On 28 December 2013, the day after the GMC 1973 batch reunion in Nagpur, Prabhakar Patil’s son Piyush married Supriya in Nanded. The timing was not accidental. The reunion had gathered the batch after years of dispersal — doctors returning from Akola, Wardha, Amravati, Chandrapur, Mumbai, the Gulf, and the United States — and the wedding that followed felt like an extension of the same gathering energy. The batch celebrated both events.
Do Annkhe Hui Chaar. Four eyes became one vision. In Prabhakar’s case, the pun runs deeper than the occasion. His entire professional life has been about eyes.
Borgaon to Wardha to Nagpur
Prabhakar was born in Borgaon, a village in Arni Taluka, Yavatmal district, to a farmer. He attended the local primary school before making the journey to Wardha for his pre-medical year at Jankidevi Bajaj College of Science — the same college that sent Suhas Jajoo, Rekha Sapkal, Avinash Joshi, SP Kalantri, Rajan Bindu, Narayan Dongre, and several others to GMC Nagpur in 1973. The college’s contribution to the batch was substantial, and the friendships formed there — over shared benches in the science laboratories, over the anxieties of pre-medical examinations — outlasted the college years.
In 1973, he entered GMC Nagpur. He stayed initially with a senior GMC student, Kuber Kotpalliwar from the 1972 batch, then shared accommodation with Nandkishor Taori at Hanuman Nagar, and finally moved into the GMC hostels in the spring of 1975, once the first MBBS hurdle had been cleared.
After graduation, his rural internship took him to Samudrapur in Wardha district, alongside Vijay Thakre, Pramod Bhise, and Narayan Dongre. The urban posting was at the district hospital in Wardha. The internship in those years was genuinely formative — students posted to primary health centers far from the city had to manage emergencies without senior cover, diagnose without imaging, and treat without the drugs they might have had in a city hospital. Prabhakar learned, as his generation learned, that clinical judgement was what remained when everything else was unavailable.
The Eye and the Town
He obtained his Diploma in Ophthalmology from GMC, Nagpur in 1981 and returned to Yavatmal to begin practice. The decision to practice in his home district rather than Nagpur or Mumbai was characteristic of his generation: many GMC 1973 alumni chose to serve the places they came from, bringing specialist skills back to towns that would otherwise have had none.
Yavatmal in 1981 had almost no specialist ophthalmology. What existed was largely confined to the district hospital and whatever government posting happened to be filled at a given time. A private ophthalmologist — trained, equipped, available — was something the town’s patients had rarely encountered. Prabhakar filled that gap and stayed in it for four decades.
His practice at Datta Netralaya on Datta Chowk, Yavatmal, covers the full range of anterior segment and refractive ophthalmology: glasses prescriptions and contact lenses for the myopes and hyperopes of a town where screen use has increased dramatically across a generation; glaucoma surveillance and surgery for the elderly farmers and cotton traders who make up much of his patient population; and phacoemulsification cataract surgery — the small-incision technique that replaced the older, more disabling procedure and allowed patients to return to work within days rather than weeks.
Phacoemulsification came to district-town India gradually through the 1990s. The technique required microscopes, irrigation systems, phaco machines, and the surgical skill that came only from practice. Prabhakar adopted it as the technology became available, bringing a standard of care to Yavatmal that would previously have required a trip to Nagpur or further.
What Practice Means in a Small Town
Ophthalmology in a Vidarbha district town is not only about what happens in the operating room. It is about being the person the town trusts with its eyes — a matter, for cotton farmers who depend on sight to assess the quality of their crop, of direct economic significance. It is about the elderly woman brought by a grandson who is not sure whether the cataracts can be fixed. It is about the child whose vision loss has been attributed to supernatural causes by the family until a teacher or a health worker suggests otherwise. It is about the diabetic patient who does not know that the disease is damaging his retinae until Prabhakar finds the changes on fundoscopy.
Over four decades of this, Prabhakar has seen his town change. The patient who arrived in 1985 with no awareness of glaucoma now sometimes arrives with a blood pressure medication and a suspicion that his vision is failing. The smartphone-using teenager now presents with myopia that the previous generation did not have in the same proportions. The cataract patient in 2020 expects to see clearly within a day of surgery; in 1985, she expected weeks of recovery. The town has grown and become more medically sophisticated, and Prabhakar has kept pace.
The Second Generation
Piyush — the son whose wedding gathered the batch in December 2013 — completed his MBBS at Pravara Institute of Medical Sciences and his MS in Ophthalmology at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, Wardha. He joined his father’s practice at Datta Netralaya, and the clinic is now a two-ophthalmologist operation. He spent time at Kota refining his skills in the anterior chamber before joining his father — a period of focused training that the older GMC generation rarely had access to, and which reflects how much specialist medical education has expanded in India since 1973.
Piyush married Supriya, an MBA in finance; their daughter Ira and son Aryan have arrived since. The family practices together, lives near the clinic, and is embedded in the community that Prabhakar has served for forty years.
Do Annkhe Hui Chaar. When Prabhakar wrote that phrase about his son’s wedding, he was making a gentle joke about an ophthalmologist’s family. He was also describing, without sentimentality, what the accumulation of a professional life looks like when it is going well: a son who carries the work forward, a town that is better served than it was, and a practice that will outlast the founder.