He died the way surgeons sometimes die — in harness, on a weekday, not long after finishing an operation. It was the summer of 1993, and Arun Mankar was 39. His own hospital was still being built. He had told his friends at a dinner the month before that when it was done, he would name it Mankar Smruti Hospital — not in his own honour but in memory of something, though he did not say what. A month later the name became memorial rather than aspirational. His friends, hearing what had happened, understood that he had known something they had not.
The Boy from Ruikhed
Arun was born in 1954 in Ruikhed, a small village 70 km north of Akola. His father was a farmer. He went to a local school in the village for his early education, then moved to Akola for middle school and high school at New English High School. The school sent him, eventually, to Government Medical College, Nagpur, where he enrolled in 1973 as part of Batch D, Roll Number 167.
In the dissection hall and lecture theaters of GMC, Arun Mankar was something people noticed. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Sanjeev Kumar, the Indian film actor of the 1970s whose dark good looks and gentle screen presence made him one of the era’s most admired performers. Whether Arun enjoyed the comparison or found it tiresome is not recorded; what is recorded is that the resemblance was real enough that his batchmates called him by the actor’s name with affectionate persistence.
He interned at Deolapar Primary Health Center — 67 km northwest of Nagpur — alongside Manik Khune. After completing his internship, he returned to GMC Nagpur to enrol in the MS (Surgery) program. Surgery suited him. He had the temperament for it: steady hands, a patient manner with nervous patients, and the kind of focused energy in an operating room that good surgeons develop slowly or are born with. His MS was completed in 1982. He was 28.
A Practice Built on Warmth
Arun moved back to Akola after his MS and opened his surgical practice. The town’s medical community was not large, and a new surgeon with good training and a reassuring manner filled a genuine need. He became popular quickly — not through advertising or aggressive referral networks, but through what his batchmates described, uniformly and without prompting, as a “patient-friendly approach.”
The phrase sounds like a cliché until you understand what it meant in the context of a small-city surgical practice in Maharashtra in the 1980s. Patients in Akola were not always educated, were not always confident in their dealings with doctors, and were often frightened. A surgeon who explained what he was going to do, who answered questions, who didn’t treat the operating table as the only language he spoke — this was not common. Arun Mankar was, by the accounts of those who knew him and those who consulted him, genuinely kind.
He operated at Shankar Hospital while his own facility was under construction. The hospital was his project, his ambition, the thing he was building toward. Naming it Mankar Smruti — the Marathi word for memory, for remembrance — suggests that even as he planned it, he was thinking about what endures. It is the kind of detail that can be read several ways, and his batchmates tend to read it with a shiver.
June 1993
On a day in the summer of 1993, Arun Mankar finished an operation at Shankar Hospital, stepped out of the operating room, and suffered a massive myocardial infarction. He was 39 years old. The medical term is sudden cardiac death; the human term is that he was gone before anyone could do anything, before his own surgical skill could be brought to bear on the crisis inside his chest.
He had not, as far as his friends knew, shown any signs of cardiac trouble. There had been no warning, no preliminary illness, no narrowing of activity. He had been operating the day he died. The news moved through the GMC 1973 WhatsApp group — in the years after mobile communication made such things instantaneous — with the particular quiet of facts that are too large to absorb quickly.
Reminiscences from Deolapar
Dr Manik Khune recalls:
In July 1979, one evening, four young doctors—Arun Mankar, Ram Vallabh Rathi, Jayant Deshmukh (GMC Nagpur, 1972 batch), and I—arrived in Deolapar, a quiet village on the Nagpur–Jabalpur Highway, 32 km from Nagpur. The rains had washed the land into a deep green, and our health centre stood cradled by pasture and forest.
I became the default cook. What began as necessity turned into shared learning. Soon, everyone could prepare poha, khichdi, subji, and even round chapatis. Arun took particular delight in chapatis, laughing as he rolled them out.
We were an unlikely mix. Ram Vallabh and I kept to ourselves; Arun and Jayant drew people in. Deshmukh—married, grounded, and practical—had brought a radio and, rather remarkably, a Smith & Wesson rifle. He owned a licensed armory at Ravi Nagar Square in Nagpur.
Evenings stretched gently. We walked along the highway, talked late into the night, and returned to the same comforting meal—tur dal khichdi tempered with mustard seeds. As the cooker cooled, cards came out. Arun, animated and irrepressible, was often at the centre of laughter—either provoking it or absorbing it.
Arun’s ease with people was immediate. In Deolapar, he quickly befriended many, including retired ACP Mr Anil Bobde, then serving at the local police station. One cold night, Arun and Deshmukh set out into the forest to hunt. Ram Vallabh and I stayed by the fire. They returned before dawn with a sambar. Later, as we cycled past the police station, we rode in silence—cold, alert, and faintly anxious.
Years later, after internship, Arun built a surgical nursing home in Akola. When I visited, I saw a life anchored in work and quiet regard—especially among poorer patients who trusted him deeply. What stayed with me most was his humility.
Once, advising an elder to quit smoking, he said softly, “Sir, please excuse me; you are elder, and I have no right to teach you—but in my opinion, you should quit smoking.”
That gentle restraint, that instinctive respect—rare, and unforgettable.
He is survived by his wife, Dr. Seema, who continued in medicine after his death — serving as a medical officer at District Hospital, Akola, the blood bank at GMC Nagpur, and the TB Ward at District Hospital, Wardha — and two daughters. The hospital he had been building was completed and carries his name, as he had said it would. Mankar Smruti Hospital stands in Akola. Whether that is comfort or irony depends, again, on the observer. Arun Mankar would probably not have asked the question.