The Father’s Plan

Shri Manohar Lal Gambhir had a plan for his children, and he stated it with the cheerful confidence of a man who has not yet consulted the children. While his daughters eventually pursued medicine in the wards of Haryana and Punjab, his vision for the family remained anchored in a singular mission.

“All my daughters will be doctors,” he told his friends, “and my son will be an engineer.”

It was not merely ambition. It was his mission. He was a mathematics and economics teacher who had become the principal of Government Higher Secondary School, Karnal. His wife, Mrs. Shanta Gambhir, taught English literature, history, and geography, and was principal at the Government Girls Higher Secondary School in Rohtak. Between them, they had produced a household so thoroughly devoted to education that even the furniture seemed to carry the smell of chalk and examination papers.

The plan, at first, unfolded perfectly. The eldest daughter secured admission to Dayanand Medical College, Ludhiana. The second eldest joined Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi in 1963. Two daughters, two white coats, exactly as declared.

Then Mankesh reached Class 9 and dutifully took Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics — the engineering stream, as his father had directed. He applied to engineering colleges. And then a grim statistic circulated in the kind of earnest, worried conversation that ran through middle-class families in early 1970s India: nearly two lakh engineers were unemployed.

His father pivoted without sentiment. I don’t want my son to become another unemployed engineer. He would become a doctor, just like his sisters.

Mankesh agreed. He knew it meant losing a year — he would need to clear the additional biology paper and then sit the pre-medical course. He did both. He cleared them. He began applying to medical colleges across the country.

The engineering ambition was set aside. The medical journey, circuitous and unplanned, had begun.

A Punjabi Boy Hears of Sevagram

He was born on 11 February 1952 in Jalandhar, Punjab. His earliest memories were not of playgrounds or toys but of classrooms — the blackboard’s chalk dust, the smell of freshly bound books, the ringing of the school bell. Education ran in the family’s blood so thoroughly that it had become simply the texture of daily life, unremarkable and omnipresent. He had begun his schooling at Junior Model School in Abohar, moved through Government Higher Secondary School in Karnal, and completed his pre-medical studies at Dyal Singh College in Karnal in 1970.

The name Sevagram, when it arrived, sounded faraway — almost exotic to his Punjabi ears. His uncle — his Taya ji — walked in one afternoon with a copy of The Tribune and tossed it onto his lap, pointing to an advertisement for MGIMS Sevagram. His father immediately told him to inform his classmate Yogendra Nath Mathur, who lived nearby and whom he greatly admired. Both applied.

On 1 June 1970, they took the entrance examination at AIIMS Delhi — MGIMS held its pre-medical test jointly with AIIMS in those years. After the exam, Mankesh shifted his attention to Aligarh Muslim University and Banaras Hindu University. On 15 July, he was in Banaras for the BHU PMT. He had also, still caught between medicine and engineering, applied for engineering courses at BHU — a hedge against all possibilities failing simultaneously. He attended counselling at Rohtak Medical College and was placed on the waiting list.

And then a telegram arrived from MGIMS — an invitation for interview. It arrived at the same time as the news that he had been selected for engineering at BHU.

Playing safe, he rushed back to Banaras, paid the engineering fees, and then boarded a train toward Wardha — with no time, as he put it, to lose.

The Journey to Wardha

What followed was a journey of considerable logistical improvisation.

At Banaras station, the crowd was crushing. He grabbed a second-class ticket to Allahabad. At Allahabad, he took a tonga from the metre gauge station to the broad gauge station — a detail that speaks to an era when Indian railways were a geography lesson unto themselves — and stood in the third-class queue to buy a second-class ticket to Nagpur.

By the time he reached Nagpur, it was seven in the evening. He caught a passenger train to Sevagram. And then the skies opened. It was raining heavily when he finally reached the hall where other candidates were staying. Inside, drenched and exhausted, he found Yogendra Nath Mathur already seated, talking with Jasmeet Singh. He introduced himself, changed out of his wet clothes, and slept.

His father had separately arrived in Sevagram the previous day from Karnal. Not finding Mankesh, he had gone back to Nagpur — and then returned again in the morning. At Sevagram, Mankesh also ran into Dr. Sheel Mohan Sachdev, his old classmate from Class 7 and 8 in Kaithal, who had arrived for the same interview.

Of the interview itself, he remembers almost nothing. A commanding presence at the centre of the panel — Dr. Sushila Nayar. Other distinguished figures around her. Five minutes that are now a blur of impressions rather than specific exchanges.

He returned to Karnal with little hope. He had seen too many closed doors already.

The telegram arrived. He had been selected.

When he called Mathur, the telegram had come there too. They were both in.

On the 31st of July

On the 31st of July 1970, three of them set off together for Sevagram: Yogendra Nath Mathur, Ajay Raj Kamra, and Mankesh. Kamra and Mankesh travelled in the unreserved general compartment, jostled by the crowd yet buoyed by anticipation. Mathur, ever the planner, had secured a berth in a three-tier coach.

They arrived — Roll No. 33 (Kamra), Roll No. 42 (Mathur), Roll No. 51 (Sachdev), Roll No. 16 (Gambhir) — as the MGIMS Class of 1970, the institute’s second batch. A new chapter had begun, and the Punjab mustard fields were very far away.

Sevagram was unlike any place Mankesh had known — simple, humble, purposeful. Under its neem trees, in its wards and lecture halls, the boy who had been pointed toward engineering and redirected toward medicine began his real transformation: not from student to doctor but from a person shaped entirely by other people’s plans into someone capable of making his own.

The campus was small and intimate. There were more ideals than equipment. The 1969 batch occupied Dharmananda Hostel, and the new batch entered their orbit — learning, adjusting, discovering that the seniors who had seemed intimidating from a distance were, up close, something closer to elder siblings. Within months, the two batches were bound in the particular friendship that forms when people are young and in a place together that demands something of them.

Five Children, Five White Coats

He completed his MBBS and went on to postgraduate training, building a medical career in the years that followed. His two younger sisters would also join the profession. All five Gambhir siblings became doctors.

His father, who had once declared his daughters would be doctors and his son an engineer, found himself with five children in medicine and none in engineering. He had to revise his dream. He did not, by any account, revise his pride.

When Mankesh thinks of that original plan — the one announced to friends with such confidence, the one that began collapsing the moment a grim statistic about unemployed engineers made its way into a family conversation in Karnal — he sees it not as a failure of planning but as evidence that the lives of children routinely exceed the plans made for them. His father understood this, eventually, and was grateful for it.

The journey from Karnal to Sevagram — via AIIMS Delhi, via Banaras, via Allahabad’s tonga between gauge stations, via a night of rain and a floor in a stranger’s hall — was a journey that could not have been planned. It was assembled from chance, persistence, and his father’s willingness to change his mind when the facts changed.

That willingness, as much as any formal education, was the thing worth inheriting.

Dr. Mankesh Lal Gambhir completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the second batch of 1970. He was born in Jalandhar, Punjab, the only son in a family of educators. His father and mother were both school principals in Haryana. All five Gambhir siblings became doctors. He lives in Punjab.