He played the Congo, the Bongo, and the Mandolin in the GMC auditorium, and took first rank in all three MBBS examinations. Both things are true of Jayant Pande, and both matter. In a batch that produced remarkable doctors, Jayant was the one who collected gold medals the way others collected textbooks — and then went home to practise scales.
The Boy Who Ranked First
Jayant was born in Bangalore to an Air Force doctor, and his early schooling moved with his father’s postings. He attended Mount Carmel School, Nagpur, then Saraswati High School at Sitabuldi, and completed his secondary education at Somalwar High School in 1972, placing 9th in the HSSC examination and first in the Biology group. He took his BSc I at the Institute of Science, Nagpur, where he ranked first in Nagpur University, before entering Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1973.
At GMC, the academic record was singular. First rank in all three MBBS examinations. Honours in Anatomy — shared with Sharad Jaitly, a distinction that was rare even then. Honours in Physiology, Pharmacology, and Preventive and Social Medicine. Adjudged the ideal student of GMC Nagpur in 1976, and the best student of Nagpur University the following year. The classmates who watched this accumulation of prizes remember it with a mixture of awe and amusement — the sort of affection reserved for someone who makes the impossible look effortless without ever lording it.
Apollo’s Compound Gift
The ancient Greeks gave Apollo dominion over medicine and music together, as if the two were inseparable. GMC’s Music Society in the 1970s would not have disagreed. Jayant served as both secretary and chief of the society — and performed in it, playing the Congo, Bongo, and Mandolin at multiple college programmes. In those same years, Vivek Deshpande sang, Shriram Kane played the sitar, Uday Gupte played the sitar, Rajendra Sarda and Rajendra Phadke played the flute, and Shashikant Khaire played the accordion. The auditorium, on those evenings, was something to hear.
It was also where love found him. Seema, from the GMC 1977 batch, was a fellow member of the Music Society. She played the mandolin too. They married on 7 July 1984. She became a consultant paediatrician in Nagpur. He became a neurologist. Between them, they have kept medicine and music in the same house for four decades.
The Making of a Neurologist
After graduation, Jayant interned at the Mohadi primary health centre alongside Rajiv Laul, V. Maitreyan, Vikas Chitnavis, and Ramesh Mundle. He then returned to GMC Nagpur for his MD in Medicine, completing it in 1981. His thesis, supervised by Dr. G.K. Dubey, examined the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy of serum LDH in cirrhosis of the liver and cancers.
Neurology called next. He pursued DM (Neurology) at Topiwala National Medical College and BYL Nair Hospital, Mumbai, completing it in 1985. His DM thesis, under Dr. P.M. Dalal, focused on the radio-diagnosis of central nervous system tuberculosis — work that placed him at the intersection of neurology and infection at a time when CNS TB was one of the great diagnostic puzzles of Indian medicine.
He spent two years as a registrar in neurology at Nair Hospital, and two more as a lecturer, before deciding in 1987 to return to Nagpur and build a private practice. The decision meant leaving academic neurology behind — a departure he has not revisited with regret. Academic neurology in Mumbai in the late 1980s offered distinction; private neurology in Nagpur offered something harder to quantify — the chance to be the person a city turns to.
What Thirty-Eight Years Looks Like
Pande Memorial Hospital on P.R. Sathe Marg in Dhantoli is a 15-bedded facility with an EEG laboratory and a physiotherapy unit. Jayant has run it for 38 years. He is a visiting neurologist at Central Railway Hospital, Kingsway, and at the Corporation Diagnostic and Research Centre, Sadar. He serves on the panels of MOIL and BHEL Nagpur.
Senior-most is a word that gets attached to him now — one of the senior-most neurologists in Nagpur. It is accurate without being complete. Seniority measures time; it does not measure the particular quality Jayant Pande brought to the consulting room — the combination of meticulous academic formation and the patient attention of someone who has been practising one specialty in one city long enough to know its population’s neurological patterns the way a gardener knows his soil.
His daughter Purnima completed her BCom and CA-I at Symbiosis International University, Pune, and married Chetan Namjoshi, who works as Chief Financial Advisor at J.P. Morgan, London. They live in New Jersey. His son Siddharth completed his MBBS at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, his MD in Radiology at Dr. Vithalrao Vikhe Patil Foundation’s Medical College, Ahmednagar, and is now a senior resident in radiology at D.Y. Patil Medical College, Pimpri, Pune.
At 70, the man who once ranked first in every examination he sat still sees patients, still plays music, still carries — one imagines — the same precise attention that turned every examination into a first rank and every clinical problem into something worth solving.