The operating theatre and the ward were the two rooms where Arun Deshmukh and Hema Deoras fell in love. She was learning obstetrics and gynaecology; he was learning the anterior chamber of the eye. Both were at Government Medical College, Nagpur, in the late 1970s. The courtship lasted years \u2014 long enough, their classmates remember, to become part of the college’s unofficial folklore. When they finally married in the summer of 1981, no one was surprised. What followed was forty years of shared professional life: a gynaecologist and an ophthalmologist, working side by side in a single hospital in Vikhroli, Mumbai, raising three children, and watching two of them become doctors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a particular kind of life, a medical marriage conducted at close range, and Arun has lived it with his characteristic quietness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arun was born in Bhaywani, a village in Solapur district, to a father who spent his working life with the railways, rising through the grades until he retired as chief controller of the Central Railway. The railways gave the family mobility and, more importantly, access to schools that a village might not have provided. Arun studied at the Railway Main School for his primary years, then moved to Satara for middle and high school at Sainik School \u2014 a transition from a small station-town to a boarding institution that would have sharpened a boy’s independence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He arrived in Nagpur for his pre-medical year at Dharampeth College, sharing benches with classmates who would later scatter across the medical landscape of Maharashtra: Sunita Mutha, Sudhir Sathe, Vinayak Sabnis, Ashok Badhe, Satish Deshmukh, Khemraj Wankar, and others. In 1973, he entered Government Medical College, Nagpur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arun was not a man given to loud self-presentation. He did his work and let it speak. His years at GMC were marked by the quiet accumulation of friendships and clinical exposure that the college, for all its infrastructure gaps, provided in abundance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, Arun completed his rural internship at the Primary Rural Health Center, Saoner, alongside Vijay Karmarkar, Vinay Ubarhande, and Chandra Mohan Singh Hajari. The urban half took him back to GMC, Nagpur. House jobs followed in surgery and ophthalmology \u2014 the latter at both GMC and at Swami Ramanand Teerth Rural Government Medical College, Ambajogai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ophthalmology is a specialty that rewards patience and precision. The eye is a small organ with an intricate anatomy, and the surgeon who works in its chambers must develop a steadiness of hand and a fineness of judgement that other disciplines seldom demand with quite the same intensity. Arun’s temperament suited it. He obtained his Diploma in Ophthalmology from GMC, Nagpur and settled into a domain that would occupy him for the next four decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the early 1980s, the shape of his life had become clear. He married Hema Deoras in 1981. She completed her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology from GMC Nagpur in 1983 \u2014 Arun had already begun his specialisation. Together, they were a professional unit before they were a medical establishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The move to Mumbai came after Hema’s MD. Both joined the ESIS Hospital in Chembur for two years \u2014 solid, demanding work in a public facility that sees a cross-section of industrial Mumbai. In 1986, they took over the hospital and redirected it toward private specialist care. Arun focused on the anterior segment of the eye: refractive error, glaucoma, cataracts, the procedures that make up the bread and butter of a practicing ophthalmologist in a city of 20 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What distinguishes a good ophthalmologist in private practice is not the ability to perform the rare and dramatic intervention, but the accumulation of diagnostic accuracy over thousands of consultations: the right refraction, the timely glaucoma diagnosis, the cataract removed at the right stage. Arun built his practice on exactly this kind of steady competence. His patients in Vikhroli knew him as the doctor who examined carefully, explained clearly, and did not recommend surgery until surgery was warranted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The hospital Arun and Hema share at Vikhroli \u2014 Sai Nursing Home \u2014 became the centre around which their family life organised itself. Their children grew up near it, and two of their three children chose medicine. Shweta earned her MBBS from DY Patil Medical College, Mumbai, completed a DNB in ophthalmology in Chennai, and added a fellowship in retinal surgery from Taiwan \u2014 coming back to work in a field adjacent to her father’s. Shilpa trained in internal medicine in New York and is now an endocrinologist in the United States. Rajiv, the youngest, chose engineering and works with Walmart eCommerce in San Jose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The tendency of GMC 1973 alumni to produce medical children is striking. Arun’s family exemplifies it: a gynaecologist mother, an ophthalmologist father, and two physician children who have taken the profession further afield \u2014 one in retina, one in endocrinology, both outside Maharashtra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ophthalmology in India changed considerably across the four decades of Arun’s career. When he began in the early 1980s, cataract surgery meant large-incision extracapsular extraction, recovery took weeks, and glasses were thick-lensed and heavy. Phacoemulsification \u2014 the small-incision technique that replaced it \u2014 came to India gradually through the 1990s, compressing recovery to days and transforming patient expectations. Intraocular lens design improved, corneal topography maps became routine, and laser refractive surgery arrived to address the myopia epidemic that urbanisation and screens were creating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arun navigated these shifts without drama. He updated his skills as the field required, brought new techniques into his practice at appropriate moments, and continued to see the full range of anterior segment pathology that came through his clinic: the diabetic with maculopathy, the elderly patient with end-stage glaucoma, the child with amblyopia that had been missed too long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His work has been a life’s accumulation rather than a series of headline achievements. He has operated on thousands of cataracts, refracted tens of thousands of patients, and managed glaucoma through medication and surgery across a patient population that has trusted him through decades of care. In a system that often celebrates the spectacular, this kind of quiet, sustained competence deserves its own recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He continues to practice in Vikhroli, doing the anterior segment work he has always done, while Hema, in the ward above, attends to the gynaecological needs of the women who have been her patients for thirty years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"