“When I die and go to heaven and God asks me ‘I gave you this gift, what have you given to the people in return?’ I would say, ‘Dear God, I haven’t kept track of what I have given to people, but what I have received is something even Gods aren’t given, which is their laughter.'” — P.L. Deshpande
Those words, spoken of another man, are the ones his classmates reach for when they speak of Sanjay Warhadpande. They fit him as precisely as if he had written them himself.
The Son of a Literary Family
He was born on 14 January 1956 into a household where language was serious business. His father was a professor of Marathi and an accomplished author — a man for whom words were a profession and a discipline. Sanjay absorbed both the discipline and the gift, and then turned the gift in a direction his father may not have anticipated: toward laughter, repartee, and the particular art of making a room come alive.
He excelled in academics throughout school and arrived at GMC Nagpur in 1973 with a sharpness that his batchmates recognised immediately. He played cricket for the GMC team alongside Ravindra Kasat, Vikas Chitnavis, Avinash Deshmukh, and Rajendra Phadke — and he kept himself in the kind of physical condition that surgeons need, visiting the gymnasium with the regularity of a man who understood what the operating theatre demands of the body.
The Famous Five
At GMC, he was one of five — Uday Gupte, Vinayak Sabnis, Rajeev Biyani, Harish Motwani, and Warhadpande — whose friendship defined a particular register of the batch’s social life. “During UG days, he was best known for his repartee and quick wit,” recalls Vinayak Sabnis. “To his credit, there never was a dull moment in his presence for his friends and family.”
Vivek Deshpande, who knew him across the full arc of those years, put it plainly: “His nature was out of this world. Spending time with him was psychotherapy. You would forget all your troubles. He was in my exam batch. And I remember we would kick him out of the waiting room at the time of viva because with his antics he would never allow us to focus on the last minutes of study. A darling rascal, he was pure, innocent fun. He and Tillya are two losses I grieve even today after all these years. Their departure changed me. Forever.”
Rajeev Biyani was shorter: “He had a terrific sense of humour and got into his own in the final year. The wittiest of us all.”
The Surgeon
He obtained his MS in General Surgery from GMC Nagpur and entered the private sector in Nagpur with the deliberateness of a man who had thought through the decision rather than drifted into it. He grasped quickly what private surgical practice required — not only technical skill but the ability to build trust, to read situations, and to act when others hesitated. He was generous with patients who could not pay and generous with colleagues who called him in a crisis; other surgical specialists knew he could be relied upon.
During his surgical residency, a house officer named Dr. Minal Nisal, from the GMC 1975 batch, joined his unit. Six months in the surgery wards was enough. The registrar and the house officer married. Minal went on to MD and then a staff post in Pathology at GMC Nagpur. They had two sons.
29 June 1992
On that evening, the Warhadpande family was in a car in Nagpur. The accident took Sanjay, his elder brother Dr. Rajeev Warhadpande — a physician from the GMC 1972 batch — and their parents. In a moment, a family was gone.
Minal relocated to the United States, where she rebuilt her life and raised their sons. Devdutta completed his MD and MS and is now a neuroradiologist at University Hospital Tucson, Arizona, married to Dr. Maitreyi Salpekar. Shantanu completed his degree at Ohio State University College of Medicine and is training in vascular and interventional radiology in Pittsburgh. Both sons pursued medicine. Both look, by all accounts, like their father.
Sujata Sawangikar-Bhalerao, who grew up two houses away from the Warhadpandes in Professors’ Colony, Hanuman Nagar, remembers the whole family: “Very humble soul indeed. The whole family was like that. His brother Dr Rajiv, his illustrious father and very hard-working mother always worried about our studies and pressures. I remember his two young bright sisters too.”
What Laughter Leaves Behind
The Academy of Medical Sciences, Nagpur, holds the Drs. Rajiv and Sanjay Warhadpande Memorial Oration in collaboration with the Diabetic Association of India, Nagpur branch, every alternate year. The first took place in 1994.
It is a formal tribute to two brothers from one family, lost together. But the classmates of GMC 1973 who remember Sanjay do not think primarily of orations. They think of the waiting room before the viva, from which he had to be expelled to allow anyone else to concentrate. They think of the corridor outside the anatomy dissection hall. They think of what it sounded like when he was in the room.
He died at 36. The GMC Nagpur class of 1973 has had more than thirty years to learn to carry that.