Her father gave her a Luna moped in the second semester of first MBBS. He filled the petrol, managed the repairs, and kept the tyres inflated. Her mother ensured that breakfast, lunch, and dinner were ready every day. “I was richly pampered by my parents,” Neelam says, “and, therefore, loathed the idea of enduring the hardships of hostel life.” She lasted in the hostel exactly one month.
That small detail — the moped, the parents, the early retreat from hostel to home — says something essential about Neelam Matnani. She has always known what she wanted, and what she valued, and has arranged her life accordingly, without apology.
The Vintage Family
Dhanwanti Vanjani was born on 15 December 1955, in Nagpur, into a family known for selling the finest vintage wines in the city. She went to Mahatma Gandhi Centennial Sindhu High School, Jaripatka, and then to Sindhu Mahavidyalaya for her premed college education. The college had opened only in 1971. Her maternal uncle, a physics teacher there, persuaded her father to ignore the better-known colleges. “He convinced my father that Sindhu Mahavidyalaya was as good as any other college in the city,” Neelam recalls. The uncle proved right. That one-year-old college sent seven students to Government Medical College (GMC), Nagpur in 1973: Khatija Arif-Jumkhawala, Dhanwanti Vanjani, Gagan Panjwani, Manohar Kanadia, Chandrashekhar Jambholkar, Murtaza Akhtar, and Dinesh Soni.
She arrived at GMC, commuted on the Luna her father maintained, ate the meals her mother cooked, and made it through the five years without the hostel forming her, as it formed so many of her classmates. She was among the first nine women of the batch to marry — in February 1979, halfway through her internship, she married Dr. Gurbux Matnani, a 1971 graduate of BJ Medical College, Pune, who later completed his MD in Pathology from the same institution.
Family First
She moved to Pune and registered for the DGO programme at BJ Medical College. Pregnancy brought recalcitrant skin problems — swollen, sore, itching feet — and she left the course. After delivery, her priorities reorganised themselves clearly and permanently. Husband, children, in-laws: these came first. She did not return to the DGO.
In the years that followed, Neelam ran a private practice that, at its peak in the early 1980s, saw 80 patients a day. She was good at it. But she reduced her hours, deliberately and incrementally, to make time for her family. “I have achieved what I wanted in my life,” she says: “inner peace, serene satisfaction, and happiness.” Her father-in-law, who lived to 94 and died in 2007, gave her three decades of love and affection. She speaks of him with a pride that has nothing to do with achievement and everything to do with belonging.
The generation that trained in government medical colleges in the 1970s was formed by the assumption that career came first, that sacrifice was proof of seriousness. Neelam Matnani made a different calculation — that a doctor who chose her family over her practice was not diminished by the choice. Across the decades since, as medicine grew more corporate and more consuming, that calculation has come to look less like compromise and more like wisdom.
The Matnani Children
Her elder son, Rahul, completed MBBS from Grant Medical College, Mumbai, then a PhD in Immunology and MD in Pathology from the University of Kentucky, and a fellowship in Haematology at Columbia University. He now works as a consultant haemato-pathologist at Cleveland Clinic, Abu Dhabi — married to Nishika Jalani, a BDS graduate with an MPH from Kentucky. Their daughters are Ananya, born 2010, and Anishka, born 2015.
Her younger son, Nitin, holds a BE in Electronics and Telecommunication from DY Patil Institute, Pune, and an MS from the University of Louisville. He works as Team Lead at Aera Technology in California, in cognitive and AI automation — married to Komal Rangnani from Nanded. Their twin daughters are Jinisha and Jeeana.
Dr. Gurbux Matnani, after his long academic career in Pathology at DY Patil Medical College, Pune, runs his own Pathology Laboratory. He serves as an honorary at YCMH, is director of Seva Vikas Co-operative Bank, and was charter president of the Rotary Club of Pimpri Town.
What She Does Now
Neelam no longer practises medicine. She cooks, takes long walks, exercises, and spends time with the people she loves. She describes this not as retirement but as arrival.
The Luna is long gone. But the instinct it represented — that the people who love you deserve your time, and that arranging a life around that truth is not retreat but choice — has governed her since the beginning.