The Ear Specialist
Friends have been teasing Avinash Deshmukh for decades with the same old pun — “Lend me thy ear” — and he has long since stopped pretending to find it tiresome. Of the three territories that make up ear, nose and throat surgery, it was the ear that claimed him earliest and held him longest. Patients who come to his clinic at Midas Hospital in Nagpur’s Ramdaspeth know him as the doctor who listens first and diagnoses second — a quality that, in a busy ENT practice, is less common than it should be.
But before the ear, there was the cricket pitch.
The Sportsman of GMC
Avinash was born at Daga Memorial Hospital. His father, a Professor of English, served as principal of colleges in Pusad and Digras, giving the family the characteristic mobility of academic life in government service. Avinash later moved to Nagpur for his schooling, studying at Nutan Bharat Vidyalaya in Abhyankar Nagar, before joining the Institute of Science. In 1973, he entered Government Medical College Nagpur to pursue medicine.
At GMC, Avinash was well over six feet — tall, wiry, and conspicuously athletic. There was no sport he did not play. Led by Vikas Chitnavis, he represented GMC as a swing and seam medium-fast bowler and a dependable number-four batsman, part of a team that reached the semifinal of the Nagpur University cricket tournament — the only occasion in GMC’s history that the college achieved that distinction. He represented the GMC basketball team for five years, played kho-kho and volleyball, and turned out for the Vidarbha handball team. For five consecutive years, he was a member — and once captain — of the Nagpur University team.
The athletic CV is not incidental. It tells you something about the man who would later, in a Nottinghamshire hospital, impress nurses and staff with a multi-faceted personality — and resist, as he described it, “enough temptations to hold him in the UK forever.” Avinash Deshmukh has always had more going on than the next man expected.
Avinash Deshmukh has always had more going on than the next man expected.
Beyond medicine, he remains deeply engaged with public and institutional life in Nagpur. He currently serves as Vice President of the Women’s Education Society, which runs seven educational institutions, including the prestigious LAD College, now in its 93rd year. He has also served for the past four years as Vice President of the Vidarbha Cricket Association — a fitting continuation of a lifelong engagement with sport.
ENT, Then the Ear
After internship at Deolapar primary health centre — with Rajeev Biyani, Sanjeev Chandorkar, Rajendra Phadke, and Sanjay Gadre — and six months of urban internship at GMC, Avinash attempted a house job in obstetrics and gynaecology. He was told, not unkindly, that men had no future in a specialty that belonged to women. He pivoted to ENT.
He obtained his Diploma in Laryngology and Otology from GMC Nagpur in 1981, then moved to Mumbai, where he completed his MS in ENT at Lokmanya Tilak Medical College, earning a silver medal. His thesis, supervised by Dr. K.C. Gadre, examined the closure of large tympanic membrane perforations by rotation flap — 50 patients, meticulous work, a subject that would foreshadow his eventual domain. He spent the next years as a medical officer at an ENT hospital in Mumbai before returning to Nagpur in January 1988 to start his own practice.
In 1997, the Overseas Doctors Training Scholarship took him to an 800-bed hospital in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, for a year. He earned a Diploma in ENT from London, came home with new skills, and continued building a practice in which the ear gradually became the centre of gravity.
For years he worked alongside Dr. Madan Kapre — the widely respected ENT surgeon from GMC Nagpur’s 1968 batch — at Niti Gaurav Complex, Nagpur. The association gave Avinash a finishing that years of independent practice alone cannot provide.
Sadhana, Suhrid, and a Wedding That Made History
Avinash married Sadhana in December 1985 — a university topper and gold medallist from Mumbai, who built a career in obstetrics and gynaecology that, by any reckoning, stands alongside his own. She has performed more than 10,000 caesarean sections, and the number that matters to colleagues is not the scale but the principle: every operation was done because it was genuinely needed, never for convenience or financial gain. In an era when unnecessary procedures became common, her practice remained anchored in ethics and sound judgement.
Their son Suhrid holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT; their daughter Shivani is a dental surgeon with a gold medal in orthodontics.
Shivani’s marriage to Abhiram Mundle — son of Ramesh Mundle, Avinash’s classmate from the GMC 1973 batch — gave the family a place of particular significance in the GMC fraternity. It was perhaps the first time that the children of two classmates from the batch married into each other’s families, carrying a friendship forged in college corridors and ward rounds into the next generation. Years later, a second such bond formed when Indrajeet, son of Dilip Gohokar, married Rutuja, daughter of Dhirendra Wagh — both from the same 1973 batch. Such marriages are reminders that medical college friendships, built in lecture halls and hostel rooms, sometimes outlast careers, distances, and generations.
Among the Tribes, and a Philosophy of Medicine
From 2006, Avinash has spent time in the tribal belt near Pandharkawada, working with a group called Srujan to help tribal communities learn non-violent methods of honey collection, and to improve mother-child health outcomes in the region. It is the kind of work that does not appear in a curriculum vitae and does not require a subspecialty diploma — only the recognition that medicine extends beyond the consulting room.
His philosophical anchor is a doctor he never formally worked under: Dr. Manu Kothari, Professor Emeritus of Anatomy at KEM Hospital, Mumbai — “an incorrigible punster,” as Avinash recalls him, whose razor-sharp, unconventional thinking reshaped Avinash’s outlook. ManubhaI Kothari died on 16 October 2014. His memory remains in a song he composed on the lines of a Raj Kapoor number — a doctor’s credo in verse — that Avinash can still recite.
At Neeti Clinics, Ramdaspeth, the practice continues. The ears of Nagpur and central India still find their way to Abhyankar Nagar. The pun still gets made. Avinash still takes it in good humour — which is, when you think about it, the appropriate response from a man who has spent forty years learning to listen.