Reader, Pathology \u00b7 Nine Years at Sevagram \u00b7 The Man Who Knew Viswanath’s Debut Scores<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The interview panel included Dr. Sushila Nayar and, to Santosh Gupta’s surprise, Pratibha Patil \u2014 then Maharashtra’s state public health minister, later India’s first woman President.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Patil leaned forward. “Are you interested in sports?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Yes, Madam. Cricket.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Do you know how many runs Gundappa Viswanath scored on his debut?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without hesitation: “0 and 137. The Kanpur Test against Australia last year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A newspaper was fetched. The score was verified. Pratibha Patil smiled. “You may go.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had secured his place at MGIMS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Santosh Gupta was born on December 5, 1950, in Gondia, the eldest of six siblings in a joint family of modest means. His father Gokul Prasad taught at a middle school; his mother Shyama Devi ran the household. Her atrial fibrillation shaped his childhood more than anything else \u2014 her heart racing unpredictably, confining her to the house, requiring Santosh to balance school, household chores, and her care simultaneously. His grandmother had bronchial asthma. Medicine was not an abstract ambition for him. It was a response to specific suffering he had watched from close range and felt powerless to address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1968, he missed admission to Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur, by three marks. He completed a BSc at Dhote Bandhu Science College, Gondia, and waited. In 1970, when BHU conducted the PMT for MGIMS, he appeared. The interview with Dr. Nayar and Pratibha Patil followed. He knew Viswanath’s debut scores. He was in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MGIMS in 1970 was bare and unfinished \u2014 buildings scattered across dry land, no orientation camp, no Gandhi Ashram stay, the old hospital housing wards, OPDs, lecture halls, seminar rooms, dissection hall, and operating theatres all together. He was not there for comfort. He was there for a purpose he had clarified beside his mother’s bed years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During his final MBBS viva in November 1975, he was questioned for thirty minutes on a paraparesis patient from Chhattisgarh \u2014 neuroanatomy, neuropathology, clinical neurology. He had long abandoned Davidson’s Medicine for Cecil’s and Rustom Jal Vakil’s Clinical Medicine. He held his ground. He loved Medicine and expected to practise it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sevagram had no postgraduate programmes in 1975. Further education meant Pune or Bombay, and most courses were unpaid. Santosh’s father was in debt. His family depended on him. Earning while studying was not a preference \u2014 it was a constraint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pathology offered something Medicine did not: a salaried lecturer’s post for MBBS graduates, without the usual progression through house officer and registrar roles. His heart was in Medicine. His situation was in Pathology. Survival came first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He joined MGIMS as Lecturer in Pathology on January 14, 1977, under Dr. K.V. Moghe, on a basic pay of \u20b9325 plus allowances. Six months later, Dr. Narayan Ingole \u2014 a batch junior \u2014 became the second MGIMS alumnus to join as faculty. When the MD Pathology programme began in 1978, Santosh and Dr. Satish Sharma were its first two candidates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His thesis on G6PD deficiency was not proceeding well. A faculty member from Jhansi named Dr. Saxena offered him advice he would remember for the rest of his life: don’t take the thesis too seriously \u2014 it is a passport for the exam, not a masterpiece. Hundreds have researched the same topic. Get it done. A completed thesis, even if imperfect, is always better than an unfinished one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He refocused. He completed it. He earned his MD in Pathology in April 1980 \u2014 a decade after arriving at MGIMS as a first-year student.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was appointed Reader in Blood Bank and Haematology in February 1984. The nine years between his arrival in 1977 and his departure in 1986 were not what he had expected academic life to be. Research papers were published without his name. Permission to attend conferences he had contributed to was denied. For the entirety of his time at MGIMS, he was never permitted to guide postgraduate students \u2014 while Dr. Moghe mentored four, Dr. Arora one, and Dr. Samal seventeen. Between 1976 and 1986, the department produced thirty-five papers, mostly case reports, typically listing only the department head as author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He managed to publish three papers of his own: on glycogen’s role in endometrial infertility, on alpha-1-antitrypsin and hepatitis B in chronic liver disease, and on blood groups, sickle cell haemoglobin, and G6PD deficiency in the Mahar community of rural Maharashtra. The sickle cell work had genuine promise. Administrative obstacles prevented it from progressing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was not a difficult personality. He maintained close relationships with the department’s technicians \u2014 Gyaneshwar Thackeray, Bhoyar, Mahajan, B.M. Patil, and Babu Dhole \u2014 the people who made the laboratory actually function, whose contributions rarely appeared in any record. He understood that departments ran on more than faculty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the experience of watching his work appropriated, his mentorship opportunities blocked, and his research impeded accumulated into a growing certainty that Sevagram was not the place where he was going to build the career he had imagined. On April 1, 1986, he resigned. Six weeks later \u2014 on May 10, his wedding anniversary \u2014 he opened a private practice in Wardha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For two decades, the practice ran. It was good work, reliable work, necessary work. It was also, eventually, monotonous. The pull of teaching proved stronger than he had anticipated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2006, he closed the practice and returned to academia, teaching across four institutions over fourteen years: Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Wardha; People’s Medical College, Bhopal; LN Medical College, Bhopal; KD Medical College, Mathura. He retired at seventy, returned to Wardha, and quietly reopened his practice. The loop that had begun in Gondia, passed through Sevagram, detoured through Wardha and Bhopal and Mathura, had brought him back to the same town \u2014 carrying the accumulated experience of five institutions and four decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had married Uma Devi from Jhansi. Their son Sandeep is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon; their daughter Neeta moved from fashion designing to homemaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At seventy-five, he looks back without bitterness \u2014 which is itself a kind of achievement, given what the MGIMS years contained. The institution had not given him everything it might have. He had found other ways forward. He had taught, practiced, moved, returned, and kept going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The interview with Pratibha Patil was in 1970. Gundappa Viswanath’s debut scores were 0 and 137. He knew them without hesitation. He has always known things carefully, precisely, and in full \u2014 including, in the end, how to make peace with a career that did not unfold as planned and was worth having anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"