In 1973, a young man arrived at Government Medical College, Nagpur, with Rs 200 borrowed from his brother — money scraped together to cover the first month’s expenses of a medical education. He was the eleventh child in a family of thirteen. There had never been a radio in their home in Wardha. He had never been to a restaurant. He was, by his own account, a science prodigy who corrected his chemistry teachers when they were wrong.
Avinash Joshi was going to be a doctor. No force short of the universe itself was going to stop him. And the universe tried.
The Boy Who Kept Going
Born in Wardha to a Claims Officer of Central Railway, Avinash attended Hanuman Pratap School, New English School, Cradock High School, and Jankidevi Bajaj Science College — the same college that sent Suhas Jajoo, Rekha Sapkal, and SP Kalantri to GMC Nagpur in 1973. At Bajaj College, Joshi was already making himself uncomfortable for his teachers: a prodigy with a sharp tongue and a sharper sense of when something was wrong.
At GMC, he was all set to sit the final MBBS examination in November 1977 when illness struck. The diagnosis proved elusive. He spent weeks as an inpatient at JJ Hospital, Mumbai — a medical student lying in the ward, knowing enough to be frightened and not yet knowing enough to be certain. He recovered. He sat the examination six months later, in May 1978, and topped every subject. Medicine scored 273 marks.
Then the institution acted as institutions sometimes do, with a rule applied without mercy: the May sitting was counted as a second attempt. His marks were slashed across every subject. The seat in the MD programme at GMC, which his performance had earned, vanished.
He packed and went to Mumbai.
Mumbai, and the Making of a Psychiatrist
In Mumbai, Joshi worked as a house officer and registrar in Medicine and Psychiatry at MGM Hospital, then found his way to the Department of Psychiatry at GS Medical College and KEM Hospital. He emerged three years later with both a diploma and a degree. His MD thesis — a retrospective chart review of patient transfers between Psychiatry and other departments — was supervised by Dr. Doongaji, then head of the Psychiatry department at KEM.
He bought most of his books secondhand, or borrowed them. The exception: a copy of Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, purchased at VT Station for eight rupees. “Today,” he notes, “a copy costs Rs 24,000.”
He had, by then, already saved Rs 150 from his stipend and bought a transistor radio from a shop in Sitabuldi — borrowing Rs 100 from his batchmate Rajendra Sarda to make up the shortfall. He kept the radio for about a year. Then he gave it to a patient he had watched, during his fourth-year Surgery posting, lying in bed with Pott’s spine — confined, immobile, enduring time in the way that ill people endure it. Joshi thought the music might help.
Months later, after he had passed his MBBS and started internship, the patient’s family tracked him down in the Obstetrics and Gynecology OPD. They returned the radio. He had forgotten the incident entirely. “Tears rolled out of my eyes.”
Nagpur, and the Brain Garden
The destination Joshi had wanted all along was Neurology. In 1981, the rules changed, closing the 2-year DM (Neurology) programme to him. He returned to Nagpur, took a lecturer’s post at GMC (1983–1987), and then served as a Specialist Psychiatrist at ESIS Hospital, Nagpur, for more than two decades.
In 1989, he founded Mayflower — a not-for-profit school for children with intellectual disabilities, the second such institution in Nagpur at the time, and one that has survived without government grants for more than three decades. Over 300 children have passed through it. Many have grown into adults with jobs and economic independence. Currently 45 children attend.
The larger dream — the Brain Garden, a museum that would explain the human brain to the public, lay bare its maladies and their treatment, make neurology and psychiatry visible and less frightening — has taken shape over years. Posters in plain language. Exhibits that explain what goes wrong and how doctors try to fix it. The kind of public education that a man fascinated with the brain would naturally want to build.
His wife Sulabha, whom he met when she was a house officer (GMC Nagpur, 1975 batch), became Professor and Head of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Nagpur. Their sons — Sahil, an MBA with stints in Ghaziabad and France; Anay, an IIT Powai engineer and Chief of R&D at SEDEMAC Mechatronics in Pune — chose mathematics and engineering over medicine. Joshi does not appear to regret this.
He has since moved to Pune, where he consults at Ruby Hall Clinic, Hinjewadi. The boy who corrected chemistry teachers in Wardha is now, by every measure, the most interesting man in any room he enters.