practice in Mumbai over five decades. He remained engaged with paediatric education and professional networks throughout his career. His family’s Gandhian roots — his father’s lifelong commitment to Khadi Gramodyog, his birth in a cowshed where Vinoba Bhave’s brother lived — shaped the values he carried into medicine. He lives in Mumbai.