The morning cycle ride to GMC Nagpur in 1973 was a small daily formation. Manohar Kanadia set out from Kamal Chowk. Gagan Panjwani joined from Jaripatka. Chandrashekhar Jambholkar pedalled out from Indora Chowk. Murtaza Akhtar fell in from Itwari. Aziz Khan from Gitti Khadan. Chandrashekhar Meshram from Kamal Chowk. As the group passed through Mahal, Mahendra Sawarkar joined the entourage.
“With our starched aprons carefully perched over the handlebars,” Chandrashekhar recalled, “we, the first years, would approach the GMC gate with hands trembling, tongues parched, and hearts palpitating.” Ragging awaited. So did Gray’s Anatomy. Both, in time, were survived.
A Nagpur Boy, Root and Branch
Chandrashekhar’s parents came from Chhindwara but had settled in Nagpur before he was born. His father taught at a Nagpur Municipal Corporation primary school — a profession that placed the family firmly within the city’s lower-middle-class intelligentsia: educated, careful with money, and convinced that education was the only durable investment. Chandrashekhar attended Corporation Primary School, Lashkari Bagh, through the fourth standard, then Dada Dhanwate Vidyalaya in Mahal through the tenth. He completed his premedical year at SFS College and Sindhu Mahavidyalaya — the latter a one-year-old institution that in 1973 managed to send eight students to GMC Nagpur, among them Khatija Arif-Jumkhawala, Dhanwanti Vanjani, Harish Motwani, Gagan Panjwani, Manohar Kanadia, Murtaza Akhtar, and Dinesh Soni.
He was a day scholar throughout. The bicycle to GMC was his daily tether to the college. When the group eventually upgraded — after six months, the daily riders began taking the bus from Jaripatka to Medical Square — it felt, as he put it, like progress.
After graduation he did his urban internship at GMC Nagpur and rural internship at Katari Sawanga with Manohar Kanadia and Dinesh Soni. He then earned his DCH from GMC Nagpur, alongside Bharat Kothari, Vijay Karmarkar, Abhimanyu Niswade, and Chandramohan Hajari.
The Quacks and the Science
Chandrashekhar began his practice at Teka Naka, near Kamptee Square in Nagpur — a locality that already had three practitioners with nearly three decades of practice between them. They were quacks. They had patients. They had trust, of a kind.
“When I started practice, measles was being treated with peacock feathers,” he said, “and superstitions ruled the roost.” The task was not simply to see patients but to inject science into a community that had learned to associate healing with ritual. He approached it as a family physician rather than a pure paediatrician — treating the household as a unit, building relationships that extended across generations, and earning trust the only way it can be earned in a neighbourhood: slowly, by being there.
The area was also home, he noted with characteristic understatement, to a significant number of gundas. He learned to deal with them too.
DCH gave him paediatrics. Practice gave him the rest. Over time, as Nagpur changed, so did what his patients asked of him. In the early years they came with fevers, coughs, and diarrhoea. Now they come for blood pressure monitoring, diabetes management, osteoarthritis, asthma, and cardiac follow-up. The primary care physician in India has become, almost without announcement, the coordinator of chronic disease.
The Family He Raised and the Son Who Followed
Chandrashekhar married Sandhya on 25 July 1984. They have three children. Their elder daughter Meenakshi holds degrees in biotechnology and management and works as an HR recruiter with PeopleScout in Gurgaon. Their younger daughter Swati is a dental surgeon who practises in Thane. Their son Pankaj — an MBBS graduate from Index Medical College — is a first-year MD resident in Community Medicine at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi. The next generation of the family has entered medicine through the door that Chandrashekhar opened fifty years ago, pushing a bicycle through Nagpur’s early morning streets.
He runs a modest clinic near Jain Mandir in Ashok Nagar, Nagpur — small, by design, and fully occupied. He keeps a five-bed hospital for inpatient care where costs are held low and the medicine is, as he has always practised it, safe.
The Doctor-Patient Relationship, Changed
Ask Chandrashekhar what is different now and he answers without hesitation. “People are more aware, sceptical, and have started seeking a lot of information. The doctor-patient relationship has changed substantially. Now we need to continuously update our knowledge and be very careful in triaging patients.”
He says this without resentment. The patients who arrive with internet printouts and questions are, from his vantage, patients who are taking their health seriously. The paediatrician who learned to treat measles without peacock feathers, in a neighbourhood run partly by men who did not take kindly to being refused, has had ample practice adapting.
The bicycle is long gone. The morning ride from Indora Chowk to the GMC gate — aprons perched on handlebars, hearts palpitating — remains one of the clearest memories of a life in medicine. It was, he says, a very simple time.
He has not let simplicity leave the practice.