The matter, as far as anyone could tell, was about bricks.
Gopal Kesariya, a Gujarati student who knew no language other than his own, and Rajendra Bagh, a Maharashtrian who spoke only Marathi, had found themselves locked in a heated debate on the construction site outside the emerging college building. Neither understood a word of what the other was saying. Both spoke with great conviction, their voices rising above the dust and the hammering of the half-built Sevagram campus.
Finally, exasperated, Kesariya bent down, lifted a red brick, and shouted: Aa che! At the same moment, Rajendra picked up another and retorted: Ho aahe! Both bricks were raised high like trophies of some victory neither man had yet won. They glared at each other — puzzled, it seemed, by the identical gesture — and then, as if struck simultaneously by the absurdity of the whole thing, the crowd of students around them burst into laughter.
The brick had spoken in two languages and said the same thing.
That was Sevagram in 1969: classrooms under construction, hostels makeshift, the spirit of friendship building the real foundations of MGIMS while the labourers built the literal ones.
A Nagpur Boy with Good Timing
He was born on 7 January 1949 in Nagpur, the son of Mr. Maheshwar Prasad, a civil engineer of rare integrity who had built the Nagpur airport and several government museums, had topped his class at Roorkee Engineering College, and had chosen to refuse private contracts and stick to government work — a choice whose financial consequences were real and whose moral consequences were perhaps the only inheritance he consciously intended to pass on.
His father had been a gifted hockey goalkeeper in his youth, and the love of sport came through. Subhash did his schooling at Bishop Cotton School and St. Francis de Sales College, then joined SFS College for his B.Sc. He missed GMC Nagpur by two marks. He tried BHU; the same cruel fate struck — this time by a single mark. Then came news of a new medical college in Sevagram, on Gandhiji’s own soil. He applied, walked into an interview whose details have entirely faded from memory, and found himself part of the historic first batch.
The first sight of his hostel was humbling — a small hut opposite Mahadev Bhavan, shared with Anil Kaushik for six months. Later, a three-bedroom arrangement with Subhash Patil and Rajendra Bagh. They were pioneers, quite literally: they swept Anatomy labs, arranged Physiology benches, scrubbed dissection halls. By evening, their shirts smelled of formalin and cement dust in equal measure.
Captain of Cricket and Everything Else
Sports gave the MBBS years their rhythm, and Subhash Srivastava gave the sports their shape.
He was captain of the college cricket team from the first year — an opening fast bowler who also batted at three, his partner in pace being Shivaji Deshmukh, who brought the same fiery energy to his yorkers that he brought to everything else. They fielded a spirited team — Vinod Ude, Vilas Kanikdale, Raju Deodhar — choosing some teammates less for talent than for filling the numbers, a diplomatic arrangement that the team’s early-round eliminations did not entirely disprove. Later, juniors like Akhil Tahir and Sharad Mahakalkar carried the baton with greater distinction.
His father’s love of sport extended to practical support: he donated a cricket kit to the college and contributed two thousand rupees — a generous sum in those years — to the equipment fund. The gesture was not forgotten.
Subhash also captained the badminton team, playing doubles with Vinod Ude and Vilas Kanikdale in the dust-softened evenings that Sevagram’s open courts made possible. And the drama stage found him too — Dr. Indurkar, the Anatomy teacher, simply pushed him onto it one day for a Hindi drama called Loki Kiki. He delivered his lines, the audience laughed, and he discovered he was capable of holding a room.
Dr. B.S. Chaubey once held up a theory paper written by Madhavan Pillai during a class at GMC Nagpur and said: “This is how you should write.” He carried the paper to Nagpur and showed it to his postgraduate students. That day, Sevagram’s pride was larger than anything the classrooms could contain.
Ratnamala
It was in his second year that he first saw Ratnamala Golhar.
She was a soft-spoken girl from Deoli near Wardha. For him, it was love at first sight — the Sevagram air carrying, alongside the fragrance of neem and the weight of Gandhi’s memories, his whispered proposal. To his delight, she said yes.
For both of them, the relationship was conducted in the constrained register of a campus that did not officially sanction it — meetings careful enough to be almost invisible, affection expressed in the intervals between lectures and practicals. Three years later, in November 1974, they were married. The story of how the wedding actually took place, Subhash has always said, is best told by his wife.
He is right. It is her story too, and she has told it.
Anaesthesia, Freelancing, and the Long Sevagram Career
After MBBS — in an era when MGIMS offered no postgraduate courses — he looked outward. He pursued a Diploma in Anaesthesiology in Nagpur, then worked for five years as a lecturer. Eventually he returned to Sevagram for his MD under Dr. Shetty, a formidable and inspiring head of Anaesthesiology, conducting research on hyperbaric bupivacaine in spinal analgesia and its effect on post-spinal headache. By 1983, he left Sevagram and set up as a freelance anaesthesiologist in Nagpur, serving several private nursing homes.
The work was demanding and the independence was real. He carried with him from Sevagram the discipline of simplicity and the sincerity of a man who had learned his craft at an institution that never confused the purpose of medicine with its financial rewards. These qualities sometimes surprised colleagues in the city’s glossier institutions.
His two children — Sangeet and Amit, born in Sevagram and Nagpur — watched their parents closely enough to make a clear-eyed decision. They became engineers and settled in the United States. He understood why. A medical career asks for sacrifices that are visible to the children of doctors in ways they are invisible to almost no one else.
Still the First Batch
Nearly fifty-six years have passed since the hut days. His batchmates — who came from Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Bombay, Pune, even Kerala — remain bound together in a friendship that time has failed to erode.
Whenever they meet, the memories come in a specific order: the brick quarrel, the cricket matches, the dissection hall cleaned by student hands, the evenings dreaming under Sevagram’s vast sky. The friendship is not the residue of those years. It is the thing those years were building, alongside the college and the careers and the lives.
1969 was not just the year a college was born. It was the year a family was born — a family called Sevagram, which has held together, without institutional maintenance, for more than half a century.
Dr. Subhash Shrivastava completed his Diploma and MD in Anaesthesiology from Nagpur, including research conducted at MGIMS under Dr. Shetty. He worked as a faculty member in Nagpur before establishing an independent anaesthesiology practice serving multiple institutions. He married Dr. Ratnamala Golhar — Roll No. 11 in this archive — his classmate and lifelong companion. His two sons live in the United States. He lives in Nagpur.