The room fell silent.

Dr. Sushila Nayar leaned forward across the interview table, her eyes carrying the particular warmth of someone who has just had an idea and is quietly delighted by it. The boy standing before her was tall and lanky, seventeen years old, wearing a khadi kurta-pyjama so new that the creases were still announcing themselves. She tilted her head slightly and smiled.

Toh phir karke dikhao. Well then. Show us.

Hardial Singh blinked. This was his interview for admission to India’s first rural medical college. He had been asked to dance bhangra.

When a woman who once served as Gandhi’s personal physician asks you to dance, you do not hesitate. He shot his hands up. His feet hit the floor. He swirled with the particular joy of a teenager performing for the first time before a room full of professors, and the panel burst into laughter. He was thanked and politely asked to leave. The next day, his name was on the final list.

He was going to be a doctor.

Three Sardars in Khadi

He was born on 7 July 1950 in Amritsar, though the family had scattered by the time he was old enough to understand geography. His father had moved to Warora, a small town in Vidarbha, where he worked as a forest contractor. Hardial did his schooling in Delhi — up to the eleventh grade at Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College in Dev Nagar, Karol Bagh. A year followed in Udhampur with his elder brother, an army man.

His father had a strategy for his children that was practical and unambiguous: one son a lawyer, one an engineer, one a businessman, one a doctor. The doctor’s slot fell on Hardial.

Dr. Jivraj Mehta had a vision for the inaugural batch: half from Maharashtra, half from the rest of India, drawn from villages and families touched by the freedom movement. Two from Kashmir, two from Kerala, two from Punjab. Hardial had no recommendation letter, no political résumé. He had a khadi kurta bought for the occasion, borrowed confidence, and a boyish smile. And good feet.

In the hostel, he was placed with Amarjeet Singh and Avtar Singh — three Sardars in khadi, marooned cheerfully in a sea of Maharashtrian, Tamil, Bengali, and Gujarati faces.

Loyal Friends and Inventive Mischief

Hardial was not, by his own accounting, a sportsman. He was a loyal friend. Mangalsingh Rajput, Vinod Ughade, and Vilas Kanikdale became his closest companions. Mangal was the class comedian, constitutionally incapable of passing a situation without seeing what could be made funnier. The bucket of frogs left outside the girls’ hostel made headlines across the campus for days. Hardial had been nearby. He was usually nearby.

Every month, a group of seven or eight boys would take the bus to Nagpur. The ritual never varied: a film, a plate of chicken curry, the late train back. It was the reliable punctuation of a life that was, in most other respects, austere.

The 1969 girls were dubbed Santara Bazaar; the 1970 girls were Meena Bazaar. These were nicknames of the era — playful, entirely of their time — used within the close quarters of a campus where boys and girls attended the same lectures and developed, under the Gandhian eye of the institution, the particular camaraderie of people who become something more like family.

Teachers Who Demonstrated

The teachers settled into Hardial’s memory as a collective of dedicated and exacting people. Professor I.D. Singh, who loved both Physiology and cricket and saw no contradiction between them. Dr. R.V. Agrawal in Pathology, whose no-nonsense approach expressed a conviction that medicine practised without rigour was not medicine at all.

What Hardial absorbed in those years was not a body of knowledge so much as a way of being present with patients. His teachers demonstrated: they examined, listened, explained. The lesson — absorbed so thoroughly it became reflex — was that compassion and competence were not in competition.

The Last Smallpox

After graduation, three of them — Amardeep, Avtar Singh, and Hardial — joined a smallpox eradication project funded by the World Health Organisation. They travelled across Nalanda and rural Bihar, often in jeeps, sometimes on foot, staying in government rest houses. They vaccinated children, traced contacts, sat with families who needed the fear addressed before they would accept the needle.

Smallpox is gone now — entirely gone, from the entire planet. Hardial Singh was part of the campaign that accomplished that. He was twenty-three years old, trained in a village in Vidarbha, doing the most consequential work of his life in rural Bihar.

Thirty-Four Years in One Place

He returned to Delhi and joined ESI Hospital as a houseman. What followed was not the peripatetic career of many of his batchmates but something rarer and more demanding: sustained commitment to a single institution across a working life. Thirty-four years at ESI Hospital, from houseman to Medical Superintendent. In 1992, he completed an MBA in Hospital Administration. He saw thousands of patients, mentored hundreds of students, and retired with peace in his heart.

He is seventy-five. Every time he meets his 1969 batchmates — in Delhi, in Igatpuri — he becomes, briefly, the seventeen-year-old in the new khadi kurta who shot his hands up and danced bhangra because Dr. Sushila Nayar asked him to and he had no reason not to. Thirteen of that batch are no longer around. Each year, when the remaining members gather, they raise a silent toast to the absent ones.

Dr. Hardial Singh completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the inaugural batch of 1969. He participated in the WHO smallpox eradication programme in Bihar following graduation. He joined ESI Hospital in Delhi as a houseman and served there for thirty-four years, rising to the position of Medical Superintendent. He completed an MBA in Hospital Administration in 1992. He lives in Delhi.