In 2005, after more than a decade in gynaecology practice, Sanjivanee Kotibhaskar walked away from her clinic and into a Brahma Kumaris ashram. She was not in crisis. She was not burned out. She had simply decided, with the same deliberateness she had brought to medicine, that a different kind of work now called her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had been a doctor for twenty-three years. She would now be something harder to name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sanjivanee studied at Nutan Kanya Shala in Amravati before moving to Nagpur, where she enrolled at the Institute of Science to complete her pre-university year and first BSc. She entered Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973, part of a batch that would scatter across India and beyond over the following decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, she earned her DGO from Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur and worked as a medical officer at Mohapa \u2014 a primary health centre 36 km northwest of Nagpur. She also served at the Zilla Parishad, Nagpur, before moving into private practice as a gynaecologist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What followed was unusual even by the varied standards of the GMC 1973 batch. Twenty-three years after obtaining her MBBS, Sanjivanee returned to formal postgraduate training. In 2001 \u2014 by which point she had been a practising gynaecologist for close to a decade \u2014 she completed her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology from BJ Medical College, Pune. The degree arrived not as the foundation of a career but as its credential, earned after the practice was already established.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Four years later, she stopped practising entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Brahma Kumaris is a global spiritual organisation based on meditation, self-transformation, and the principle that every soul is intrinsically good. It has more than 825,000 students and 8,500 centres across 100 countries. In 2005, Sanjivanee became an active member and eventually made the organisation the centre of her life, finding a place at the Brahma Kumaris Ashram in Pune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her days now move between meditation, study, and outreach. She posts videos on Facebook explaining spiritual principles \u2014 dressed in white, a red rose pinned to her lapel \u2014 and mixes what she calls spiritualism with culinary practice, sharing recipes alongside reflections. Pumpkin pies and the nature of the soul, offered in the same register.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The combination is less incongruous than it sounds. She spent decades attending to women’s bodies at their most vulnerable moments \u2014 in labour, in crisis, in pain. The attention to human experience she developed there did not disappear when she left the clinic. It found a different form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"