Tapash Kumar Saha has spent his professional life looking through a microscope \u2014 first as a student of pathology at Government Medical College, Nagpur, then as a teacher in Malaysia, and later as a specialist in the Central Government Health Service. He has worked in Saudi Arabia and Kerala and Kolkata, in government dispensaries and private colleges, and now, in retirement, on a contract that keeps him near the slides he has studied for forty years. The microscope has not changed. The rest of the world has changed enormously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tapash was born in Kolkata on 25 October 1956, the son of a doctor. His father’s profession brought the family to Nagpur, and Tapash did his schooling at Bishop Cotton School before moving to St Francis De Sales College for his premedical year \u2014 the college that also sent Aziz Khan, Nasrin Raina, Dilip Gohokar, Rajiv Garg, Murtaza Akhtar, and Sharad Jaitly to GMC Nagpur in 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During his undergraduate days, he and Avinash Joshi and Rajan Bindu ate their lunch together at Dr Tambe’s clinic \u2014 a habit that says something about the friendships that GMC Nagpur formed among students from different cities and different backgrounds, thrown together by proximity and circumstance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, Tapash completed his internship from GMC Nagpur and turned to pathology for his postgraduation. The subject suited his temperament: systematic, evidence-based, demanding of precision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tapash’s career did not follow a single institutional arc. After obtaining his MD from GMC Nagpur, he served in various settings: as a senior lecturer at MAHSA University College in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; as a specialist in Microbiology in Saudi Arabia for four years; at Azeezia Medical College in Kollam, Kerala for a year; and as a Specialist Medical Officer at ESI Hospitals in Kolkata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This movement across institutions and countries was not restlessness but practicality \u2014 each posting offering what the previous one had closed off. The teaching hospitals of Malaysia gave him students. Saudi Arabia gave him clinical volume and reasonable pay. Kerala gave him a return to India. Kolkata gave him home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2018, he opted for voluntary retirement from government service. He now works as a Specialist in Pathology at the Central Government Health Service in Nagpur, on a contract basis \u2014 a quieter arrangement than the decades before it, but continuous. The slides are still there. He is still reading them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Radha, his wife, teaches at Kolkata University. Bhaskar, their elder son, is a software developer in Madison, Wisconsin, with a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Shekhar, the younger, studied medicine in Lithuania and worked in cardiac surgery at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a particular kind of knowledge that pathology imparts \u2014 not the urgency of the ward or the operating theatre, but the patience of evidence. A pathologist reads what the tissue says, not what the patient reports or what the physician expects. The discipline trains a different kind of attention: slow, methodical, unwilling to conclude before the evidence is complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tapash carried that attention through his career. In Malaysia, he taught it to students who would go on to practise in Southeast Asia. In Saudi Arabia, he applied it under pressure. At CGHS Nagpur, he now applies it, quietly, every working day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The class of 1973 produced a handful of pathologists \u2014 Omprakash Bohra, Pramod Bangde, Uday Kanhere, Vinayak Sabnis, Rajan Bindu among them. Tapash’s path was the most peripatetic of them. Yet he returned, eventually, to Nagpur. Perhaps that is the gravitational pull of the city where the trajectory began: the GMC corridors, the lunch at Dr Tambe’s clinic, the smell of formalin in the pathology lab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He is still here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"