Reader in Otolaryngology \u00b7 Ten Years at Sevagram \u00b7 The Man Who Arrived Single and Left as Four<\/p>\n
Suresh Kumar Tarachandji Jain was born on February 22, 1956, in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, the fourth of seven siblings in the household of Shri Tarachandji Jain, an accountant in a private firm. He attended Hindi-medium schools and found in the classroom a deep attraction to mathematics. In his eleventh year, he chose pure mathematics without hesitation.<\/p>\n
An elder brother intervened. The job prospects for engineers were poor; biology offered a better path. SKT protested \u2014 he found more beauty in numbers than in dissecting plants and animals \u2014 but elder brothers, in this family as in many, prevailed. Within a year, he had mastered botany and zoology with the diligence of someone who had decided that if the subject was now his, he would command it. The MP Pre-Medical Test of 1974 yielded an aggregate of 64% that was enough for Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal.<\/p>\n
At Gandhi Medical College, there were two Suresh Kumar Jains. Fees were mixed up. Documents were interchanged. The Dean decided to append their fathers’ initials. Suresh Kumar Tarachandji Jain became SKT Jain. When Maharashtra’s bureaucracy later attempted to simplify him to plain “Suresh Jain,” he declined firmly. The identity had been acquired through administrative chaos in a dean’s office in Bhopal, but it was his, and it was not up for revision.<\/p>\n
ENT was not his ambition. He was drawn toward ophthalmology or orthopaedics. Both filled up quickly. ENT was what remained. He accepted it with reluctance that transformed, with time and good training, into growing enthusiasm. He completed his MS in General Surgery under Dr. Jagdish Gulati, whose thesis assignment \u2014 evaluation of sensorineural deafness \u2014 pulled him further into the specialty he had not initially chosen. Word of a lecturer’s vacancy at MGIMS reached him in 1984. He appeared for the interview and got the post.<\/p>\n
He entered a department of two faculty members: Dr. V.N. Chaturvedi, the disciplinarian from AIIMS who believed in meticulous documentation, methodical patient examination, and unwavering surgical precision; and Dr. R.M. Raizada, thorough and deliberate, whose unhurried manner in the operating theatre produced the near-bloodless field and unshakable calm that his students remembered across decades. Two very different temperaments, both insisting on the same underlying standard of care. SKT absorbed what each had to give.<\/p>\n
The department in those years was genuinely busy \u2014 thirty beds, nearly nine thousand outpatients annually, five hundred and seventy admissions, three hundred and eighty operations. Community health work alongside the medicine department: village visits, school health surveys, screening camps that took specialist care to people who could not access it otherwise. The programme had just achieved independent examination status at Nagpur University for the first time in December 1983.<\/p>\n
He witnessed tragedy in this period. Dr. Shyam Sunder Rathi, a postgraduate student who had already published international research on electrogustometry in Hansen’s disease, died unexpectedly of a lung disease. The loss left the department shaken in the way that the death of a young colleague always does \u2014 the particular weight of potential unrealised adding to the ordinary grief of loss.<\/p>\n
He was promoted to Reader in ENT. The next step \u2014 Associate Professor, then Professor \u2014 required vacancies that did not open. Dr. Chaturvedi and Dr. Raizada were firmly in place, their tenures extending well beyond what the department’s promotional structure could accommodate for a third faculty member. The institution that had offered ethics, community, purpose, and genuine clinical experience could not always offer the promotional pathway that sustained a career across its full span.<\/p>\n
He mentored two postgraduate students during his decade: Dr. Amreliwala, who worked on myiasis, and Dr. G.P.S. Gill, who asked why taste changes in anaemia \u2014 both questions rooted in the clinical reality of a rural hospital’s patient population. He co-edited annual reports and served as Secretary of the Academy of Medical Sciences.<\/p>\n
In 1986, he married Sunita from Jhansi. Shruti was born in Sevagram. Shubhi was born in Sevagram. “When I came to Sevagram, I was single. When I left, we were four.” The campus had become the context of his family’s earliest formation.<\/p>\n
Ten days before completing a full decade, on the morning of his thirty-eighth birthday, he left for Nanded, where a newly established government medical college needed an ENT department. He built it, then was transferred to GMC Nagpur for six years, then to Akola \u2014 another fledgling institution needing a strong ENT foundation. He took the responsibility. In 2012, he joined Indira Gandhi Medical College, Nagpur, as Professor. In 2015, he was transferred to Aurangabad, where he remained until retirement in 2020.<\/p>\n
Eighteen postgraduate students guided over his career. Forty research papers published. Additional charge of Dean at Akola \u2014 the administrative trust placed in a man who had spent decades building departments in places that needed them rather than polishing his position in places that were already established. He built his home in Nagpur and settled. He had done the work. Enough was enough.<\/p>\n
Shruti is in Pune with TCS. Shubhi is in Germany with her husband. The daughters born in Sevagram have carried the formation of that campus into lives on different continents. In the quiet lanes of Nagpur, SKT Jain lives with the satisfaction of a life well lived \u2014 not with nostalgia but with a clear accounting of what the decades had contained: the dean’s office where administrative chaos gave him his name; the elder brother who redirected him from mathematics to biology; the ENT specialty he had not originally chosen but had thoroughly mastered; the ten years in Sevagram where he had arrived single and left as four.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"