When Samina Ali’s father graduated from Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1947 — in the college’s inaugural batch — the institution was just finding its feet, and Indian medicine was on the edge of independence. By the time his daughter walked through the same gates in 1973, GMC had trained a generation. Two doctors, one family, twenty-six years apart: the continuity was not accidental. Samina had grown up understanding that medicine was what serious people did.
Amravati to Aligarh
Samina was born in Amravati, where she completed her schooling at Holy Cross Convent Higher Secondary School. Her father’s GMC pedigree and her mother’s LAD College, Nagpur background gave the household an educated temper. She completed her pre-medical year at Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya, Amravati, in 1972–73 and joined GMC Nagpur in 1973. Among the students who arrived from Amravati that year was a cohort that included Rekha Sapkal, among others — women entering a profession that was still, at the time, negotiating how many of them it intended to accommodate.
After graduating, Samina completed her internship in two halves — six months at the Rural Health Training Centre, Saoner, and six months at Civil Hospital, Amravati. In 1979 came marriage, and with it, movement. Her husband, Dr. Syed Shakir Ali, had qualified in Medicine and Surgery from Aligarh Muslim University and was pursuing postgraduation there. Samina went with him and enrolled for her DGO at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Aligarh Muslim University, under Professor Shaista Mohsin. She completed the degree in 1981.
The mid-career years of many GMC 1973 women followed a pattern shaped less by ambition than by the logic of marriage and institutional availability: qualification gained where the family happened to be, practice established where conditions permitted. This was not passivity — it required adaptability of a high order. Samina moved with a husband, rebuilt her professional identity twice, and spent nearly three decades at the front edge of obstetric care in a major Gulf hospital.
Burhanpur, Then Abu Dhabi
In 1982, the couple settled in Burhanpur — a town on the north bank of the Tapti River in Madhya Pradesh, 340 kilometres southwest of Bhopal — where they ran a private nursing home until 1985. Then came Abu Dhabi, and twenty-eight years.
At Al Mafraq Hospital, Samina worked across the full range of obstetric practice: routine deliveries, complicated labour, caesarean sections, antenatal complications, and gynaecological screening and treatment. She managed referred cases from smaller centres and operated in what she described as one of the best maternity hospitals in the UAE. It was, by any measure, serious work at scale.
Her husband Dr. Shakir Ali served as an orthopaedic surgeon at the same hospital across the same years. They retired together in 2016 and returned to Nagpur — the city where both their medical careers had begun — settling in Vijaynagar.
Retirement and Its Two Passions
Samina has been clear about what retirement means to her. “I have cultivated two passions that occupy my free time,” she has said: canvas painting, where she works with the natural world as her subject, and dress designing. The two occupations share something — the eye for proportion, the patience with detail — that three decades of obstetric practice had trained in her without meaning to.
Her sons Syed Majid Ali and Syed Faraz Ali are both engineers by training and technologists by profession, settled in California with their families. Majid works at ServiceNow; Faraz at Meta. Between them, they have four grandchildren: Syed Ayaan, Syed Zayn, Syed Daaniyal, and Haaniya. The family visits the United States regularly.
Samina’s father entered GMC Nagpur in 1947, when the institution was new and the country was not yet independent. She entered in 1973, when both were still finding their shape. She left medicine in 2016, after half a century in its orbit. The arc is long, the roots deep, and the canvas, now, is her own.