Pradeep Desai will tell you, without much prompting, that he has made more catastrophic decisions than most of his batchmates and recovered from all of them. He says this with a specific kind of candour that stops just short of boasting \u2014 because the recovery, each time, required something that only he could supply. The decisions were various: private practice in a city he had not thought through, a fellowship abroad that lasted one month but changed everything, retraining in the NHS at an age when colleagues a decade his junior ran the units he was joining. What held across all of it was the same quality: a refusal to accept the situation he was in as the situation he had to accept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Born in Chandrapur to a school teacher, Pradeep did his schooling at Rani Raj Kanwar School and Government Jubilee High School before joining Janata Mahavidyalaya, Chandrapur \u2014 a college he recalls warmly for giving him a “fantastic education.” He arrived at Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973 alongside Pramod Bangde, Vijay Karmarkar, Sudhakar Dupare, and Maya Bhaskarwar, among others from the Chandrapur group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, his internship at the primary health centre in Balharshah and civil hospital in Chandrapur gave him his clinical footing. He joined a Diploma in Anaesthesiology at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur, and found, by his own admission, that he had no idea what was happening in the programme. The admission cost him clarity; what replaced it was a single application form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Avinash Deshmukh handed him the form for the postgraduate entrance examination at PGI Chandigarh. Pradeep sat the examination \u2014 extraordinarily competitive, taken by candidates from across the country \u2014 and got in. The PGI years were formative. He worked across surgical specialties, absorbed the basics of anaesthesiology from teachers who made no concessions, and emerged with an MD and a clearer sense of what he was capable of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After his MD, Pradeep weighed Nagpur against an impulse. He visited Kolhapur \u2014 his brother lived there, the city was green, and the practice was available. He moved. In retrospect, he calls it a big mistake \u2014 not because Kolhapur was bad, but because it was too comfortable, too removed from the intellectual environment that kept him sharp. He had money, friendship, and leisure. He had very little stimulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The corrective came again through Avinash Deshmukh. A Union for International Cancer Control fellowship took Pradeep to the United States for a month \u2014 one month, built on work in cancer pain management he had begun in Kolhapur in 1983. One month was enough. He returned to India having seen what the field could look like, and spent the next few years working toward a different life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1998, at an age when recertification in a foreign health system is genuinely hard, Pradeep moved to the United Kingdom. His wife Kanchan was a UK citizen, which simplified some paperwork and complicated nothing else. He had to retrain from scratch, studying alongside colleagues a decade younger, sitting examinations he had not sat before, rebuilding a professional identity in a system that granted nothing on the basis of what he had done elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He acquired the FRCA and the FFPMRCA. He headed the pain department at Wexham Park Hospital and served as Regional Adviser for Pain Medicine for the Oxford Deanery. He retired from NHS clinical practice in July 2020 but his private practice continues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pain medicine \u2014 neuromodulation, the management of chronic pain that has exhausted other interventions \u2014 suited him. It is a field that combines pharmacological precision with procedural skill and clinical judgement, and it rewards the kind of thinking that resists simple formulas. Pradeep found it, he says, extremely satisfying. Coming to it late, by a route that passed through failure and recovery and an unexpected continent, perhaps made it more so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He returns to India twice a year. The friendships from GMC \u2014 Avinash Deshmukh most prominently, but others too \u2014 are not sentimentality but a structural part of his life. They were there during his crunch times. He is conscious of this. He does not let himself forget it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n