Vijay Karmarkar wanted to build hospitals. He ended up working in one instead.
As a boy in Chandrapur, he was absorbed by buildings, drawings, and structures — the way spaces are conceived and brought into being. When his class results came back and he topped them, the choice was made for him by convention: in those years, toppers went to medicine. He listened to the convention, entered Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973, and spent the next four decades as a paediatrician. He was very good at it. He never quite stopped wondering what might have been otherwise.
His son did not make the same accommodation. Keenly interested in buildings since childhood, Prajakt Karmarkar chose architecture, studied at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, obtained his master’s degree, and now practises in Nagpur. In February 2022, his firm received an outstanding concrete structure award for Vidarbha, with a certificate of merit from UltraTech. He married Sonali, an interior designer, in April 2022.
The father who designed nothing except a paediatric ward watched his son design structures that will outlast them both. It is, Vijay acknowledges, a good outcome.
The Town That Made the Doctor
Vijay was born in Chandrapur to a high school teacher. He went to Government Jubilee High School, then Lokmanya School, then Janata Mahavidyalaya — all in Chandrapur, where Pramod Bangde, Pradeep Desai, Sudhakar Dupare, Maya Bhaskarwar, and Suresh Satghare were among his classmates. He came to GMC Nagpur in 1973 and graduated in 1977.
His rural internship took him to the CR Das Mobile Hospital, his urban posting to the District Hospital, Chandrapur. After graduation, he stayed in the discipline he had been assigned to — or, more precisely, the discipline that had been chosen for him by the advice of his teachers and the logic of the merit lists. He enrolled in MD (Paediatrics) at GMC Nagpur, working under Dr. AM Sur, with Bharat Kothari, Abhimanyu Niswade, and CM Hajari as co-registrars. He obtained his MD in 1982.
He spent several months at a tuberculosis hospital in Gondia and a year at Sion and Nanavati hospitals in Mumbai, acquiring clinical breadth before returning to Chandrapur in 1984. He opened his 15-bed paediatric hospital. When he started, there were two MD Paediatricians in the town. There are now 25.
The Practice, and What It Cost
Vijay practiced intensively for four decades. The early years were full, the middle years heavier, and by the time he reached his sixties, the conditions of paediatric practice in private medicine had changed in ways he found discouraging.
“As paediatricians, we commit so much time, effort, and money, not to mention sacrificing things like family and friends, and real-life experience, all to attain a high-level skill to help children — but parents no longer acknowledge these harsh facts,” he said. “The practice has become very challenging and stressful, and a paediatrician is left with no personal or social life now.”
He continued to practice, but pulled back from critical cases after 2019. It was a deliberate and honest choice — the recognition that intensive paediatric care at that level requires not just skill but the reserves of energy and attention that decades of practice had drawn down.
Yoga Dance, and the Discovery of Something Else
In February 2019, Vijay stumbled on a yoga dance class at the local municipal garden. The form is exactly what it sounds like: yoga stretches set to music, structured as a dance routine, with warm-up and cool-down built around the science of exercise. He was intrigued, then absorbed, then trained in it. By July 2019, he was running free daily sessions for the residents of Vivek Nagar colony.
The groups multiplied. Chandrapur now has at least 30 yoga dance groups in different parts of the city. Vijay’s group won first prize at a district-level online competition on Yoga Day in 2020. He has written about it, spoken about it on All India Radio, and trained IMA family members in it during the month of Yoga Day. He has started choreographing theme-based dances.
After a pause of 25 years, he also returned to writing. Two articles appeared in Tarun Bharat Nagpur; one was published in the Chandrapur IMA journal. All three were well received.
He served as IMA President of the Chandrapur branch from April 2017 to March 2018. Under his leadership, the branch won seven awards, including the distinction of best branch in Maharashtra, along with several national IMA awards.
His wife Veena, an MSc in Biochemistry, runs the clinical laboratory and manages the household, creating the conditions in which his late-career reinventions have been possible.
The architect manqué who spent forty years healing children has, in his sixties, found a different way to build something — not in concrete, but in the bodies and mornings of a few hundred people who come to the municipal garden before the day begins.