The icing on the cake, Rajan Bindu has called it: the morning the visitors came. His son Ameya had stood first in the HSC board examination, and for days afterward people made their way to the Bindu household in Aurangabad to offer congratulations. Rajan, who had spent his entire career in the company of tissue samples and microscopes, found himself briefly at the centre of a celebration that had nothing to do with pathology and everything to do with the particular satisfaction of watching a child exceed expectation.
It was, by his account, the finest thing life had given him. And life, he said, had given him everything on a common man’s wish list.
The Wandering Education
Rajan was born in Hyderabad and educated, by the rhythms of his father’s postings, across several cities — Nashik, Wardha, Nagpur. His father was a doctor who retired as a civil surgeon in Aurangabad. A medical household, in other words, but one in which the son did not feel compelled to replicate his father’s specialty.
He arrived at GMC Nagpur in 1973 as part of the batch, but stayed only until the summer of 1975. He is one of four from that cohort who left after the first MBBS — the government took its time transferring him to Government Medical College (GMC), Aurangabad, where he would complete his MBBS, do his internship at Parali and Nanded, and earn his MD in Pathology.
Those two years at GMC Nagpur were not erased by what followed. Decades later, Rajan could still recall the physical and emotional ragging of the early months, the student elections, the majestic Maharaja as the social centrepiece of college life. He remembered eating lunch during the first semester at Dr. Tambe’s clinic alongside Avinash Joshi, Rajendra Sarda, and Tapash Saha — the small, reliable pleasures of young men with very little money and a great deal of time between them.
The Anatomy faculty Dr. Gavhale and the Biochemistry faculty Dr. Tiwaskar, he recalled, were considered “terror” by the students. He smiled at the memory when he wrote it down. Time had softened what had once been formidable.
A Discipline Chosen by Circumstance
Rajan did not choose Pathology as an act of vocation. He chose it because, within six months of completing his internship, he was offered a lectureship in the subject — and because surgery and paediatrics, the alternatives pressed upon him, simply did not appeal.
He said yes, and never looked back.
The trajectory that followed was one of patient institutional accumulation: Senior Resident in Pathology (1979), Assistant Lecturer (1979–83), Associate Professor (1983–2006), Professor (2006), Head of Department and Vice-Dean. He became a postgraduate teacher in 1985. He retired as Professor and Head of Pathology at GMC Aurangabad in May 2019 — forty years after his first appointment.
He never went into private practice. This was not oversight; it was decision. Academic pathology suited a man who preferred the steady work of the institution to the uncertain economics of independent practice. He was, in this sense, representative of a generation of government medical college faculty who built careers of genuine depth without the financial rewards that private medicine offers, sustained by the work itself and by the satisfaction of training others.
Among those trained at GMC Aurangabad was his son Ameya — MBBS from Aurangabad, MS in Surgery from BJ Medical College, Pune, and MCh in Plastic Surgery from Grant Medical College, Mumbai. Ameya now practices as a Consultant Plastic Surgeon at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai. The elder son Kedar is a software engineer with Persistent Systems, Pune.
A Life Relocated
In May 2019, Rajan retired. He spent a year as Professor of Pathology at a college in Udaipur before joining Symbiosis Medical College for Women, Pune, in December 2020. He and his wife Dr. Anuradha — a consultant gynaecologist — relocated to Pune, selling the family hospital in Aurangabad.
The move was, in its way, a second beginning. A new city, a new institution, a new set of students arriving each year with their questions and their anxieties, needing to be taught not simply what tissue looks like under a microscope but how to think about what they see.
His father died on 28 December 2019, aged 92, following a fractured femur and cardiac complications after surgery. It was the end, as Rajan put it plainly, of a particular chapter.
The congratulations that came to the house when Ameya stood first in the board examination arrived, in retrospect, at the beginning of another. The father who had never sought the limelight found it, briefly, in his son’s achievement — and found it sufficient.