Prakash Kataria was the first in his family to go to college. He came from Chandur Bazar, a small town in Amravati district where his father and uncles ran a cloth shop and a medical store, and where higher education was not so much opposed as simply not considered — not relevant to the business of buying and selling, keeping accounts, managing family. Prakash broke that pattern. He also broke it quietly, without drama, in the way of someone who has made a decision and does not require approval for it.
He arrived at Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973, part of a cohort drawn from across the villages and small towns of Vidarbha. He shared a room near Kalpana Building on Canal Road, Ramdas Peth, with Ravindra Kasat during the first year — Kasat, who would become a surgeon in Amravati, and whose laugh was one of the defining sounds of Hostel 2. Across the corridor, close enough to borrow salt or notes, lived Prahalad Jajodia and Nandkishor Chandak. The friendships formed in those years lasted.
The Accident of Pathology
Pathology was not Prakash’s plan. After completing his MBBS and internship — his rural posting was at Parseoni, with Deepak Bahekar, Rajendra Sarda, and Satyanarayan Rathi; his urban posting at Amravati, with Laxmikant Rathi, Ravindra Kasat, and Harish Baheti — he received the offer of an MD seat in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at GMC Nagpur. The subject did not interest him. He went to Mumbai instead and began looking for house jobs.
What happened next is the kind of story that Prakash tells with a slight smile, because he recognises that careers are shaped as much by chance as by intention. He found a house job in pathology at a Mumbai hospital under Dr. Ajit Pendharkar. Then the Dean of Topiwala National Medical College, Dr. SM Purandare, advertised a postgraduate seat in pathology in a corner of a newspaper that almost no one read. Prakash was the only applicant. He became the first candidate of Dr. Mrs. Phatak and completed his MD in Pathology from Topiwala National Medical College and BYL Nair Hospital, Mumbai in 1981.
During his residency he also found his life partner — Varsha, a Mumbai woman who was completing her own MD in Paediatrics at Topiwala National. They married in September 1980. The parallel careers, both in medicine, both in different specialities, suited them both. Varsha became a consultant paediatrician; Prakash, a pathologist. They moved together through the cities that career and circumstance required.
From Nasik to Riyadh
After two years as a lecturer at BYL Hospital and Topiwala National Medical College, Prakash moved into private practice and established a blood bank in Nashik. The mid-1990s brought a reckoning that many private pathologists of his generation faced. Competition had intensified. Ethical standards in laboratory practice had deteriorated in ways that troubled him. He describes the period with characteristic directness: the combination of unethical practices and growing commercial pressure made it difficult to do honest work. In June 1999, he left India for Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia, for a generation of Indian physicians trained in the 1970s and early 1980s, offered something that private practice in India often could not: a salary, a structure, and the relative insulation of institutional employment from the pressures of fee-for-service medicine. Prakash joined the Vitamin Group of Hospitals and Laboratories in Riyadh, where he has worked since — providing diagnostic pathology services to a population that is largely South Asian, with the occasional Arab patient referred from the network’s tertiary facilities.
He has not returned to India permanently, though he travels back regularly. His sons are both settled in India. Pratik, the elder, is a neonatologist at Sahyadri Hospital in Pune, having completed MBBS in the Soviet Union, a DCH from BJ Medical College, and a fellowship in neonatology. Pallav, the younger, is a gold medallist in MD Pharmacology from DY Patil Medical College and works with Novartis in Hyderabad. Two sons, two medical careers, two different paths through the same profession. Prakash reflects on this with the particular satisfaction of a man who understands that the best gift a father can give is the example of work done seriously.
The ‘SHARP’ Group and What It Meant
Among the things Prakash carries from his GMC years is his membership in the informal alliance that called itself SHARP — Shobha Dani, Hema Deoras, Arun Deshmukh, Ravi Kasat, and Prakash Kataria. It was not a formal study group or a political faction. It was simply five people who gravitated toward each other, spent time together in the clinical years, and found that the combination of different temperaments and backgrounds produced something more useful than any single one of them could manage alone. Shobha went on to become Professor and Head of Orthopaedics at AIIMS Rishikesh — the first woman in that role. Ravi Kasat became a surgeon in Amravati, known as much for his laugh as for his skill with a scalpel.
Prakash left GMC after his internship and did not return for postgraduation. Like several of his batchmates, he found his way to the degree through detours that looked, at the time, like failures of planning. They were not. They were the education that the formal curriculum could not provide: learning what you are actually good at by trying several things that don’t quite fit.
He remains in Riyadh, still working. The small town boy from Chandur Bazar who became the first in his family to enter college has, across forty years, given his family two physician sons, a gold medal in pharmacology, a neonatology specialist, and a marriage that has survived the long separations and frequent relocations that characterise a medical career lived across continents. Not a bad return on the original investment.