On the first day of her house job in TB and Chest at Government Medical College, Nagpur, Tara Bhat got married. She reported for duty and tied the knot on the same August morning in 1979 \u2014 a detail that tells you something essential about the woman: she did not choose between medicine and life. She arranged them side by side and got on with both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tara grew up in Nagpur and did her schooling there, completing her pre-medical education before entering GMC Nagpur in 1973. In a batch of 204 students, she was one of 46 women \u2014 a minority navigating a world where the expectations placed on women in medicine remained unexamined by most of the men around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She graduated in 1977. The house job in TB and Chest followed, and then, without missing a beat, she enrolled for the Diploma in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The DGO was the floor, not the ceiling. She returned to GMC for a residency and earned her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1983 \u2014 six years after graduation, with a marriage and a household woven into those years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1984, Tara opened her private practice in Hanuman Nagar, Nagpur \u2014 a stone’s throw from the GMC campus where she had trained. The proximity was not sentimental. It was practical: the neighbourhood she knew, the patients she understood, the hospital she could reach quickly when a case turned complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She also served as a locum lecturer at GMC Nagpur and attached herself to Vivekananda Medical Mission, Khapri, running outpatient sessions every Saturday until 2005. The RashtraSant Tukadoji Cancer Hospital, Nagpur, saw her at outpatient and diagnostic outreach camps. None of this made the newspapers. It was simply the shape of a working week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For more than four decades, Kale Maternity Home at 107 Hanuman Nagar held its ground. Patients came because Tara listened. Her husband, Dr. Ratnakar Kale, an anaesthesiologist, was beside her \u2014 not only in the operating theatre but in the quiet geometry of a shared professional life. Without that partnership, the practice could not have run as it did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her faith was present in everything. Tara’s approach to patients is rooted in her religious beliefs, and those who have worked alongside her describe a quality of attentiveness that goes beyond clinical habit \u2014 the kind that comes from treating every encounter as something that matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The generation that followed Tara went far \u2014 geographically and professionally. Amita, the eldest, holds an MCA and an MS in Computer Sciences from San Bernardino University, California, and works with United Airlines in the United States. Aarti, the second daughter, holds an MBBS from Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur, and an MPH from UC Berkeley; she works in oncology at Stanford, California. Krutika, the youngest, is an MBBS and MD (Medicine) graduate who married Dr. Ameya Abhyankar, an associate professor of medicine at Topiwala National Medical College and BYL Nair Charitable Hospital, Mumbai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three daughters, three distinct paths: technology, public health, and clinical medicine. Tara raised them with no template for what they should become and appears to have expected only that they would be serious about whatever they chose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grandchildren have arrived \u2014 Harihar in California, Abhiram and Aditi in San Francisco, Mukta in Mumbai. Playing with them, Tara says, is the most enjoyable part of life now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What her patients and colleagues may not know is that Tara paints. She sings \u2014 trained formally in school, her voice shaped by the Bollywood of the 1960s and 1970s. At the class reunion in Gondia she performed, and the response was genuine, not polite. She has since recorded duets with Rajeev Laul, the Mumbai-based gynaecologist from her batch, and the recordings have circulated among classmates who remember her from the wards and corridors of GMC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The arts and the medicine coexist in her without contradiction. Both require attention. Both require patience. Both require showing up \u2014 which, since that August morning in 1979 when she reported for a house job and a wedding simultaneously, has never been in question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"