On 7 July 1973, Nandkishor Salampuria received his GMC Nagpur admission letter. It was his birthday. Those who knew him would later say it was arguable the best birthday gift a medical student could dream of. He was 18, from Khamgaon in Buldhana district, admitted to a college 400 km from home, and fully prepared to make the most of it.
He shared a room for a year and a half with Vijay Kherde and Kailash Murarka in Habib Manjil on Ramghat Road. He was a member of the Saptrishi group — Vijay Kherde, Kailash Murarka, Nandkishor Salampuria and Makhanlal Gupta from Akola, Nandkishor Taori from Malkapur, Indra Ostwal and Ajit Jadhao from Khamgaon — young men who shared a geography, a dialect, and a loyalty that outlasted graduation. He edited the college souvenir. He played on the GMC badminton team.
The Making of a Plastic Surgeon
He had the good fortune to work as a house officer under Professor LK Sharma in Plastic Surgery, and under Vikram Marwah and ML Gandhe in Surgery. He obtained MS (General Surgery) and then MCh (Plastic Surgery) from GMC Nagpur, with Dr LK Sharma as his guide and Suhas Jajoo as his co-registrar.
He completed his MCh in November 1984 — the very month he married Sharda, then a resident in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Raipur. He began his private practice at Akola in February 1985.
Two Thousand Faces
Over the next three decades, Salampuria conducted diagnostic and operative plastic surgery camps across Melghat and the districts of Vidarbha. Between 2010 and 2014, he performed close to 2,000 cleft lip and palate surgeries under the Smile Train project — restoring to children a face the world would not turn away from. He taught surgery at GMC Akola. He chaired MAPSICON, the state surgeons’ conference, in 2011.
A few months before his death, he telephoned SP Kalantri. His daughter had just cleared MD (Obstetrics and Gynaecology) from JNMC Sawangi with distinction and had recently married. His voice, as Kalantri recalled, carried the unmistakable quality of a man at peace with what he had built. The call was warm and easy and full of gladness.
On 12 January 2021, Nandkishor Salampuria died of COVID-19. He had been admitted to a hospital in Akola, developed multi-organ failure, and did not come back. He was 65.
He is survived by his wife Dr Sharda, a consultant gynaecologist, and his daughters Shraddha, a dermatologist in Pune, and Shruti, an obstetrician-gynaecologist.