Dr. Anand Mohan Sur was not a man who wasted words. When the head of the Department of Paediatrics at Government Medical College, Nagpur, stood before his students and spoke about breastfeeding, the room went quiet. For Bharat Kothari, a third-year student in the early 1970s, that single lecture decided the next four decades of his professional life. He walked out of the hall knowing, with a certainty he had not felt before, that he would become a paediatrician.
The Bicycle Seller’s Son
Bharat was born in Bhuj, his maternal grandfather’s town, but grew up in Nagpur, where his paternal great-grandparents had migrated in 1910. His father ran a brisk trade in bicycles — a modest, industrious business that put Bharat through school and, eventually, through Government Medical College. He attended Gujarati School, Itwari, for his early years, then Lakadganj High School, then Saraswati High School at Shankar Nagar. At each step, the family’s expectation was clear: study hard, get ahead.
He entered GMC Nagpur in 1973 through the Institute of Science. In the hostel evenings, when other students scattered to tea shops and the common room, Bharat climbed to the terrace of Hostels 2, 3 and 4 for cricket. He was ambidextrous — off-spin with the left hand, right-handed at the crease — and he loved the music of the 1960s and 70s with a devotion that never left him.
The Hurdle Before the Goal
After graduation, Bharat did his internship at Sindewahi in Chandrapur district, alongside Arun Warkari, Arun Kohle and Subhash Hatey. He returned to Nagpur knowing where he was headed — but the route had a gate he had not expected.
Until 1979, entry to the MD (Paediatrics) programme at GMC required candidates to first complete a Diploma in Child Health. MD candidates could not bypass DCH and compete directly. It was a structural hurdle that sorted the committed from the impatient. Bharat cleared it without complaint. He sat his DCH, then competed with the junior batch for the MD seat — and prevailed. He came under the supervision of Dr. AM Sur, the very man whose lecture had set his direction years before. The circle closed quietly and without ceremony.
His MD thesis investigated a question with direct consequences for newborn care. After completing the degree in 1982, he worked for six months under Dr. Bipin Desai, a well-regarded paediatrician in Gujarat, then moved to Navsari as Chief Medical Officer in the paediatrics section of the district hospital. Two years later, he arrived in Vapi.
Forty Years in Vapi
Vapi sits at the southernmost tip of Gujarat, a manufacturing town on the Damanganga river. It is not the kind of place paediatricians dream of settling — no teaching hospital, no university affiliation, no research library. What it had was children, and parents who needed someone they could trust.
Bharat opened his 15-bed paediatric hospital and began the work of building a practice from nothing. By his own reckoning, it took years. Reputation in a new town is built one consultation at a time, one sick child recovered and sent home, one frightened mother reassured. He did not hurry the process.
That Dr. Sur’s influence went deep is evident not only in Bharat’s choice of specialty but in the emphases of his practice. Breastfeeding, nutrition, child development — the themes that Sur had animated in that long-ago lecture became the pillars of Bharat’s clinical approach. He understood, as Sur had taught, that the most powerful intervention in paediatrics often cost nothing.
The 1960s and 70s music that Bharat loved as a student never left him. In Vapi, far from Nagpur’s hostels and cricket terraces, the records and tapes kept the connection alive. Some attachments, he had come to believe, do not diminish with distance or time.
The Children They Raised
Bharat and Raksha’s son Dharam studied engineering at the University of Southern California and now works as a timing engineer at NVIDIA in Santa Clara — a long remove from his father’s paediatrics ward, but a continuity of precision. Their daughter Dhara took a different path: an MBBS from Jiangsu University in China, a diploma in psychiatry from NKP Salve Institute in Nagpur, and a consulting post at a primary health centre in Daman. The children of a paediatrician who sought out underserved places himself, they built careers of their own calibre.
When Bharat looks back across four decades in Vapi, it is not the cases or the complications he returns to first. It is the lecture. A lecture that lasted perhaps an hour, in a hall in Nagpur in the early 1970s, delivered by a man who had mastered his subject and knew it mattered. That hour made the rest possible.