“I was a shy and taciturn girl when I came to GMC, Nagpur,” Maya Bhaskarwar said, years after the fact. “The big city, the big medical campus, and the English-Marathi divide completely overwhelmed me.”
She came from Chandrapur, the daughter of a family with petrol, transport, and automobile interests. She went to Jubilee High School, then Lokmanya Tilak Vidyalaya, and did her premed at Janata Mahavidyalaya, Chandrapur — where Pramod Bangde, Vijay Karmarkar, Pradeep Desai, Sudhakar Dupare, and Suresh Satghare were her classmates. At GMC Nagpur, she found her footing in the hostel, in the company of Pratibha Thakre, Meena Patil, Vijaya Vithalkar, and Sandhya Mohgaonkar. Her rangolis in the college art competitions earned genuine appreciation from the judges.
The Pune Years
She interned at Chandrapur Civil Hospital alongside Aziz Khan, Harish Baheti, and Rajendra Sarda, and completed her rural posting at Rural Health and Training Centre, Saoner. In the spring of 1979, she married Arun Jamkar, a surgeon from BJ Medical College, Pune — a man who would go on to become Dean of BJ Medical College and Vice Chancellor of Maharashtra University of Health Sciences, Nashik. She left Nagpur and joined the postpartum programme at BJ Medical College as an anaesthesiologist.
She enrolled in MD (Anaesthesiology) at BJ Medical College as an in-service candidate, earning her Diploma in Anaesthesiology in 1982 and MD in 1985 under Dr Usha Padhye, who supervised her thesis evaluating intrathecal morphine, pethidine, and pentazocine as postoperative analgesics. She was confirmed as a lecturer in the Department of Anaesthesia at BJ Medical College in 1989 and remained at that institution for three decades, mentoring close to 30 residents through their MD theses.
Her specialisation fell on orthopaedic and trauma anaesthesia — the long cases, the spine, the patients who arrived broken from road accidents. She also worked on labour analgesia in her earlier years. She obtained a fellowship in teaching technology from FAIMER, Ludhiana, and a fellowship in bioethics.
After the Operating Room
She retired from BJ Medical College on 30 September 2019 and moved to Emergency Medicine — a natural continuation of the same quality of attention she had brought to the operating room: the same calm in the face of urgency, the same interest in a patient who is not yet stable.
The years since have brought travel — Bali, Japan — and grandmotherhood. Her granddaughter Uma, born to son Saket and daughter-in-law Sai in the United States, has, in Maya’s telling, brought out the child from within her.
Yoga occupies her mornings. Trekking — an enthusiasm acquired from Arun — has taken her to the Himalayas more than once. The taciturn girl from Chandrapur who arrived at GMC barely able to speak English finished her formal career having shaped the practice and the confidence of three decades of young anaesthesiologists.