The village of Khiroda sits 30 kilometres from Bhusawal in the Jalgaon district \u2014 small enough to have a school, a primary care centre, and not much else. The son of a primary school teacher who taught in that school, Pramod Mahajan grew up understanding two things early: that education was the only exit, and that if you wanted to help people, you had to go where the problems were. He has spent the five decades since proving both points correct \u2014 first in the wards of GMC Nagpur, then in the clinics of Chandrapur, and finally in the consulting rooms of Nashik, where he reinvented himself more than once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pramod completed his school education at the local school in Khiroda before moving to Wardha, where he joined Jankidevi Bajaj College of Science for his pre-medical year. The college sent an unusually strong cohort to Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1973 \u2014 Suhas Jajoo, Rekha Sapkal, Avinash Joshi, SP Kalantri, Rajan Bindu, Prabhakar Patil, Laxmikant Rathod, Ashok Gambhir, Nandkishor Taori, and Maya Khati among them. Pramod was one of this group. He arrived at GMC as a young man from a village family, the first doctor his household would produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, he interned at the primary health centre in Nagbhid, 96 kilometres southeast of Nagpur, with Ganesh Kale, Rajendra Kokate, and Abhimanyu Niswade. His urban internship followed at the Civil Hospital in Buldhana. He returned to GMC Nagpur and obtained his Diploma in Laryngology and Otology \u2014 the DLO that would define the first phase of his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Chandrapur, Pramod built a solid ENT practice over 17 years. But what distinguished him in that coal-belt town was not his clinical work alone \u2014 it was what he wrote and what he organised. He produced 11 books in Marathi covering subjects from the mechanics of ear, nose, and throat disorders to child rearing, tobacco and alcohol dependence, literacy programmes, and cosmetic medicine. The books were practical, addressed to readers without medical training, and sold in local bookshops. For a specialist writing in a regional language for a general audience, this was unusual and deliberate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1992, he started an Alcohol Anonymous chapter in Chandrapur \u2014 and then did something more difficult. He helped a group of 12 women run AA centres in surrounding villages. Rural Maharashtra in the early 1990s had no template for this. Pramod helped them build one: how to identify alcohol dependence, how to talk to families, how to design small solutions that did not require government sanction or urban infrastructure. The women ran the centres themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was not philanthropy as a footnote to a medical career. It was medicine extended into the community by a doctor who understood that an ENT clinic could not fix what began in the home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Around 1999, Pramod moved from Chandrapur to Nashik, a city in north Maharashtra with a very different character \u2014 larger, more cosmopolitan, with a medical market that rewarded specialisation and technology. He adapted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He became the first ENT surgeon in north Maharashtra to offer vestibular investigations and tympanography. He set up the region’s first multilaser centre. He then moved further \u2014 acquiring skills in hair transplantation and cosmetic dermatology, adding laser cosmetic surgery, body contouring, and fat grafting to a practice that had begun with runny noses and blocked ears. He holds an accreditation in laser surgery from the Australian Centre for Medical Laser Technology and holds life membership in multiple professional bodies spanning ENT, facial plastic surgery, rhinology, otology, and cosmetic surgery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trajectory sounds unlikely \u2014 from a village school in Jalgaon district to the laser suites of Nashik \u2014 but it follows a consistent logic. Pramod has always gone where the need was, and when the need changed, he changed with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The generation after him carries the work forward. His daughter Harshada married a MCh oncosurgeon from Tata Memorial Hospital; his daughter Madhavi married a DNB urologist. The family’s medical tradition, begun by one man from Khiroda, now spans three surgical disciplines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"