The night was late, Sevagram was asleep, and six hungry medical students were standing in a dark lane outside Babulal’s canteen. They had walked back from a film in Wardha and the mess had long since shut. Vinay Barhale was among them — sheepish, famished, beginning to wonder whether the walk had been worth it.

Then Dr. Indurkar appeared.

The Anatomy professor was out for his night walk, and he took in the scene with the unhurried calm of a man who has seen hungry students before and considers it no great crisis. “Come,” he said simply, and turned back toward his house. Ten minutes later, they were sitting cross-legged on his kitchen floor, eating chapatis and bhaji that his wife had made without complaint or ceremony, feeding six students she had not known were coming.

Nobody said very much. There was not a great deal to say. The chapatis were hot and the kindness needed no explanation. Vinay would carry that evening with him for the rest of his life — not as an extraordinary event but precisely because it was not one. At Sevagram, a professor’s home and a student’s hunger occupied the same world. The boundary between them was not there. That was the thing about the place.

A Childhood of Questions

He was born on 27 October 1950 in Nanded, into a home where no one was a doctor but everyone — family, neighbours, the general current of expectation in that household — had decided, without quite consulting him, that he would become one. It was not an unusual arrangement in those years. The path to medicine was one of the few paths that combined social respect with the possibility of doing something genuinely useful, and parents in small towns understood this with a clarity that their children sometimes took longer to reach.

His own childhood was shaped by an absence. His father, Subhash Hanumantrao Barhale, suffered from seizures and psychosis — conditions that in those years were poorly understood and barely treatable. Psychopharmacology had not yet taken root in India; psychiatrists were rare and regarded with a mixture of suspicion and helplessness. What his father endured was real and visible, and what medicine could offer him was almost nothing.

Vinay was fifteen when his father died. The loss settled in him not as bitterness but as a question — a slow, unresolved inquiry into why the mind could break so completely and leave those around it so without recourse.

From Shopkeeper to Stethoscope

His uncle, Laxmikant Barhale, who owned a small shop, took over his upbringing with quiet steadiness. Alongside him was Dr. Bajaj, the family’s paediatrician — a man Vinay had known since childhood, whose bag he had carried on home visits as a boy. He could still picture Dr. Bajaj arriving at a door, the particular way he listened, the calm that he brought into rooms where people were afraid. Two men, one a shopkeeper and one a doctor, had between them given him the model of a life worth living.

He had tried for Aurangabad Medical College and missed. Fate, in this as in several other matters, had a different itinerary in mind. Then a neighbour mentioned an advertisement for a new medical college in Sevagram — a Gandhian institution, selection by interview, a place built on principles rather than rank alone. He applied, was called, and arrived for his interview not quite knowing what to expect.

The panel asked him about Gandhi’s thoughts. It was a reasonable question to ask at a college founded in Gandhi’s shadow, in Gandhi’s village, by people who had walked with Gandhi. Vinay answered as honestly as he could — which was, as it turned out, well enough. A few weeks later he was holding his letter of admission. Not to a conventional medical college, but to what felt, from the first days, more like a gurukul — a place of instruction in living as much as in medicine.

The Gurukul Experience

Principal I.D. Singh taught Physiology and broke down complex ideas into explanations of crystalline simplicity. Dr. Indurkar and Dr. Kane in Anatomy, Dr. R.V. Agrawal in Pathology — they were not merely teachers; they were guides, and on bad days, something closer to parents. The particular gift of Sevagram’s faculty was that they held both roles without confusion. A professor might scold you sharply for a poor performance, then sit with you the following day for an hour, quietly dismantling your fear and helping you rebuild your preparation. L.R. Pandit did this for Vinay once, and he did not forget it.

Sevagram was a small village, Wardha eight kilometres away and almost no transport between them. No cars. No motorcycles. One bicycle in the entire batch, owned by M.G. Pillai from Kerala, who guarded it with three chains and the vigilance of a man protecting something irreplaceable. One night, someone broke all three chains and dismantled the bicycle. Pillai did not speak for days. The thief was never identified. The bicycle was reassembled, eventually, but the three chains told a story about the ingenuity of boredom, which was one of Sevagram’s recurring minor themes.

Transistors and Tapping Feet

Wednesday nights at eight o’clock were sacred. All roads in the hostel led to Yogendra Pal’s transistor radio — a scuffed little box that ruled for exactly one hour. Ameen Sayani’s voice rose above the crickets, warm and unhurried, and the hostel breathed as one. Bindiya Chamkegi drifted over heads bent toward the speaker. Zindagi Ek Safar Hai Suhana set feet tapping on stone floors. Dum Maro Dum broke the night’s quiet with laughter. Books, exams, and the dusty walk back from Wardha vanished. For one hour, there was only the music, the night air, and that small radio holding seventy students in its orbit.

Hostel life was a patchwork of cultures — students from different states, languages, habits, and cooking traditions, assembled in a single building and expected to become something coherent together. Seven Gujarati classmates had arrived knowing no Hindi, let alone English, and faced their first year of textbooks in a language they could barely read. They studied with a ferocity that shamed the more comfortable students.

Balkrishna Maheshwari, one of the seven, faced an external examiner in Surgery who was openly skeptical — a student from a village college, a student who had struggled with the language of instruction — and proceeded to answer every question with such precision that the examiner left shaking his head in a different kind of disbelief.

The Road Less Chosen

Vinay was watching all of this, taking it in. And something else was growing in him, slowly, in the background of lectures and practicals and hostel evenings — something he had been circling since his father’s illness. He was thinking about psychiatry.

Everyone around him thought it was a mistake. Psychiatry was not a serious specialty; it was an afterthought, a field for those who could not manage something else. Some friends pleaded. Others mocked. His classmate Shyam Babhulkar — who had become one of his closest friends in those Sevagram years, who knew exactly how stubborn Vinay could be — hid his bag to stop him leaving for Bombay to begin the MD Psychiatry programme at KEM Hospital.

Vinay left anyway.

At KEM, under Dr. B.R. Doongaji, Dr. V.N. Bagdiya, and Dr. L.P. Shah, he discovered not only the science of psychiatry but its particular humanity — the way it required you to listen differently, to hold a person’s inner world with a care that other specialties could sometimes do without. Dr. Shah, who was almost completely blind from retinitis pigmentosa, was the most striking of his teachers. He lived and worked among the fully sighted without concession, carrying his visual disability with a composure that went beyond courage. Watching him work recalibrated what Vinay believed to be possible.

Returning to Aurangabad

The question his father’s suffering had lodged in him — why could the mind break so completely — had, by the end of his training, found at least a partial answer. He returned to Aurangabad, the city where he had once missed a seat at the medical college by a margin too thin to measure, and built his practice from nothing. Over the years, what began as a clinic became a hospital, recognised eventually as one of the finest psychiatric centres in Maharashtra. The state’s Best Psychiatrist Award followed — an acknowledgement that the road less chosen had led somewhere.

More than fifty-five years on, memories of Sevagram return without being summoned. The Shrikhand Puri that Akka Dhotre made during those first weeks when the hostels were not yet ready. Dr. Padma Agrawal making tea for a group of students who had turned up at her door for no particular reason and been welcomed with no particular fuss.

And always, the evening with Dr. Indurkar — six students on a kitchen floor, chapatis arriving hot, a woman who had not been asked setting a pan on the stove without breaking stride. Vinay Barhale had gone to Sevagram looking for a medical education and had found, among other things, a demonstration of what it meant to live generously. He spent the rest of his career trying to repeat it.

Dr. Vinay Barhale completed his MD in Psychiatry from GS Medical College and KEM Hospital, Mumbai. He returned to Aurangabad, where he established a psychiatric hospital that became one of the leading centres for mental health care in Maharashtra. He received the Maharashtra state award for Best Psychiatrist. He continues to practise in Aurangabad.