He had hands that people noticed. In the operating theatre, colleagues watched him work with something close to absorption — the precision of the incisions, the economy of motion, the quality of attention he brought to a patient with polio contractures or a fractured femur. His guide during the MS programme was Padmashri Dr. Vikram Marwah, the dean and master surgeon of GMC Nagpur, and the standards Marwah set were exacting. Dilip Magarkar met them. His classmate Mohan Gupte, who knew him as well as anyone in the batch, wrote of his “magic and nimble hands, with utmost precision, dexterity, meticulousness and great confidence.” It was not flattery. In the memory of those who watched him operate, it was simple description.
Nagpur to GMC
Dilip Shankar Magarkar was born and raised in Nagpur. He attended CP Berar School and completed his premed education at Mathuradas Mohota College of Science — the same college that sent thirteen students to the GMC Nagpur 1973 batch, including Harshvardhan Sheorey, Vilas Tambe, Siddhartha Kumar Biswas, Rajshree Chaturvedi, and others. He joined Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973.
After graduation, he did his rural internship alongside Ajit Pradhan, Pradip Sambarey, and Mohan Gupte at Kuhi, 40 kilometres southeast of Nagpur. During his GMC years, he was known for his involvement in theatre — he worked with Dhirendra Wagh on several Marathi productions, and the drama Tarun Turk Mhatare Ark is still recalled by those who saw it.
After graduation, he pursued his MS (Orthopedics) at GMC Nagpur under the supervision of Dr. Vikram Marwah. Shobha Dani, who would go on to head the Department of Orthopedics at AIIMS Rishikesh, was his co-registrar during the MS programme. That Shobha chose Orthopaedics in 1980 — when only twelve female orthopaedicians existed in the country — and that Dilip worked alongside her without the friction that more conventional surgical departments might have produced, says something about both of them.
The Polio Years
He began his career as an honorary orthopaedician at a charitable hospital for handicapped children in Sitabuldi, Nagpur. The patients who came to that hospital were largely from poor families — children with polio contractures, deformities that years of neglect and inadequate primary care had made worse than they needed to be. This was not glamorous surgery. Corrective procedures for post-polio deformity require patience, a fine sense of anatomy, and a willingness to work in a setting where the equipment was limited and the gratitude of the families was the primary reward. He did it voluntarily and consistently.
He also worked with Dr. Vikram Marwah and at the Nagri Co-operative Hospital, Nagpur, before establishing his own hospital at Reshimbag in 1990, where he also built his home. For several years, he visited Yavatmal on Sundays to extend his practice reach into a district that had fewer orthopaedic services.
He participated in charitable polio surgery camps throughout his career, earning what Mohan Gupte described as “many accolades from all corners of the society and the surgical fraternity.” This was work that received no grant funding, generated no publications, and appeared in no citation index. He did it because the need was there and because he could.
The Marriage of Two Families
There is a particular detail in the GMC 1973 batch narrative that attaches to Dilip Magarkar: his daughter’s marriage. Poorva, who completed her MD in Anaesthesiology from GS Medical College, Mumbai, followed by a DNB in Critical Care, married Dr. Jitendra Mahajan, an onco-anaesthesiologist at AIIMS Delhi. His son, Shashwat, completed his MDS in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery from Government Dental College, Mumbai, and practices at Dhantoli, Nagpur.
These are ordinary facts of family life. But within the GMC 1973 archive, the marriage that mattered most as a point of record was between another pair: the son of Ramesh Mundle married the daughter of Avinash Deshmukh, extending a GMC friendship across a generation. Dilip Magarkar’s place in that larger story is as a man whose deep bonds of friendship with his classmates — Mohan Gupte, Dhirendra Wagh, Vivek Kulkarni, Aziz Khan, Kishore Kedar, and many others — were among the permanent things of his life.
1 July 2009
On 1 July 2009, Dilip Magarkar developed sudden chest pain at home. He was taken first to a local physician, then transferred to Spandan Heart Institute, Ramdaspeth. An angioplasty was performed. He recovered briefly. On 3 July 2009, he died.
He was 52.
His wife, Dr. Sulbha Magarkar — a graduate of BJ Medical College, Pune, with an MD in Pathology from GMC Nagpur — continues to work as a pathologist at Spandan Diagnostics, Ramdaspeth, Nagpur. She had collaborated with Dr. Anjali Joshi to found their diagnostic lab years earlier. She carried on.
“It is unbelievable,” Mohan Gupte wrote, “that such a phenomenal and peerless person was our chummy and is no more with us.” The word chummy — intimate friend — carries more weight than any formal tribute. In the hostel slang of the 1970s, it meant the kind of friend you ate with and borrowed money from and argued with at midnight and forgave by morning.
Dilip Magarkar was that. The operating theatre remembered his hands. His friends remembered the man who used them.