Her father was an administrative officer who rose to the rank of Collector \u2014 a position that, in the Indian bureaucracy, means movement. Pratibha Thakre’s schooling traced the postings: Buldhana, Bhandara, Warora, and finally Nagpur, where Hadas High School provided the stability that a child of the administrative service rarely takes for granted. She arrived at Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973 from the Institute of Science \u2014 having learned, through the accidents of her father’s transfers, that it is possible to put down roots wherever you happen to land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This turned out to be useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduating from GMC Nagpur and marrying Dr. Satish Deshmukh \u2014 an ophthalmologist from the 1968 batch \u2014 in May 1979, Pratibha spent the early years of her career in Mumbai: Bombay Port Trust Hospital in 1980, ESIS Hospital, Andheri in 1982, and a BMC hospital in 1983. Three hospitals, three years, a wide range of patients, and a practical education in primary healthcare that no postgraduate degree could have replicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1983, she and Satish left for Al Khobar in Saudi Arabia. The Gulf years gave the couple a different scale of practice and the financial foundation that many of their contemporaries were seeking abroad. In 1987, they returned to India and settled in Amravati \u2014 the city where Pratibha’s story, shaped by so many addresses, finally came to rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What distinguishes Pratibha’s post-settlement years is not the practice alone but the education she pursued alongside it. During her internship, she had read for a BA. Later, she formalised her interest in yoga \u2014 obtaining a Yoga Teacher’s degree from Yashwantrao Chavan Open University in 1997 \u2014 and in law, earning her LLB in 1994. The woman who arrived at GMC Nagpur in 1973 did not stop acquiring knowledge when she stopped attending lectures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Amravati, the family practice is Deshmukh Netralaya \u2014 an ophthalmology centre built around Satish’s specialty, which Pratibha has supported with her general practice and her presence. Their son Himanshu is an ophthalmologist trained at Sankara Nethralaya, Chennai; he married Bhagyashree Pawar, also from Sankara Nethralaya, on Valentine’s Day 2006. Their daughter Neeti is a software engineer in San Jose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pratibha’s life resists the tidiness of a single narrative. A collector’s daughter who knew how to move, a doctor who also became a lawyer, a yoga teacher who spent years in Saudi Arabia, a general practitioner who anchored herself in a mid-sized Vidarbha city and stayed \u2014 she is, at every stage, someone who chose to add rather than subtract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The roots she learned to put down wherever she happened to land turned out, in the end, to be deep ones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"