There is a way a good captain reads a cricket match — not only the ball in the air but the shape of the day, the mood of his bowlers, the weakness a batsman does not know he has. Vikas Chitnavis had that quality. He led the GMC Nagpur cricket team to the semifinals of the Nagpur University inter-collegiate tournament in the mid-1970s, the only time in the college’s history it had gone that far. It was not an accident. His teammates — Ravi Kasat, Sanjeev Chandorkar, Avinash Deshmukh, Sanjay Warhadpande, Rajendra Phadke — were talented, but talent without coordination wins nothing. Vikas provided the coordination.
Bhandara to Nagpur
Vikas was born in Bhandara into a family rooted in academia. His father retired as head of the department at Panjabrao Krishi Vidyapeeth, Akola; his mother retired as principal of the Government College of Education in Bhandara. He did his schooling at Loyola High School, Pune, and Shri Shivaji Preparatory High School, Shivaji Nagar, Pune, before his pre-medical education at RLT College of Science, Akola.
He arrived at GMC Nagpur in 1973 and, within a few months, found himself among what he would later call kindred souls. His rural internship was at PHC Mohadi in Bhandara district, alongside Rajeev Laul, Jayant Pande, Maitreyan Vasudevan and Ramesh Mundle — a group that, as each went their separate ways, would scatter across Indian and international medicine. His urban internship was at GMC Nagpur.
After graduation, Vikas took house jobs in General Medicine, Surgery and Paediatrics in Mumbai. By the end of 1980 he had left for England, where he sat the PLAB examination, then worked in hospital after hospital across the English regions — Doncaster, Sheffield, Bradford, County Durham, Burnley — acquiring experience, taking the MRCP in 1983, and marrying Nivedita in Mumbai on 9 February 1984 before returning to his British posting.
Medicine as a Calling
Vikas moved to the United States in 1990. He completed his residency at Rochester, New York, from 1990 to 1992, followed by a Fellowship in Gastroenterology at Brown University from 1992 to 1994. He was an Assistant Professor at Meharry Medical College until 1999. Then came a staff physician post at the VA Hospital, a private practice in Salem from 1999 to 2004, a brief spell as faculty at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in early 2005, and a return to Salem from August 2005 to August 2013. From September 2013 until his retirement in 2021, he was a clinical faculty member at the Division of Gastroenterology at Virginia Tech Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
It is a career assembled from postings across two countries, a series of moves made in service of better training and then better practice — the kind of career that builds genuine expertise rather than institutional status. His colleagues and his classmates noticed something else: throughout all of it, Vikas kept himself out of the limelight. He had no interest in social media, no appetite for recognition beyond the work itself. Vilas Tambe, speaking at the class reunion, put it plainly: Vikas had helped many classmates from the 1973 batch through their crises and anxieties, offered counsel when asked, and received no credit he would ever acknowledge.
The class of 1973 called him the agony uncle. He accepted that description with the same quiet modesty he brought to everything else.
The Family in Medicine
Vikas and Nivedita raised three children, all of whom entered medicine. Their daughter Maithili did her residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, completed a gastroenterology fellowship at the University of Virginia, and now holds a faculty post at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Their son Padmanabh trained as a dermatologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. Their daughter Madhura did her radiology residency at the same institution. Vikas looked at them with the satisfaction of someone who had tested a hypothesis about medicine — that it was part profession, part calling — and watched his children confirm it.
He still follows cricket. He watches basketball with the same analytical attention he once gave to field placings. He gardens. He photographs. He has moved from Roanoke to Charlotte, where the pace has slowed but the interests have not. The captain’s eye for the shape of things has not dimmed.