He had come expecting a medical college.
What he found, stepping off the bus from Wardha on a hot afternoon in 1969, was a quiet one-storey building called Kasturba Hospital — its corridors unhurried, its wards nearly empty, a thin trickle of patients sitting without urgency under a neem tree in the compound. He stood at the entrance with his small suitcase and looked at it for a long moment. This was where he had travelled a thousand miles from Kerala to arrive. He had imagined multi-storied buildings, wards buzzing with patients, doctors in white coats moving with the particular purposeful speed of people who have too much to do. He had imagined the visual grammar of a functioning medical institution.
This was not it.
He almost turned back.
Instead, restless and uncertain, he walked across to Gandhiji’s Ashram.
He spent three hours there — talking to the people who lived and worked within it, reading Gandhi’s writings in the stillness of the reading room, breathing the simplicity of a place that had been built on the deliberate refusal of everything he had assumed was necessary. Something shifted in him during those three hours, though he could not have named it precisely at the time. By the time he walked back across to the hospital, Sevagram no longer seemed like a mistake. It seemed like a place that required something of you — a willingness to look past the surface of things and find what was actually there.
He was willing. He stayed.
He was born on 3 May 1951 in Puri, a small village in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala — the sixth of nine children in a large, warm, perpetually noisy household where life organised itself around school, prayer, food, and the competing claims of four brothers and five sisters. His father was a businessman. His mother ran the household with the focused efficiency of someone who has learned, through necessity, to make a large enterprise function on limited resources. Two of the siblings found their way into medicine independently — an elder sister became an anaesthesiologist, a brother a gynaecologist. The seeds, perhaps, were already in the soil.
Jolly did his primary schooling in Thiruvalla, then moved to a boarding school near Kottayam from the fifth standard through the twelfth. He was sixteen when the idea of becoming a doctor settled on him — not through a single formative moment but through the gradual accumulation of inclination and example that shapes most vocational decisions made before full adulthood. Friends told him about St. Francis de Sales College in Nagpur, where serious pre-medical students went to prepare. He left Kerala and travelled north — nearly a thousand miles, from the coconut groves and backwaters of Thiruvananthapuram to the dry heat of Vidarbha, where the air tasted different and the signs on shops were in a script he could not read.
He studied hard at St. Francis De Sales College, Nagpur. His marks, when they came, were not enough for Government Medical College, Nagpur. He heard, then, of a new college in a village called Sevagram — fifty miles south of Wardha, admission by interview, sixty seats, founded on principles associated with Gandhi. He had never heard of Sevagram. He boarded a bus to Wardha, curious rather than convinced, and arrived at a one-storey building with almost no patients under its neem trees.
The interview, when it came, is now lost to him. Fifty-five years have taken the specific questions, the faces of the panel, the precise words of his answers. What remains is the fact of it — and then his name on the list, and the beginning of five years that would turn out to be nothing like what he had imagined and entirely like what he needed.
Most hostel rooms were already allocated by the time he arrived. He was placed, along with Subhash Srivastava and Varun Bhargava, in modest rooms near Mahadev Bhavan. There was no mess yet. They carried their own plates, katoris, and spoons, ate together wherever the meal was being served that day, and washed their own utensils under a shared tap. The khadi was mandatory. The morning prayers were mandatory. The vegetarian meals were non-negotiable. The daily shramdan — sweeping, cleaning, the physical maintenance of the campus — was simply what you did before the day’s other work began.
It all felt alien at first. He had not come to a village in Vidarbha to sweep courtyards at dawn. He said as much, under his breath, on more than one occasion. But slowly, almost without his noticing, the strangeness wore away and something else took its place. Sevagram was not trying to produce doctors who had heard about rural India. It was trying to produce doctors who had lived in it, even briefly, and who knew from that living what textbooks could not convey — what it meant to arrive at a dispensary having walked three hours, what it cost a family to lose a working day to illness, what kind of medicine was actually possible in conditions of scarcity.
By the second month, he had stopped noticing that he was sweeping. By the third, he had stopped noticing that he was wearing khadi. The habits of the place had become, in the way that all genuine habits do, invisible.
A table tennis table near the hostel became, in those first months, his anchor.
He had played before, casually, the way most boys play games at school — for the pleasure of the thing, without ambition. At Sevagram he played with increasing seriousness, and within a year was captaining the MGIMS team. Then fortune intervened in the form of Neeraj Bajaj.
The Bajaj family’s roots ran deep in Wardha — the same Bajaj family whose association with Gandhi had made their name synonymous with the region’s particular combination of commerce and conscience. Neeraj, who would go on to become the national table tennis champion, visited Sevagram from time to time, and Jolly began cycling to his home in Wardha, where a proper table awaited and a proper teacher was willing to sit with him.
Neeraj coached him with the focused generosity of a champion who finds in a willing student a pleasure beyond competition. He taught Jolly to read an opponent’s wrist — to watch the angle of the paddle in the half-second before contact and predict where the ball would go. He taught him to disguise his own shots, to introduce the unexpected into a rhythm the opponent had begun to trust. “Surprise is your best shot,” he said, with the satisfaction of someone passing on a principle rather than merely a technique.
For a boy a thousand miles from home, those sessions in Wardha gave him both skill and a tether — a recurring appointment with someone who treated him as worth teaching, in a town that was beginning to feel, incrementally, like somewhere he belonged.
Among the teachers who settled into his memory most deeply were Dr. R.V. Agrawal and Dr. S.P. Nigam in Medicine.
Dr. Nigam’s clinical rounds were of the kind that students describe, decades later, in the present tense — as if the man is still at the bedside, still speaking. He could read a case from across the room, it seemed: something in the patient’s posture, the colour of their skin, the quality of their stillness told him things before the chart was opened. His voice during rounds was calm, his manner precise, his corrections delivered without cruelty but without softening either. He was not interested in what students thought they had observed. He was interested in what was actually there.
“Always listen to the patient,” he would say, tapping his stethoscope with one finger. “This instrument is secondary.”
It was a statement that contained, in nine words, the entire Sevagram philosophy of medicine — the conviction that technology serves attention, not the other way around, and that the primary instrument of a doctor is the quality of their listening. Jolly stood at bedsides in those years and learned, slowly, to hear what the stethoscope confirmed rather than letting it tell him what to hear.
Those lessons did not leave him when the clinical years ended. They became the framework within which everything subsequent was practised.
In his final year, a choice presented itself. Ophthalmology interested him — the precision of the work, the dramatic recoveries possible in a field where a single procedure could restore what a patient had believed permanently lost. A seat in Delhi was offered. He held the possibility in his mind, turned it over, considered it seriously.
And then he set it down.
Medicine was his first love. He had known this from Dr. Nigam’s bedside, from the cases that kept him awake not from anxiety but from the particular alertness of a student who finds the work genuinely compelling. He stayed faithful to it, in the way of people who, having once found what they actually want, distrust the attraction of alternatives.
He completed his MBBS, did house jobs in Medicine and Paediatrics at Sadar Hospital alongside Balkrishna Maheshwari — who chose Medicine, as he did — and Anil Kaushik, who chose Paediatrics. He pursued a diploma in chest diseases at Vallabhbhai Patel Institute in Delhi, and eventually earned his MD in Medicine from Kottayam Medical College. He returned to Kerala, to the landscape of coconut groves and backwaters where the journey had begun, and joined Muthoot Medical Centre in Kozhencherry, Pathanamthitta — a well-established multispecialty hospital where he built a practice rooted in the clinical attention that Sevagram and Dr. Nigam had trained him in.
He married a gynaecologist trained at CMC Ludhiana. Their elder daughter, Dr. Nissy, completed her MBBS, MD, and FRCA from the Royal College of Anaesthetists in London, and now practises as a consultant anaesthetist in the United Kingdom. Their younger daughter, Hepsy, holds a B.Tech and an MBA in Finance and lives in Canberra, Australia. The children of a Kerala boy who had once stood outside a quiet hospital in Vidarbha, suitcase in hand, nearly turning back — now scattered across three continents, each carrying a piece of the life he built from that moment of hesitation and its resolution.
He has thought, over the years, about those three hours in Gandhi Ashram. What they gave him was not an argument for staying — not a reasoned case that this particular college, however modest its buildings, would give him what he needed. What they gave him was something quieter and more durable: the experience of a place that had been built on the conviction that simplicity was not a privation but a form of clarity. He had arrived expecting grandeur and found purpose instead, which is, as he understood it later, the better of the two things to find at seventeen when you are choosing how to spend your working life.
The stethoscope, Dr. Nigam had said, is secondary. The listening comes first.
Jolly Mathew had been listening since the afternoon he walked across to the Ashram and let Sevagram explain itself to him. He had not stopped since.
Dr. Jolly Mathew completed his MD in Medicine from Kottayam Medical College, Kerala, following postgraduate training that included a diploma in chest diseases from Vallabhbhai Patel Institute, New Delhi. He has practised for several decades at Muthoot Medical Centre, Kozhencherry, Pathanamthitta — one of Kerala’s established multispecialty hospitals. He lives in Kerala with his wife, a gynaecologist. His elder daughter is a consultant anaesthetist in the United Kingdom; his younger daughter is based in Australia.