The telegram arrived on 7 July 1973 — Rajendra Kokate’s birthday. His parents handed it to him in Dabhadi, a village near Malkapur in Amravati district, and the news inside it was simple: he had been admitted to Government Medical College, Nagpur. There are few better birthday gifts for a farmer’s son from Vidarbha, and Rajendra knew it. He carried that knowledge quietly through everything that followed — the crowded hostel rooms, the long postings in remote primary health centres, the late return to MD studies alongside colleagues half his age, and the slow winding down of a practice built on patience and principle. When he died in November 2025, his classmates felt the loss as only those feel who have shared the particular intimacy of a dissection hall bench.
The Son of Vidarbha
Rajendra grew up in Dabhadi and went to Sitabai Sangai High School before joining Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya, Amravati, for his pre-medical year. Twenty-four students from that college joined the GMC Nagpur batch of 1973 — a formidable cohort from the cotton district heartland. Rajendra was anchored in the dissection hall between Pramod Mahajan ahead of him and Dilip Tikkas behind, part of a solid cluster of roll numbers 110 to 120 that became, over time, a small fraternity within a larger one.
He was never the loudest voice in the room. His batchmates remember a man whose smile was infectious and whose laugh — warm and sincere — cut through the noise of hostel life without effort or performance. He was, in the way that matters most in a long career, reliable.
After graduation, his internship divided between Nagbhid in Chandrapur and the Civil Hospital in Amravati. He worked briefly as a tutor in Pathology before the pull of public service took him in a different direction.
The Villages, and the Long Inning
Rajendra gave his working life to rural Maharashtra. The postings moved him through Mangrulpir, Dhamangaon, Achalpur, Chikhaldara, Tembhursonda, and Daryapur — medical officer at a succession of primary health centres, each one serving populations that had few other options. He did not approach this as sacrifice. He believed that medicine must go to the villages, and he lived that belief with the same quiet consistency he brought to everything.
He found his life partner in Dr. Vijaya, herself a medical officer, and for years they served side by side in the public health system. Together they built a practice rooted in the communities they worked in, sustained by mutual trust and shared purpose.
Fifteen years after graduation — when most of his batchmates were established in private practice — Rajendra chose to return to college. He enrolled in the MD (Medicine) programme at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur, studying alongside students young enough to be his children. He called himself, without self-pity, a “maturity-onset MD.” His thesis, supervised by Dr. Suresh Kate, examined the relationship between blood groups and chest tuberculosis — a question of direct relevance to the patient populations he had served. He completed it with characteristic diligence and returned to Anjangaon.
In Anjangaon Surji, he served as Medical Superintendent of the Sub-District Hospital, retired as a Class I Officer and Civil Surgeon, and then, in 2002, chose voluntary retirement and opened a modest private practice focused on outpatient care. The work was simple and honest. He referred patients to MGIMS Sevagram when they needed more than he could offer, and when he did, he would say: Please look after them — they’re my people.
His son Vikram followed him into medicine, completing MD (Medicine) at JNMC Wardha and then a fellowship in Nephrology. His daughter-in-law Minal trained as an anaesthetist at KEM Hospital, Mumbai. Rajendra took a quiet pride in this — not the pride of a patriarch, but the satisfaction of a man who had shown that medicine, practiced honestly in a small town, was a life worth handing on.
When the diagnosis of gall bladder cancer came in the final weeks, he met it as he had met everything — with a half-smile and the words: I’ll manage. He died at home, surrounded by his family, on 1 November 2025.
One more wicket down, as his classmate SP Kalantri wrote that same evening from Sevagram. The innings is moving toward its close.