At GMC, he was part of what the batch remembers as the Famous Five \u2014 Uday Gupte, Vinayak Sabnis, Sanjay Warhadpande, Harish Motwani, and Biyani himself. He played table tennis with the intensity of a man who takes every game seriously. He dressed with a precision that his classmates still remark upon \u2014 meticulous, elegant, and clearly deliberate. Vinayak Sabnis, who knew him from their Holy Cross Convent days, puts it plainly: he was born with a fantastic memory and an irreverence for authority, and both gifts got him into and out of trouble in roughly equal measure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His internship was at the primary health centre in Deolapar, 67 km northwest of Nagpur, with Sanjay Gadre, Rajendra Phadke, Harish Motwani, Pradeep Desai, and Avinash Deshmukh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The Turn Away from Medicine<\/h3>\n\n\n
After graduation, the postgraduation in Medicine that he wanted did not come. He was the only son of a family that ran a daily newspaper \u2014 Matrubhumi<\/em>, the oldest district newspaper in the country, started by his grandfather, then already in its 88th year of publication. The paper covered Akola, Amravati, Yavatmal, Khamgaon, and Washim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He joined the family business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This decision, which might look like a retreat, was in fact the beginning of a different kind of career. He traded in cotton, cement, and tea. He dabbled in detergents and plastics. He moved into land development and financial brokerage. He served as secretary and then president of the Berar General Education Society \u2014 a premier educational institution in Akola \u2014 for fifteen years, and left it, by his own assessment, perceptibly better than he found it. He served as president of the Maheshwari Samaj Trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The medical degree, in this trajectory, became less a qualification than a frame of mind \u2014 a trained habit of attention and diagnosis applied to problems that were institutional rather than clinical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The passion that ran beneath all of it was music. He had always been a listener of the serious kind \u2014 not background music, but music attended to, argued about, remembered. In time, he founded Kalashray<\/em>, a club that organises live classical and semi-classical performances for its members in Akola. It has run, without interruption, for more than 24 years.<\/p>\n\n\n His younger son Pushkar has gone further. An amateur cricketer and snooker enthusiast, Pushkar has shaped into a playback singer of real ability, learning from Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan \u2014 teacher of Hariharan, Sonu Nigam, and Shreya Ghoshal. He can perform light music with a versatility that has earned him serious attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The elder son, Utpal, went a different route: a BFA from Purdue University, an MBA from London Business School, and he is now executive assistant to Kumar Mangalam Birla. His wife Aditi, an IT engineer from Pune, works in the same orbit. Between the two sons, the family has managed to span classical Indian music, corporate strategy, and multinational management \u2014 a breadth that the grandfather who started Matrubhumi<\/em> in Akola would probably not have predicted and might have admired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rajeev Biyani does not romanticise the road not taken. He left medicine because medicine, at that moment, did not have a place for him, and because the family business had an immediate claim. He built what he built in the space that was available. He ran an institution, grew businesses, supported music in a city that needed it, and raised two sons who are, in their different ways, flourishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\nKalashray<\/em> and the Music<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n\n\nThe Honest Assessment<\/h3>\n\n\n