“How best can you sum up your gains and losses?” SP Kalantri asked him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arun Kowale considered the question. “Well,” he said, “I have added years to my life and have lost all hair on my scalp.” He offered this balance sheet without elaboration, and it stood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arun was born in Bramhapuri \u2014 the same small town that produced Manik Khune, Roll No. 1 of this batch \u2014 to an advocate father. He went to Zilla Parishad School for his first four standards, then to Nevjabai Hitkarini School through the tenth, and on to the Institute of Science, Nagpur, for his pre-medical year. He entered Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For his rural internship after graduation in 1977, he chose the primary health centre at Sindewahi, 130 km southeast of Nagpur \u2014 with Bharat Kothari, Arun Warkari, and Subhash Hate. His account of that choice is candid: they wanted a posting away from home, and one unlikely to be inspected. The rivers around Sindewahi swelled in the rains and made the PHC difficult to reach. “Yet our teachers would make it a point to visit our centre,” he recalls. The compounder was posted at a strategic vantage point on days when inspection seemed likely, with instructions to come running when the jeep appeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What happened to Arun Kowale’s career next is a parable of Indian medical bureaucracy \u2014 the kind of detour that shapes a life in ways no deliberate plan could have arranged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He joined the Department of Biochemistry at Solapur at his brother’s suggestion \u2014 his brother taught Biochemistry at GMC. A year into the posting, the government ruled that non-medical personnel could also serve as Biochemistry faculty. Arun, a medical graduate, was now anomalous. He could not be dismissed \u2014 he was a bonded candidate \u2014 but he could be transferred, and the threat of posting to a remote medical college hung over him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr Ganeriwal, who had taught Physiology at GMC and was by then heading the Physiology department at Dr Vaishampayan Memorial Government Medical College, Solapur, solved the problem simply. He took Arun under his guidance, enrolled him in the MD Physiology programme, and produced, in 1982, a Physiologist. Arun wrote his thesis on serum copper and ceruloplasmin levels in different types of leprosy. The subject was not one he had chosen; the career it inaugurated was long and apparently well-suited to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He served in medical schools at Solapur, Yavatmal, and Kolhapur, rising to Professor in 2008. During a three-year stay in Kolhapur, he served briefly as Dean of RCSM Government Medical College when Dr Madhukar Parchand \u2014 a classmate, Roll No. 132 of the GMC 1973 batch \u2014 left Kolhapur. He returned to Pune in 2012, serving as Professor of Physiology and Vice-Dean of BJ Medical College until his retirement in June 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He coached college sports teams. He played cricket and table tennis. He managed sports programmes across several medical schools. But it is the teaching he returns to when asked to account for his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Most students tend to forget teachers who teach them Biochemistry,” he says. “But I was fortunate to have earned incessant love and affection from my students \u2014 past and present.” He regards this as what a teacher in a medical school should expect. It is also, he implies, what he received, and he did not take it for granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After retirement, he joined a team designing a new state-of-the-art government medical college at Baramati, serving as a project consultant for the Dean. He was trying, he said, to build a college that the future generation should be proud of. The work of building and teaching, it seems, does not stop when the classroom does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"