Her father gave his children a simple rule he never needed to argue about: that education was the only thing no one could take away from you, not by tax, theft, or rising prices. He had to move often\u2014his work with Burmah\u2011Shell took the family from Gujarat to Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh\u2014and so his children learned early how to start over. New schools, new towns, new classmates, and always the same message: learn as much as you can, wherever you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nasrin Raina, who later rebuilt her career in the United States in her fifties, knew this rule by heart long before she had to live by it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nasrin was born in Cambay\u2014now called Khambhat\u2014a small town in Anand district, Gujarat. It is older than most Indian cities and quieter now than it once was. Her early schooling took place in many places across central India: St Aloysius High School in Bhusawal, Maharashtra; St Mary\u2019s School in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh; and then Nagpur, where she went to college. At the Institute of Science, she completed her pre\u2011medical year\u2014the same building, just across the road from her house, where many of her future GMC batchmates were also studying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had admission offers from JIPMER, Pondicherry, and GMC Nagpur. She chose Nagpur. Among those who came from similar paths\u2014Alison Girling, whose father was her father\u2019s colleague at Burmah\u2011Shell, and the group of women who became her close friends at GMC\u2014the choice felt right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe were privileged to see many places because my father was often transferred,\u201d Nasrin recalls. As a child, the moves felt like breaks in her life. Fifty years later, they look more like training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, she did house jobs in Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Ophthalmology, then won a postgraduate seat. Working under Dr. Asha Deshpande, she wrote her MD thesis on the anti\u2011lactogenic effect of pyridoxine\u2014a narrow, clear clinical question that rewards careful, honest research. She completed her DGO and MD at GMC Nagpur and in 1984 moved to Jammu, her husband\u2019s hometown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For two decades, Nasrin ran a private obstetrics and gynecology practice in Jammu\u2014a city shrouded through the 1980s and 1990s by the Punjab insurgency and the rising storm of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. Doctors there toiled amid days when ordinary life frayed at the edges, when security threats dictated every routine choice, and sustaining a practice demanded a resolve far beyond clinical skill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“That was a difficult time,” she says simply. Her family remained safe. The practice endured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her brother had arrived in the United States in 1977 for a postgraduate degree in chemical engineering. He stayed. Over the next two decades, the idea of joining him gradually crystallized into a plan. The family visited in 2000 and again in 2003; by then, their daughters were already envisioning lives there. Nasrin and her husband decided to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What happened next defies the tale of a retired physician chasing quiet shores. It is the story of a woman in her late forties who conquered the United States Medical Licensing Examinations on her first try, secured a Family Medicine residency, and completed three grueling years of postgraduate training\u2014demands American doctors typically face in their twenties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She finished residency in 2010. During her third year, she juggled part-time hospitalist shifts alongside her Family Medicine duties. Afterward, she embraced outpatient practice: continuity of care, predictable rhythms, the art of medicine that forges enduring bonds over years, not fleeting moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“All my patients have charming smiles,” her daughter Jasleen\u2014now a board-certified orthodontist in the United States\u2014has said of her own work. The sentiment runs deep in the family, not the glamour of medicine, but its quiet daily grace: sitting across from someone anxious or unwell, offering your quiet wisdom and healing touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nasrin retired from her family medicine practice in February 2025 in Ponte Vedra, Florida. Her husband, a former national field hockey coach, has hung up his stick after a lifetime rallying teams on the turf. Her daughters are settled and flourishing. Her father’s principle\u2014that education, carefully tended, could never be taken away\u2014proved profoundly true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"