The operating theatre at Jaslok Hospital, Mumbai is among the most demanding environments in Indian medicine. The neurosurgeons who work there are operating inside the skull; the anaesthesiologist at the other end of the drapes is managing a brain \u2014 keeping it alive, keeping it still, keeping it just conscious enough and just unconscious enough for the work to proceed. For more than three decades, that anaesthesiologist has been Rajshree Deopujari.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She came to Jaslok in 1994. She has not left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rajshree was born in Nagpur, the daughter of a private practitioner and a professor of English. She attended St Joseph Convent for her schooling \u2014 a convent education in a city where such education still carried its old weight \u2014 and then moved to Shri Mathuradas Mohota College of Science for pre-medical studies, joining the cohort of 13 Mohota students who entered GMC Nagpur in 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was among the handful of women in that batch who came from urban, English-educated backgrounds \u2014 a distinction that, in the wards of GMC, mattered less than it might have outside them. Medicine has a way of redistributing status. What you knew, what you could do, how you held up on a difficult night in the casualty ward: these were the currencies that counted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, she obtained her Diploma in Anaesthesiology from GMC Nagpur in 1980 and her MD (Anaesthesiology) in 1982. Her thesis, supervised by Dr. Mankeshwar, asked a precise clinical question: was domperidone better, equivalent, or inferior to metoclopramide in reducing postoperative nausea and vomiting in children? It was the kind of question \u2014 bounded, testable, useful \u2014 that defines good clinical research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After her MD, Rajshree moved to JJ Hospital, Mumbai, and then to the United Kingdom, where she spent four years refining her skills in anaesthesiology across several hospitals. She returned to Bombay Hospital, working there until 1991, then took a three-year break. In 1994, she joined Jaslok Hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The break, in retrospect, was not a pause in her career but a pivot. When she returned, she returned to a specific clinical world: the operating theatres where her husband, Dr. Chandrashekhar Deopujari \u2014 Professor and Head of Neurosurgery at Bombay Hospital and one of the country’s leading neurosurgeons \u2014 worked. She built alongside him, and around him, a subspecialty that had not previously existed as a structured discipline at Jaslok: Neuroanesthesiology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Neuroanesthesiology demands a precise understanding of intracranial pressure, cerebral blood flow, and the pharmacology of agents that cross \u2014 or must be prevented from crossing \u2014 the blood-brain barrier. It demands technical excellence under conditions of extreme consequence, and it demands the kind of temperament that does not rattle when the neurosurgeon reports unexpected bleeding at a depth of four centimetres. Rajshree has that temperament. Colleagues note it. Patients, sedated, cannot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She became President-Elect of the Indian Society of Neuroanesthesiology and Critical Care \u2014 recognition from a peer community that knows what the work requires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Anaesthesiology made me understand a lot of basic science much better,”<\/em> she has said. “As anaesthesiologists, we essentially are doing applied clinical pharmacology. In the operating rooms, we inject or infuse medications and watch them work in real time. That’s what makes it exciting.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Among her batchmates at GMC 1973, Rajshree is remembered for the warmth she has sustained across half a century \u2014 the kind of warmth that makes people feel seen rather than merely included. At the December 2013 reunion, when asked to name her closest friends, she did not hesitate: “The list is indeed long, and I know I might be missing quite a few, but I value the friendships of Nasrin, Sujata, Ratna, Viju, and Alka.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n She has balanced, by her own account, an intense clinical life with something that looks, from the outside, like grace. The operating theatres are high-pressure; the workdays demanding. She has made space, within that, for family, for reading, for the life outside the hospital that medicine can easily consume if you allow it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The generation of Indian anaesthesiologists she helped train now work across the country. In the corridors of Jaslok, she remains what she has been for three decades: the person at the head of the table, managing the most complex intracranial cases, watching the medications work in real time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She is still watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n\n\nThe Friendships That Lasted<\/h3>\n\n\n