Malegaon is a city of a million people in Nashik district — dense, industrial, and associated in the public memory with a series of communal incidents that have made other doctors hesitant. When Ramesh Chopade arrived in 1985, there was one ENT surgeon in the town. By his own count, there are now eight.
“Surgeons are hesitant to settle down in Malegaon because of the riots the town is associated with,” he said. “Soft tailwinds have started blowing and now Malegaon has as many as eight ENT surgeons.”
He came and stayed. That is the essential fact of Ramesh Chopade’s professional life — the decision to plant himself in a town that offered difficulty alongside opportunity, and to build a practice there over 38 years.
From Dabhadi to Nagpur
Ramesh was born to a farmer in Dabhadi village, Malkapur Taluka, Buldhana district. He went to primary school in Dabhadi, moved to Amravati for Shivaji Maratha High School and Shivaji College — sitting in the same bench as Padmakar Somvanshi — and entered Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973.
After graduation, he interned at Parshivani primary health centre with Gopal Ingle and Narayan Umale, and completed his urban posting at the district hospital, Amravati. House jobs in Surgery and ENT followed. He earned his MS (Otorhinolaryngology) from GMC Nagpur in 1982 under Dr Mahure, writing a thesis on anatomical variations of the recurrent laryngeal nerve. A year at Bombay Hospital, Mumbai, and then Malegaon.
The Malegaon Practice
Over three decades, Ramesh and his wife Usha — a DGO from GMC Nagpur’s 1978 batch — built a 20-bed hospital at Malegaon, offering gynaecology, obstetrics, ultrasonography, and ENT services. They treated patients with what he described as compassion and empathy regardless of ability to pay — and for a long time, patients returned that treatment with gratitude.
“When we started our hospital,” he recalled, “we used to treat all patients with compassion and empathy regardless of their ability to pay. In turn, patients were also grateful to the selfless services we rendered. Now, the times have changed and the patients and the doctors eye each other with mutual mistrust.”
That shift — from a medicine of trust to a medicine of transaction — is a theme that appears across the class of 1973’s stories, each batchmate describing it from the particular vantage of his or her own practice and district. Ramesh’s version is Malegaon’s version: a city that grew, changed, and complicated the compact between doctor and patient.
He carries the college’s memories as lightly and as durably as any of his batchmates. Asked during a telephone interview for an anecdote from his GMC days, he recalled immediately and with visible pleasure a fancy-dress competition in which students dressed as Adivasis, painted dark, menacingly circled an Englishman (Pradeep Dhande, class of 1975) in a theatrical sacrifice scene that became campus legend. Dhirendra Wagh, Ramesh Mundle, and Sanjivani Kotibhaskar also performed in that drama.
The memory was instantaneous. Forty years had not dimmed it.