When Principal I.D. Singh’s voice floated across the Sevagram evening — gentle, unhurried, entirely accustomed to being obeyed — asking for Chhotu, there was only one place to point. The badminton court. And within minutes, Vilas Kanikdale would appear, racket still in hand, slightly breathless, heart doing something between anticipation and nerves. Singh-saab would already be on the court, smiling, bouncing lightly on his feet in the way of men who have never entirely stopped being athletes. The game would begin.
Vilas played well. He also, on certain evenings, played carefully — dropping a point here, letting a rally extend a beat longer than necessary, managing the score with the delicate diplomacy of a student who has understood that some victories are better left to the person holding the other racket. Not that Singh-saab needed the charity. He was an excellent player, fit and sharp-eyed, a man who brought to sport the same brisk precision he brought to Physiology. But Vilas was twenty, and Singh-saab was the Principal, and in Sevagram the line between teacher and student was not so much observed as it was negotiated, evening by evening, on a dusty court under an open sky.
The nickname had arrived naturally, as nicknames do — from his height, or the lack of it. Chhotu. It followed him through five years of MBBS, outlasted his internship, and has survived, with great affection and no embarrassment, for more than fifty years. He answers to it still.
A Legacy of Silent Resolve
He was born on 8 April 1952, into a family already shaped by medicine, though shaped by it the hard way.
His father, Dr. Prabhakar Dajiba Kanikdale, had earned his LMP — Licentiate in Medical Practice — from Robertson Medical School in 1937. He had barely finished his training when the world changed direction entirely. The Second World War broke out, and he was drafted into the British Army as a medical officer. For six years, he was gone. His wife and daughter remained in India, knowing almost nothing of where he was or whether he was alive. Letters were rare, telegrams rarer. The silence of those years was a particular kind of suffering — not the sharp grief of confirmed loss, but the grinding uncertainty of waiting without a horizon.
In 1947, the year India became itself, Dr. Prabhakar Kanikdale came home. He carried with him a soldier’s discipline, a doctor’s resolve, and the particular self-possession of a man who has been away long enough to understand what he values. He joined Mayur Hospital in Imal, later specialised in Radiology, and eventually worked at Indira Gandhi Medical College until his retirement in 1972. He did not talk much about the war. He did not need to. What those years had made of him was visible in everything — the straight back, the economy of movement, the habit of arriving before he was expected.
Vilas was the fourth of five children. Three brothers, two sisters. None of the others chose medicine. Perhaps the stethoscope was always going to find its way to him — the one who watched his father most closely, who absorbed without being told, who understood that what Dr. Prabhakar had brought back from six years of war was not just survival but vocation.
The Monsoon Interview
He schooled at Kurve Model School, then New English High School in Sitaburdi, then moved to Hislop College in Nagpur for Pre-University and first-year B.Sc. He applied to GMC Nagpur, as most serious science students in his circle did. He fell short by a few marks. A dental college seat was offered. Dentistry did not interest him. He stared at the letter for a while, weighing options that all felt slightly wrong.
Then a small advertisement caught his eye. A new medical college was starting at Sevagram, founded on Gandhian ideals. Sixty seats. Selection by interview. The college was named after Mahatma Gandhi.
Something stirred. He applied.
The day of the interview, the monsoon arrived without warning. By the time he reached Sevagram, he was soaked through — shirt plastered to his back, water running from his collar, shoes making small sounds with each step. He walked into the interview hall smelling of wet earth and damp cotton. The panel received him without comment.
The questions were straightforward: Where are you from? Would you wear khadi? Have you worked in villages? What would you do after MBBS? He answered without flourish. He had no ministerial letter in his pocket, no family connection to the ashram, no freedom-fighter grandfather to invoke. What he had was his father’s service record as a military doctor, a folder of sports certificates, and the unshowy sincerity of someone who has thought carefully about what he wants and decided this is it.
His father knew Dr. Kane and Dr. Keshav Narayan Ingle from Nagpur. That may have helped. A few days later, the letter came. He was in. He was going to Sevagram. He was going to be part of the first batch.
Thalis and Scorpions
There was no hostel ready when they arrived. Students were distributed across whatever the village could offer. Vilas shared a room with Vinod Ughade and Mangal Singh Rajput in temporary accommodation that was functional, unglamorous, and, within weeks, entirely comfortable. The campus had a strict code: khadi, prayers at dawn, manual labour, self-reliance. None of this troubled him. At home, he had grown up doing his share — washing vessels, sweeping floors, helping his mother without being asked. Sevagram’s expectations were not foreign. They were simply formalised.
Meals were communal and egalitarian. Students brought their own thali, katori, chammach. They sat cross-legged on the floor, ate simple food, washed their utensils under a shared tap. Someone in the batch had a theory that banging thalis together loudly on the walk back from the dining hall kept snakes away. They did it every night with considerable enthusiasm, until someone pointed out that snakes are deaf. The banging continued anyway. Old habits and good theatre are hard to give up.
One evening, a scorpion made the case for Sevagram’s hazards more forcefully than any orientation lecture could have. Vilas felt the sting on his hand — a sharp, precise pain that spread quickly up his arm and kept him awake through the night. His hand swelled. By morning, the worst had passed. He filed it under experience and moved on. Sevagram toughened you, as it intended to, though it did not always announce in advance which form the lesson would take.
The Stage and the Field
He found theatre the way many things found you at Sevagram — through a teacher who believed students should be more than the sum of their examination results.
Professor K.N. Ingle taught Physiology with the focused intensity of someone for whom the subject held deep personal importance. He invited Sudhakar Deshpande, a director from Nagpur, to work with the students. Dr. M.D. Khapre, who taught Pharmacology and shared a passion for music and drama, knew Deshpande personally. The result was Dr. Salama Raje—a Marathi drama rehearsed in the stolen moments between lectures and practicals, performed on a bare stage with borrowed costumes and lights. Vilas starred in it. To his own surprise, he discovered not just that he could stand before an audience, but that he felt genuinely at ease there.
More plays followed. Madavi. Others whose titles he reaches for now across fifty years of distance and finds still within reach. The bond those rehearsals built — boys and girls learning lines together, missing cues together, finding the rhythm of a scene after the tenth attempt — was a different kind of closeness than the one formed in lectures or dissection halls. It persisted. When the batch meets now, the first stories that surface are often from those rehearsals. The dialogue half-remembered. The laughter at what went wrong. The inexplicable pleasure of having made something together.
On the badminton court, they called him Chhotu. On the athletics track, he unleashed his spear in the javelin, spun the discus like a whirlwind, soared over the high-jump bar, devoured the long-jump sandpit, powered through slow-cycle races, and exploded off the blocks in the sprints. He captained the badminton team in his final year. Principal I.D. Singh patrolled the boundary of every sports field with the hawk-eyed focus he brought to the lecture hall—bellowing encouragement, dissecting a jumper’s knee bend mid-air, erasing any line between physical and intellectual rigor because, to him, none existed.
Lessons from Mundhari and Patna
In his third year, Dr. Karunakar Trivedi crooked a finger at four students. “Medical camp. Mundhari village. Twenty miles. Be ready.” No more words. None expected.
They piled into a jeep—Vilas, Raju Deodhar, Yadunath Telkikar, Rajendra Kumar, and the doctors—and jolted down rutted roads through the rising dust of a Vidarbha dawn. In the village square, straw mats lined up under a sagging shamiana. Villagers queued in ragged rows: milky cataracts clouding eyes, pus-weeping wounds, limbs ballooned with infection—the silent toll of miles from any hospital.
The first surgery flickered to life under a hissing kerosene lamp. Students fumbled in oversized rubber gloves, hands trembling as they swabbed skin, held retractors, passed scalpels—useful before they felt ready.
Mausi—Chinamma, the staff nurse—glided through the frenzy in her starched white sari, dust be damned. “Hold steady, beta—firmer!” she barked at one, then nodded to another: “Suture here.” She mothered and mentored in equal measure, forging young doctors in the fire.
That evening, rumbling back through the dark, Vilas gripped the jeep’s side. Medicine, yanked from sterile halls into a dusty courtyard, shed its skin and breathed true.
The Science of Seeing
Internship delivered the assignment that lodged deepest in him.
Five others—Raju Deodhar, Rajendra Kumar, Hardayal Singh, Avtar Singh, Arijit Singh—joined Vilas for thirty-five days in Patna, thrust into the WHO’s global smallpox crusade. Pockets of rural Bihar still harbored the pox, a specter villagers whispered of in huts, as if naming it might summon the fevered pustules.
Village by village, they pressed on. Vilas pinned squirming children to his lap, needle flashing: “Bas, beta—one prick, then sweet.” They mapped fever trails on crumpled charts, knocked on thatch doors to find pocked faces, crouched by charpoys soothing mothers’ sobs—”It won’t take your little one, aunty, we swear it”—before arms extended for the jab.
Dust-caked, bone-tired, they tallied the days. Smallpox vanished from Earth because of hands like theirs. Vilas doesn’t boast. He carries it silent.
After MBBS, he eyed Paediatrics. KEM Hospital offered a seat, but it paid nothing. Three years without income didn’t fit his family’s needs. He chose DMRD—Diploma in Medical Radiology and Diagnosis—in Nagpur, then MD in Radiology at BJ Medical College, transferring to GMC Nagpur. His father had specialized in Radiology when it was new in India. The son found it fit him: precise work, reading images, spotting what others missed.
In 1981, he started private practice in Nagpur with other radiologists. They built one of the city’s first full diagnostic centers. They added X-rays, ultrasound, CT, then MRI as technology came.
Then things changed.
Referrals turned into deals. Doctors asked for cuts or percentages. Radiology became more about money than medicine. Vilas remembered his father: X-raying patients in a village hospital, focused only on helping. Seeing medicine shift in a growing city disappointed him. He had expected it, but it still hurt.
Three Generations in Radiology
In 2010, a chance came from Dubai: a teaching hospital linked to a medical university. Vilas went there, took over as Head of Radiology, and stayed thirteen years. The place ran on discipline and fairness, qualities he had not seen much back home.
From 2005 to 2015, he went to Africa each year for two months, helping with scans in local hospitals. Those trips brought back the reason he chose medicine: to help people, not just make money.
In 2023, he came back to India and settled in Pune. His wife, Swapnali—a chartered accountant—runs their home with the steady hand his father once had. Their daughter, Devanti, became a radiologist, third in the family to do so. Their son, Devashish, picked IT and made his own way.
Looking Back at Sevagram
It has been over fifty-five years since Vilas joined Sevagram with the first batch. His teachers’ faces still come clear: Dr. K.N. Ingle with his sharp Physiology lessons, Dr. M.D. Khapre and his talk of drugs mixed with music, Dr. R.V. Agarwal, Dr. Sudershan Dhawan. They looked like any men in kurtas, but they burned with a quiet fire for their work.
Sevagram did more than give him a degree. It gave lifelong friends scattered across India, nights with scorpion bites and borrowed stage lights, the clang of thalis in the dark mess hall, and a Principal’s voice calling out, “Chotu!”
Some memories slip away. Sevagram’s never will.
Dr. Vilas Kanikdale completed his DMRD and MD in Radiology from GMC Nagpur. He established a comprehensive diagnostic practice in Nagpur before serving as Head of Radiology at a teaching hospital in Dubai for thirteen years. He contributed to radiology services in sub-Saharan Africa over a decade of annual visits. His daughter Devanti followed him into radiology — the third generation of the family in medicine. He lives in Pune.