“A stethoscope is a solitary instrument; it requires a doctor, a patient, and a shared moment of silence.”

S.P. Kalantri was born in Wardha in 1957 and trained at Government Medical College, Nagpur, where he completed his MBBS and MD in Medicine. In 1982, he joined the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in Sevagram as a junior faculty member — a posting he assumed would be temporary. Four decades later, he is still there, still teaching, and still seeing patients.

His career at MGIMS has been built entirely in the classroom and at the bedside. He rose through the faculty ranks to become Professor of Medicine, and over the years took on administrative responsibilities that culminated in his serving as Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital. Through all of it, he remained a physician first.

At 47, he pursued an MPH at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health — an interlude that sharpened his instinct for asking better questions rather than seeking comfortable answers. He questions unnecessary investigations, resists fashionable interventions, and believes that restraint is often the most humane form of care.

He lives in Sevagram with his wife, Bhavana. He cycles at dawn, reads widely, and writes about the people who make Sevagram what it is — the ward boys, students, and colleagues who rarely enter medical textbooks but shape every working day.