The plane was already on the tarmac when the jeep screeched in.
Dr. K.N. Ingle — Associate Professor of Physiology at the newly founded MGIMS, Sevagram — climbed out with an envelope in his hand and the particular urgency of a man who has calculated, correctly, that he has very little time. The list of students selected for the inaugural MBBS batch had been finalised, signed, and was being carried to Delhi for official approval. The man carrying it was about to board. Ingle reached him, handed over the envelope, and spoke quickly. There had been a change. One name needed to be added: Yadunath Telkikar.
The name was added. The plane departed. The list, amended at the last possible moment on a runway at Nagpur airport, travelled to Delhi and returned as official sanction.
Yadunath Telkikar — born in Nanded, son of a freedom fighter and parliamentarian, a young man who had wanted to be an engineer, had settled reluctantly for BAMS, and had never even sat before the MGIMS interview panel — became part of the founding batch of MGIMS Sevagram without facing a single question from the selection committee.
He would spend the next five years proving that the last-minute addition was the right one.
To understand how a young man from Nanded came to be on that plane’s passenger list without an interview, you have to understand his father first.
Shankarrao Telkikar was a lawyer by training and a freedom fighter by conviction, and the two vocations were not, for him, in any tension. In the years when Nanded was under the Nizam’s rule, he had refused to decorate his shop on the Nizam’s birthday — “Why celebrate the man who oppresses us?” — been reported, arrested, and sent to prison for three and a half years. He returned, resumed his work, joined the Arya Samaj, led the Shetkari Samaj, participated in the 1938 Congress Satyagraha, and earned another three-year prison sentence for sedition. In 1952, he was elected as the first Member of Parliament from Nanded.
Yadunath’s early childhood unfolded in Delhi, in the shadow of Parliament, while his father attended to the business of the new nation. They were five siblings — one brother would become a surgeon, another an engineer who eventually settled in America. The family carried, in its bones, the particular seriousness of people who have paid for their convictions and consider that a reasonable price.
He schooled at a Zilla Parishad school in Kandhar village, everything in Marathi, and then spent two years at Yogeshwari Mahavidyalaya in Ambajogai — not by choice, but because his elder brother was posted there as a medical officer. He loved science but hated biology. The smell of dissected frogs was, he said, unbearable. He dreamt of engineering. His brother sat with him one evening and made the pragmatic argument of the era: engineers were struggling, many taking jobs as clerks, medicine was the better path. Younger brothers in that household did not argue with elder brothers who were already doctors. He swapped Mathematics for Biology and pointed himself toward medicine.
He missed Government Medical College, Aurangabad, by two marks. He enrolled in the BAMS course in Nanded — reluctantly, as a holding position rather than a destination.
Then a friend of his brother’s, studying veterinary medicine in Nagpur, mentioned a rumour: Dr. Sushila Nayar was opening a new medical college in Sevagram. He did not know the deadline. He did not know the details. “Apply,” he said.
Nagpur newspapers did not reach Nanded in those days. There was no telephone to make enquiries and no internet to search. Yadunath packed his certificates, took a bus to Wardha, and booked a bed at Annapurna Hotel for two rupees. Sevagram was eight kilometres away. He tried to rent a bicycle; the shopkeeper refused — he did not know the boy. The hotel owner intervened, vouching for him, and Yadunath pedalled to Sevagram under the Vidarbha sun, filled out the form, paid the fees, and returned.
No interview letter came. His uncle insisted they enquire in person. His father went to Sevagram and found Dr. Nayar, who recognised Shankarrao Telkikar immediately — the MP from Nanded, the man who had gone to prison twice for the country. She listened to the situation with sympathy. The interviews were over, she said gently. The list had been signed and sent to Delhi. Wait for next year.
And then Dr. Ingle ran across the tarmac at Nagpur airport.
A few days later, a telegram arrived: Join by August 1.
The first hostel was a Khadi Gramodyog training centre, pressed into service for the incoming batch. By evening, the mosquitoes established their own position on the matter. Malaria was common in Sevagram, and every bed had its own mosquito net — a macchardani — and every student quickly learned the ritual of its assembly. Two long bamboo poles wedged at opposite ends of the bed, crossed overhead, the net draped and then tucked under the mattress with care on all sides, every corner secured, because a single loose edge meant a night of scratching and the particular misery of waking to discover that the enemy had found the gap you missed. Inside the net, the air was still and warm and smelled faintly of cotton. Outside, you could hear the slap of someone’s palm against their own arm, the rustle of another net being tucked in, the sound of fifty students improvising sleep.
Meals were simple and egalitarian. Each student brought their own plate, spoon, and katori. They sat cross-legged on the floor, ate, washed their utensils at the shared tap, and stacked them away. Mornings began with all-faith prayer, followed by shramdan — sweeping verandas, cleaning bathrooms, clearing the campus of whatever the night had deposited. They visited Gandhi Ashram. They joined village cleanliness drives. They learned to live with little, which, for most of them, was not a great departure from what they had known at home.
Yadunath shared a room with Vijay Mutha and Vinay Barhale, and later with Sharad Gadre. By second MBBS, the luxury of a single room arrived — an unimaginable privilege when set against the dormitory conditions of that first year, and one he received with the gratitude of someone who has not taken private space for granted.
There was euphoria in that first year — the particular, slightly giddy relief of someone who had nearly not arrived at all and now finds themselves precisely where they want to be. It was, he later reflected, perhaps too much euphoria. The early months were not spent with the focused application that the opportunity warranted. Some in the batch believed it would not matter greatly if the course took a year or two longer than scheduled. The first MBBS results, when they appeared in the newspaper, confirmed that this calculation had been wrong: nearly a third of the batch had failed. Yadunath was among those who passed the first time, which he recorded without pride and with the quiet acknowledgement that he had come closer to the other result than he might have preferred.
He captained the table tennis team. He acted in hostel dramas. These were not decorative activities at Sevagram — they were the social fabric of a campus that had almost no other diversions, and the bonds they produced were the lasting ones.
But if any single memory from those years shines brightest — and he said this without hesitation, fifty years later — it is the drama stage.
In his first year, a modest one-act play brought together Shyam Babhulkar, Vilas Kanikdale, Jayashree Deshmukh, and Yadunath himself. The applause was still in their ears when, the following year, Dr. M.D. Khapre — Pharmacology teacher and in charge of cultural activities — announced something more ambitious: a full three-act Marathi drama. His relative, Mr. Deshpande, was a director of reputation in Nagpur. Thanks to Khapre’s persuasion, he agreed to direct without charging a fee.
Every Saturday evening, Deshpande would travel from Nagpur and be at the hall by six o’clock. Yadunath, as drama secretary, was responsible for mustering the cast — knocking on hostel doors, calling across corridors, collecting boys and girls from their rooms and getting them into the rehearsal hall before Deshpande arrived and found an empty stage. Rehearsals ran from six in the evening until eleven at night, five hours of lines and gestures and pauses repeated until they became second nature. The tube lights cast a pale yellow glow. Outside, the air cooled as the night deepened. Inside, they sweated through their costumes, lost in the world of the play.
Hunger struck reliably at around nine o’clock.
It was at this point that Babulal’s generosity became, year after year, the unannounced subsidy of the entire cultural programme.
Babulal ran the campus canteen — the bamboo hut, the tailor sharing the space, the limited menu, the air of a place that has become essential without quite intending to. He was, to the students, something more than a canteen owner: a friend, a lender, a source of sustenance in both the literal and the figurative sense. When hunger struck at nine, Yadunath would slip away from the rehearsal, walk to the darkened canteen, and find the keys where Babulal had left them — because Babulal left them, always, with the instruction that was also a statement of trust: “Jo chahiye, le lo.” Take what you need.
Jars of biscuits, packets of farsan, pots of tea assembled from the shelf. The cast ate between cues, crumbs on their costumes, cups balanced on the edge of the stage. Babulal never kept a ledger. He never asked how much had been taken or when the money was coming. He never, in any of the years that the students used his canteen as their rehearsal-night commissariat, made the transaction feel like a transaction.
Years later, after his MBBS, Yadunath was working in Mumbai. He made a special trip to Sevagram. He had borrowed five hundred rupees from Babulal at some point in his student years — the exact occasion had blurred, but the debt had not — and he came to repay it.
Babulal looked at him with the expression of a man confronted with a memory he has genuinely lost. “Arey, tujhe bhi yaad hai?” he said, laughing. You actually remembered?
He had no recollection of it. The money had never been the point.
Many in the batch had their own quiet debts to him, each repaid in time, each met with the same laughter and the same bafflement that anyone had kept track. The greater debt — the one that no one could repay — was for the trust, the keys left available, and the freedom given to students who needed to be treated, occasionally, as people whose word was sufficient.
After internship, Yadunath left for Bombay. House jobs in medicine and paediatrics. By 1976, he had his DCH. His father had retired and money was tight. He returned to Nanded, set up an OPD, then a ten-bed paediatric nursing home, and eventually expanded to a PICU and NICU with colleagues. It went well. At sixty-five, with his children settled in Pune, he sold the practice and moved.
In Pune, restlessness arrived before he expected it. He went to the Dean of KEM Hospital.
“Full-time paediatrics will be too taxing at your age,” the Dean said, with the candour of someone who has assessed the situation and decided that honesty is kinder than encouragement. “How about Blood Bank Officer?”
Yadunath took the role. It was not what he had planned for his sixties. It was also not nothing. He brought to it the same quality of attention he had brought to everything else — the attention of a man who has known, since a jeep screeched onto a Nagpur tarmac in 1969, that his presence anywhere is the result of a fortunate accident, and that the correct response to a fortunate accident is gratitude expressed through effort.
When he thinks of Sevagram now, he thinks of a mosquito net tucked with care in a converted training centre, the bamboo poles wedged and the cotton draped just so, because one loose corner would cost you the night. He thinks of Deshpande arriving from Nagpur each Saturday, the tube lights yellowing through the rehearsal hours, the smell of biscuits and farsan eaten between scenes on a bare stage. He thinks of Babulal’s keys, and the instruction that was also a philosophy: take what you need.
He thinks, above all, of what it meant to be the name added at the last moment — to have arrived by a margin so thin that a jeep arriving five minutes later would have changed everything. He did not take that knowledge lightly. He carried it into every ward round and every consultation room and every late-night OPD in Nanded, and it reminded him, without requiring words, that the practice of medicine is a privilege earned by accident as much as by merit, and that the correct response to privilege is to stay useful for as long as the work allows.
The list, amended on a runway at Nagpur airport in the summer of 1969, had been right.
Dr. Yadunath Telkikar completed his DCH and built a paediatric practice in Nanded over several decades, eventually establishing a nursing home with PICU and NICU facilities. After relocating to Pune in his later years, he served as Blood Bank Officer at KEM Hospital. His father, Shankarrao Telkikar, was the first Member of Parliament from Nanded and a veteran of the freedom struggle. Dr. Telkikar lives in Pune.