Manik Khune was born in Bramhapuri, a small town 115 kilometres southeast of Nagpur, in the heart of Vidarbha. He began his schooling at Zilla Parishad School, Bramhapuri, before a brief and illness-interrupted spell at Holy Cross Convent, Amravati. He returned to Bramhapuri for his fifth and sixth standards at Nevjabai Hitkarini High School, then moved to Government Vidya Niketan, Chikhaldara, where he studied from 1967 to 1972 — one of thirty students selected from rural areas across eight Vidarbha districts. He completed his pre-medical year at Nevjabai Hitkarini College, Bramhapuri, between July 1972 and April 1973. Several of his college contemporaries — Viraj Tandale, Madhukar Lanje, Khemraj Wankar, and Ashok Ingole — joined GMC Nagpur in the same year.
He completed his internship at Akola and Deolapar, working alongside Arun Mankar, R.J. Rathi, and Jayant Deshmukh from the 1972 batch. In 1979, he returned to Bramhapuri and opened a general practice — one of only five private practitioners in a town that would, over the next four decades, grow into one of the fastest-expanding cities in Vidarbha. He did not apply for house jobs at GMC, a decision he would revisit with regret for years.
Children’s health became his abiding interest. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Manik established himself as the town’s paediatrician of choice, providing daycare services for sick children alongside his general practice. He headed the local IMA branch — fifty-five members strong — and earned a reputation that extended well beyond medicine. By his own reckoning, he counselled, treated, and managed close to a quarter-million patients over those years.
Sport ran as a parallel current through his life. Bramhapuri has a tennis club that dates to 1936, and Manik took to the game seriously — seriously enough that in the late eighties he permitted himself the daydream of a set with Steffi Graf. In the monsoon months, when the courts were unusable, he turned to badminton and table tennis. He organised Vidarbha and state-level basketball and chess tournaments in Bramhapuri, and led several local sports clubs and associations.
Somewhere in the middle of a long and successful practice, a question began to form. He described it plainly: “So how long do I serve like this? What next? Shall I hang my boots?” His own answer was equally plain: “Doctors should never get tired nor retire until they are finally retired by the Almighty.” But the answer did not dissolve the question. It redirected it.
In 2015, Manik designed, planned, and built a ten-thousand-square-foot multispecialty hospital in Bramhapuri. He hired a cardiologist — the first the town had ever had — along with a surgeon, a gynaecologist, and a sonologist. He commissioned an eight-bedded ICCU. A catheterisation laboratory was in the pipeline. The vision was a superspeciality hospital that would bring everything under one roof — compensation, perhaps, for the postgraduation he had never pursued. “I did not pursue postgraduation,” he said. “It has been a lingering regret throughout my life.”
The project came undone slowly, then all at once. Specialists came and left. New hospitals opened in town and the doctor-to-patient ratio shifted. Demonetisation arrived in 2016. Covid arrived in 2020. Manik ran the hospital through all of it, then leased it out in 2020, and finally withdrew completely in March 2022. The dream, as he put it, had confronted the harsh realities of financial and operational life and had not survived.
He does not tell this story with bitterness. He tells it with the candour of a man who tried something difficult, watched it fail, and moved on.
In May 2022, Manik relocated to Nagpur. He started a small OPD on Jaitala Road and set up a medical shop nearby, managed by his son. The city had changed considerably since his GMC years, but he found his bearings quickly.
The move also opened a door he had long wanted to enter. Guided by his batchmate Dr. Suresh Batra, Manik became a devotee of the Ramakrishna Mission in Nagpur, contributing one day each week to its mobile dispensary. The spiritual dimension of his life, always present, became central.
He plays table tennis regularly — his batchmate Dr. Wankar is his preferred opponent — and competes in veterans’ tournaments across Maharashtra. His grandson Ojas, born in 2019, gives the household its particular energy. His father, Shri Vishwanath Khune, a retired college principal and school president who had shaped education in Bramhapuri for a generation, passed away on Christmas Day 2020 at the age of ninety-eight.
Writing in November 2023, Manik put it simply: “All in all, I am grateful for the infinite grace of the Almighty, and life is currently flowing smoothly.”