A Steel Trunk and a Folding Cot

His father paid the fees and they walked together to the newly built hostel, carrying a steel trunk and a folding cot between them. The hostel faced the principal’s office, close to the tennis court, near the girls’ hostel. From the dining hall came the aroma of dal and rice, mixed with the scent of neem from the trees outside. Evening prayers had already begun somewhere across the campus, the chants echoing as the sun dipped behind the Sevagram trees.

Rajeev Chaudhari had arrived at MGIMS.

He had been born eleven years earlier two kilometres away — in Vaghada, a tiny village a stone’s throw from Sevagram, dusty lanes and mud homes and mango trees swaying under the sun. He had taken his first breath in a small clinic where Sister Talpade, the nurse who owned the place, had helped bring him into the world. His father was a freedom fighter and a small farmer, tilling fifteen acres and, over the years, supplying grain to the institutions of Sevagram — sacks of jowar, wheat, pulses, and groundnuts loaded onto a bullock cart and driven to the college. The people on the interview panel knew his father. They knew his family’s honesty and struggle.

When Rajeev walked into MGIMS in 1970, he was not discovering a new world. He was arriving at a place that had grown up alongside him.

The Shooter Who Preferred Sports to Books

He was born on 14 December 1949, the second year of independent India. He was never, by his own admission, a topper. He loved sports more than books — a preference that never entirely reversed itself, even through five years of MBBS and the decades that followed.

His early years were spent in Vaghada. For high school, he walked to Wardha and studied at Craddock High School, the pride of the district, with its red-tiled building, stern teachers, and sun-baked playgrounds. There, he shared classrooms and dusty playing fields with boys like Ulhas Jajoo and Abhay Bang — then a year or two behind him, names that would later carry considerable weight. Ulhas would become Professor and Head of Medicine at MGIMS. Abhay would win national admiration for his pioneering work in rural Gadchiroli.

At school, Major Chaturvedi spotted Rajeev’s shooting ability during NCC drills. Soon, he and his friends Shyam Babhulkar, Pawar, and Saklecha had formed a shooting team. They won local and university championships. At nationals, a lack of training and guidance held them back — a frustration that taught him early that talent without support arrives only partway.

In 1970, MGIMS announced its entrance test. It was only the second year of the college. The exam was held jointly for MGIMS, AIIMS, and BHU, with no paper on Gandhian thought for this batch. Rajeev cleared it and was called for interview.

Before the interview, his father visited Santoshrao Gode — a freedom fighter, Zilla Parishad president, and a man who knew Dr. Sushila Nayar well. Gode’s assessment was frank: there were too many VIP candidates this year. Perhaps try next year. His father only smiled. “We will try our luck.”

The interview was conducted first in Hindi. Seeing the boy stumble, they shifted to Marathi. Dr. Sushila Nayar was there, and Mrs. Pratibha Patil, and Manimala Chaudhary — the same Manimala Chaudhary who had loaded grain onto a bullock cart at their house in Vaghada. They asked the usual question: Why do you want to become a doctor?

He did not have a rehearsed answer. He told them: I live close to Sevagram. Villagers need doctors. I want to come back and serve them.

It was true. There was no drama, no borrowed dream.

He got in.

The Hostel, the Humour, and the Elections

In 1972, he shared a small, dimly lit room in the old hostel with Bajrang Prasad Pandey — an ever-patient roommate who absorbed Rajeev’s mischief with the equanimity of someone who has decided, philosophically, that this is simply what a roommate is. The plaster on the walls had already begun to peel. The ceiling fan groaned louder than it spun. Nights stretched long, filled with laughter and whispers after the warden’s rounds.

Rajeev had a running joke about their academic standing in the batch: Hum dono first aate hain — ye upar se, aur main neeche se. They would laugh so hard the sound carried down the corridor, and before long someone would be knocking on the door.

The student elections provided the great set-piece comedy of those years. Rajeev arrived at MGIMS with no idea that a medical college could so thoroughly resemble a constituency. Loyalties were drawn not merely on personal friendships but on regional identities — the Varhadi bloc, the Delhi-Punjabi camp, the Jhansi group, the Pune-Mumbai contingent. Seniors arrived at his room with tea and persuasion. One group promised better mess food and an extended gate curfew. Another promised cricket bats, carrom boards, and Sunday films. Rajeev, who had arrived thinking he was there to study medicine, discovered overnight that his vote was suddenly the most important thing about him.

He cast it quietly, slipped back to his room, and lay on his bed, amused. So this was medical college. Not just cadavers and clinics, but also campaigns, coalitions, and clever speeches. He thought: if only Gray’s Anatomy had elections, maybe he’d have read it with more enthusiasm.

The 1969 batch, just a year ahead, guided the 1970 students like elder siblings. The warden, Mr. L.R. Pandit, was strict but soft-hearted, and he and Manoramabai treated the students like family — scolding when needed, but ensuring no one felt alone.

The Strike That Changed MGIMS

Some events in an institution’s history arrive through formal decisions. Others arrive through the stubbornness of particular people at particular moments.

The opening of postgraduate programmes at MGIMS was the second kind.

Dr. Sushila Nayar and her chief advisor from AIIMS Delhi, Dr. L.P. Aggarwal, held a principled position: Sevagram should create family doctors for villages, not specialists. Postgraduate seats would produce people who left rural medicine for urban hospitals. The students of the early batches held a different view. Jobs were scarce. Village practice was difficult without advanced training. The argument was not abstract — it was about the futures of sixty young doctors per batch who had given five years to the institution and needed somewhere to go.

It was Rajeev Chaudhari from the 1970 batch, Vinod Ughade from 1969, and Asha Ramachandran from 1973 who led the protest.

Asha, fierce and fearless, made the argument as personally as it could be made: she placed her bangles on the table and said, if you cannot fight, wear these. Her words burned in them. They pushed. They persisted. They did not stop until the 1973 batch became the first to receive PG admissions at Sevagram.

It was a structural change that transformed the institution — one that every subsequent batch benefited from. It had been forced not by administrators but by students who refused to accept that the situation was fixed.

From the Boy Who Failed to the Professor Who Taught

He failed more times than he could count during MBBS. This is not a detail he conceals — he states it plainly, with the equanimity of a man who has made his peace with how things actually were and what they actually produced.

What they produced was, in the end, remarkable. He earned a diploma, then a degree, and eventually became Head of Forensic Medicine at KEM Hospital, Mumbai — one of the country’s preeminent medical institutions. He was the first from his batch to become a professor.

The barefoot boy from Vaghada, the NCC shooter who loved sport more than textbooks, the student who stumbled through his interview in Hindi and was rescued by the examiners shifting to Marathi, the young man whose father had loaded grain onto a bullock cart for the same people who were sitting across the table from him — this was the boy who eventually headed a department at KEM.

He owes this, he has said, to MGIMS: to its teachers who pushed, its culture that nurtured, its spirit that never allowed you to give up.

That is how a barefoot boy from Vaghada walked into Sevagram and found his way into the world. The distance between them was two kilometres. The journey took a lifetime.

Dr. Rajeev Chaudhari completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the second batch of 1970. He went on to postgraduate training in Forensic Medicine and eventually became Professor and Head of Forensic Medicine at KEM Hospital, Mumbai. He was the first member of his batch to become a professor. He was born in Vaghada, a village neighbouring Sevagram, the son of a freedom fighter and farmer. He lives in Mumbai.