The cricket bat was not merely decorative. Three years later, in the inter-college tournament of 1979, MGIMS faced an engineering college from Nagpur. The opposing team boasted two fast bowlers who had played in the Ranji Trophy, and MGIMS was floundering. Mehendale walked to the crease at number six. He faced a searing delivery and, in one fluid, seemingly effortless motion, flicked his wrists. The ball soared over long-off, cleared the boundary fence, and landed permanently in institutional memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those present that afternoon still recall the collective intake of breath from the crowd, the stunned expression on the bowler’s face, and the quiet, almost imperceptible smile that crossed Mehendale’s lips as he watched it land. He would spend the next five decades in Sevagram teaching community medicine with that exact same quality\u2014the rare capacity, at the precise moment it mattered, to make the impossible look effortless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was born in Wardha on March 22, 1956, though his family possessed no settled geography. They had roots in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, passing through Vadodara and Navsari before arriving in Pune. His father, Dr. Madhukar Anant Mehendale, was a Sanskrit scholar of towering international standing\u2014the mind behind the Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles<\/em>, a researcher of rock inscriptions, and a lecturer at G\u00f6ttingen and Yale. His mother was a librarian. At home, Ashok was called “Gamya,” a name his parents elegantly constructed from the third and fourth notes of the Indian classical music scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a child, his handwriting was flawless. In the fourth standard, his boru<\/em> (reed pen) glided across the page with such precision in an inter-school competition that relatives later joked it predicted his fate as a doctor. (Naturally, once ballpoint pens replaced fountain pens, his handwriting deteriorated comprehensively, cementing his medical destiny).<\/p>\n\n\n\n When he sat for the B.J. Medical College entrance in Pune, he tied for the final available seat. The seat was awarded to a female student. His mother, who had once held admission to three medical colleges without attending any, refused to accept this as the end of the road. She pointed him toward the entrance examination for MGIMS. Soon after, a telegram arrived from Dean Dr. I.D. Singh, summoning the young man to Sevagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On July 27, 1976, he stood before a formidable ten-member interview panel. Decades later, he would remember only one face clearly: Dr. Sushila Nayar,<\/a> who had designed the examination herself and insisted on questioning each candidate personally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Why do you want to become a doctor?” she asked him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mehendale knew the expected answers: to serve the poor, to help the suffering, to give back to society<\/em>. He chose to say something true instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “This is the only profession where one can blend swarth<\/em>\u2014self-interest\u2014and parmarth<\/em>\u2014altruism.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Badi Behenji smiled. She then tested him on Gandhian history. He named the Aga Khan Palace and Yerawada Jail without hesitation, recalled Gandhi’s appendectomy at Sassoon Hospital, and spelled out “BCG” in full when challenged. At six o’clock that evening, the results were posted. He had topped the entrance examination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From that first interview until her death in January 2001, Ashok Mehendale remained firmly within Sushila Nayar’s trusted inner circle. He shared meals at her table, drove her to the hospital, accompanied her on remote field visits, and traveled with her across the country. In a railway compartment in Delhi, she casually introduced him to Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Though she always struggled to pronounce his Marathi surname\u2014there being no equivalent for the hard ‘L’ sound in Hindi\u2014she considered him family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her influence on his career was absolute, direct, and entirely unconventional. When he completed his MBBS and wanted to specialize in pediatrics, she simply told him the seat was taken. When he asked to pursue a Diploma in Child Health, she refused. When he drifted into Pathology as a demonstrator, she promptly summoned him back and placed him in Community Medicine. There, the General OPD offered him exactly what he had actually been searching for: children to treat, immunization programs to run, and mother-and-child welfare at the absolute center of his daily life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Sushila Nayar personally selected his MD thesis topic, despite not being his official guide, signing off on it at the Nagpur airport before buying him a cup of coffee. In April 1986, when he sat for his MD practical examination, she was in Delhi undergoing surgery and could not be present. He passed the examination without her in the room. He later reflected that perhaps this was the entire point\u2014she had spent a decade preparing him to stand without her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rural programs that defined his teaching life at MGIMS were originally conceived by Dr. Sushila Nayar<\/a> and Dr. B.K. Mahajan<\/a>, but they became Mehendale\u2019s to run, his to inhabit, and eventually his to transmit to a generation of students who had never met the founders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He oversaw the grueling Social Service Camps for decades, sending first-year students into villages for a two-week immersion where they ate the same food and drank from the same wells as their assigned families. Because he had been one of those terrified students himself in 1976, he knew exactly what the experience required and precisely the kind of doctor it was capable of producing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Reorientation of Medical Education (ROME) camp at the Kasturba Rural Health Training Centre in Anji was his personal domain from 1988 to 1990. Students arrived stripped of their tertiary hospital assumptions. They worked alongside village health workers and conducted surveys that forced them to view a community as a living organism rather than a collection of hospital beds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Amol Dongre, who was posted at Anji under him, remembered Mehendale braving floods during fieldwork, collecting jowar for the Health Assurance Scheme, and sleeping on rough gunny sacks when the work ran late into the night. It is a precise memory, because a senior doctor sleeping on a gunny sack in a flooded village is the kind of image a medical student never forgets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1990, Dr. Sushila Nayar informed him he was to become the Warden of the Boys’ Hostel. Her logic was unassailable: “You’ve been a student here since 1976 and know hostel life inside out. Now it’s time to sit on the other side of the table.” He dutifully packed his belongings, left his comfortable quarters, and moved into the Warden’s Apartment in A Block for five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He had lived in those exact rooms himself. He knew instantly when midnight noise was genuinely dangerous and when it was simply the kinetic energy of twenty-two-year-olds with nowhere else to put it. He rarely raised his voice; a single, calibrated look was usually sufficient. He was not positioned “above” the students in the traditional, antagonistic manner of wardens. He was, in some essential sense, continuous with them\u2014he was simply the boy who had arrived at Wardha station with a cricket bat, just a little further down the line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1995, Mehendale applied for a Master’s in Public Health through a United Nations Development Fellowships program, backed by a fierce personal recommendation from Dr. Sushila Nayar. The selection committee quickly informed him that the program was exclusively for women from developing countries. He was entirely ineligible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Sushila Nayar pressed his case anyway. The committee bowed to the pressure, creating an unprecedented “thirteenth” fellowship position\u2014an exception made specifically for him, making him the only male recipient that year. He completed the program between Jaipur and the University of North Carolina, returning to Sevagram in 1996 with an MPH and immediately resuming the heavy work that had been waiting for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among those who knew him, what stayed with you was not just the reach of his memory, but its warmth. It did not feel stored; it felt inhabited. Years later, an alumnus would return quietly, unsure if he would be recognised, and before he could introduce himself, Mehendale would look up, say his name, ask after his parents, recall the town he came from, and trace, in a few unhurried sentences, the arc his life had taken. Nothing announced, nothing displayed\u2014just a mind in which people did not fade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That same instinct shaped the MGIMS Alumni Association he helped found in 1993 and tended for decades. When visitors arrived\u2014researchers, donors, old students finding their way back\u2014the institute turned to him almost by reflex. He would begin without preamble, his voice settling into its natural register, moving between Hindi, Marathi, and English as the moment demanded. What followed was never a formal account. It was a walk\u2014through the Ashram, across the wards, into the spaces where the institution had slowly taken form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And somewhere along the way, the years would begin to gather. A name would open into a face, a face into a family, a family into a place you could almost see. He would pause at the library, linger in the Adhyayan Mandir, and then, as if she had only just stepped out for a moment, Dr. Sushila Nayar would enter the telling\u2014present, immediate, unmistakably alive. You might begin by listening. But before you knew it, you were no longer outside the story. You were walking through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was promoted to Additional Professor in December 2000. Just ten days into the new year, on January 3, 2001, Sushila Nayar died. The Silver Jubilee reunion of his 1976 batch had been held just days prior on Christmas. The profound loss that followed was the kind that never truly resolves; it simply becomes part of the permanent architecture of a life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He led the department from October 2010 to March 2020, guiding twenty-three postgraduates and authoring fifty research papers. In May 1995, he married Anuradha. Their children, Ajita and Shivansh, were both born in Sevagram and naturally gravitated toward the healing arts\u2014Ajita pursuing her postgraduation in dental surgery, and Shivansh in orthopedics. Even after his official retirement from MGIMS, the compulsion to teach remained unbroken. He took a final guard at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College until late 2024. Only then did he finally declare his long innings closed and walk back to the pavilion\u2014gloves off, pads unbuckled, his bat resting quietly after half a century at the crease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He arrived in 1976 with a tin trunk and a cricket bat. He never quite left. The terrified young students who passed through his village camps are now the senior doctors and department heads shaping the future of Indian medicine. They still remember the man who slept on a gunny sack in a flooded village, and who could still, half a century later, tell them their own names without ever needing to be reminded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n\n\nSwarth and Parmarth<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n\n\nDr. Sushila Nayar’s Circle<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n\n\nLiving in the Villages<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n\n\nA Block, Boys’ Hostel<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n\n\nThe Thirteenth Place<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n\n\nThe Archive That Walks<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n\n\nFifty Years<\/h2>\n\n\n