Anand Patil never came to the reunions. He felt, he had told SP Kalantri, like a stranger among old friends. The years in Gadchiroli \u2014 the long hours in a town at the edge of Maharashtra’s remotest district, the patients who came from villages that had no other doctor \u2014 had pulled him out of the orbit of the batch, further and further, until the distance was more than geographical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He died on 29 January 2025. He was the 23rd from the class of 1973 to go. His coronaries were choked, calcified past the reach of angioplasty or surgery. He had smoked heavily for decades. He knew what was happening to him, and he continued to practice in Wadsa Desaiganj until his body would not let him.<\/p>\n\n\n
Anand was born in Shegaon, in Warora Taluka of Chandrapur district. His father was a farmer. He attended local schools in Shegaon before joining Anand Niketan College, Warora \u2014 the college that sent five students to Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1973: Suresh Batra, Nandkishor Kasturwar, Rajendra Sarda, Anand Patil, and Nabatosh Biswas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation he completed his internship at the primary health centre in Mul. He joined government service as a medical officer, moving through postings in primary health centres for seven years. He treated fevers, diarrhoeas, pneumonias, poisonings, snakebites \u2014 the diseases of rural India in their full variety, with limited equipment and the expectation that he would manage. He was good at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But government service wore on him. The transfers loomed. His wife Sheila had a permanent position as a schoolteacher in Wadsa, and the prospect of posting after posting in different talukas, away from home, was not what he had imagined for his life. He left government service and started his own practice in Wadsa Desaiganj, a market town in Gadchiroli district, 207 kilometres east of Nagpur.<\/p>\n\n\n
When Anand arrived, he was the only MBBS doctor in Wadsa. When Kalantri last spoke to him, in February 2021, two MBBS doctors and two paediatricians served the town. It was still not enough. Anand knew this, had always known this, which is why he had stayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He rode motorcycles and bullock carts to reach the villages around Wadsa when patients could not come to him. He worked in a setting without a blood bank, without a specialist colleague on call, without the infrastructure that makes difficult decisions easier. He managed. He snatched lives from what might otherwise have been certain ends. The people of Wadsa knew what he was worth to them. They treated him accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At one time, three members of the GMC 1973 batch lived within a short radius of each other in this corner of Maharashtra: Manik Khune in Bramhapuri, 53 kilometres away; Nabatosh Biswas in Nagbhid, 72 kilometres; Abhimanyu Kapgate in Navegaon Bandh, 42 kilometres. Time scattered them. Khune moved to Nagpur in 2022, Biswas to Kolkata in 2021. Kapgate remains. Anand is gone.<\/p>\n\n\n
The end came on 29 January 2025. When I spoke to his son, Rahul\u2014himself a physician at the Mission Hospital in Chandrapur\u2014the medical reality was stark. Decades of heavy smoking had etched a final, irreversible map onto Anand\u2019s heart. His coronary arteries were no longer vessels but rigid, calcified conduits, choked beyond the salvage of a surgeon\u2019s knife or an interventionist’s stent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet, Anand remained a fixture in Wadsa Desaiganj, tending to his patients with a stubborn devotion that ignored the ticking in his own chest. On his final day, the rhythm he had spent a lifetime protecting in others finally betrayed him. His heart slipped into the chaotic, frantic dance of ventricular tachycardia, then collapsed into the silent shiver of fibrillation. Despite the desperate efforts of his colleagues, the pulse remained elusive; the heart that had beaten for an entire town refused to be summoned back.<\/p>\n\n\n
His greatest source of satisfaction was his son, Rahul. Rahul completed MBBS at GMC Nagpur in 2009, then MD (Medicine) at the same college, then his senior residency at Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram. He now practices as a physician at Mission Hospital in Chandrapur. Anand’s daughter-in-law is a gynaecologist. Medicine continued into the next generation, not because Anand had pushed for it, but because the example was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sheila, his wife, continues to teach at the local high school. The house in Wadsa Desaiganj stands. The clinic, Rahul says, will go on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He never sought attention, never spoke loudly, never tried to impress. His classmates, many of whom had not seen him for years, learned of his death through the quiet channels that now carry such news \u2014 a message in a group, a phone call to the batch secretary. SP Kalantri wrote his obituary from the notes of a phone call made four years before Anand died, and from the words of Rahul, who had been five years old when his father graduated and who knew him, as children know fathers who work too hard and say too little, through the texture of a life rather than through any particular conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Roll 124. Right behind Sanjay Gadre and Chandrashekhar Meshram, Deonath Nimje and Punjabrao Chavan just after. A quiet presence in the dissection hall, a quieter one in the years that followed. Gone, 29 January 2025, as he had lived: without fuss, and in his own time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"