His father was a lawyer in Bramhapuri — a small town in the Chandrapur forests where the roads narrow and the world slows. Vasantrao Tandale argued cases, managed the rhythms of a mofussil practice, and sent his son to Nagpur for school. The son, Viraj, came to Government Medical College (GMC), Nagpur in 1973, played volleyball, dabbled at bridge and table tennis, and went on to build a career across three continents before the trail grows quiet.
Bramhapuri to Nagpur
Viraj Tandale was born to Vasantrao Tandale, an advocate in Bramhapuri. He attended primary school in Amravati, had his middle school education in Mumbai, and completed higher secondary from CP and Berar High School, Mahal, Nagpur — the same school as Dilip Tikkas, Surendra Bhandarkar, and Pradip Sambarey. For premed college, he went to Nevjabai Hitkarini College, Bramhapuri, where Manik Khune, Madhukar Lanje, Ashok Ingole, and Khemraj Wankar were his classmates. All five found their way to GMC Nagpur in 1973.
In the GMC years, Viraj was known on the volleyball court and at the bridge table. He and Farhad Khan and Manik Khune played together, the small rituals of college life that bind people across the years. His rural internship took him to the primary health center at Tumsar, 93 km east of Nagpur — with Sudhakar Dhakite, CL Sonkusare, Madhukar Lanje, and Deonath Nimje.
The Anaesthesiologist’s Path
After graduation, Viraj obtained his Diploma in Anaesthesiology (DA) and then his MD in Anaesthesiology from GMC Nagpur. He trained, worked, and moved. After postgraduation, he served at Sangli, then at Jaslok Hospital in Mumbai — one of the city’s premier private institutions, where the case mix is complex and the expectations unforgiving. He then went to Al Khobar in the Gulf, where he worked at Almana Hospital until 1995.
The 1970s and 1980s produced a generation of Indian doctors who dispersed outward in waves: first to government service, then to private practice, then to the Gulf, and then, for many, onward. Viraj followed that arc. He married a staff nurse and, in 1995, moved to Toronto, Canada — for good, as it turned out. The connections with Nagpur, with Bramhapuri, with the classmates who once shared a bridge table, grew thinner over the years. He has not been part of the reunions. The archive notes, simply, that he seems to have severed his connections with the city and the family he grew up with.
A Life in Outline
The record is spare. A lawyer’s son from Bramhapuri who played volleyball at GMC, trained in Anaesthesiology, worked his way from Sangli to Mumbai to the Gulf to Canada. A career built across borders. A life about which his classmates know little.
There is something worth noting in that sparseness. Among the 205 graduates of the GMC Nagpur batch of 1973, Viraj Tandale represents a particular type — the doctor who emigrated, built a new life, and gradually reduced his ties to the place that trained him. The batch produced dozens of such trajectories. Viraj’s simply became quieter than most.
He lives in Toronto. He practised Anaesthesiology for more than three decades. He chose a country, stayed, and built a life there. Beyond that, what the archive holds is only what college left b