One afternoon during his MBBS years at GMC Nagpur, Narayan Umale held out his hands to Khemraj Wankar \u2014 Roll No. 171, a batchmate who had taught himself palm reading from a book and practised it with the earnestness of someone who believed such things could be known. Wankar studied the lines for a moment. “You are going to be a surgeon,” he said. Narayan was not so sure. The surgical theatres impressed him; the hours did not. He wanted to be a physician.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As it turned out, Wankar was right. Narayan Umale became a surgeon, headed a department of surgery, rose to become Dean of a medical college, and \u2014 some two decades after that palm-reading session \u2014 was chaired the prestigious KC Gharpure Oration at the Maharashtra State Surgeons Conference he had himself organised. If the lines of the palm can be read at all, Wankar had read his correctly.<\/p>\n\n\n
Narayan was born in Pusad, a market town about 100 km southwest of Yavatmal, where his father worked as a Special Auditor in the Maharashtra government’s Co-operative Department. The job required travel, and the travel shaped Narayan’s schooling \u2014 New English High School in Warud, Manibai Gujarati High School in Amravati, then Dadasaheb Dhanwate Nagar Vidyalaya in Mahal, Nagpur. For his premedical education, he joined Shri Mathuradas Mohota College of Science in Nagpur, one of thirteen students from that college who entered the GMC Nagpur batch of 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The GMC years settled him. He did his rural internship at primary health center Parshivani \u2014 with Prahalad Jajodia, Gopal Ingle, and Ramesh Chopade \u2014 and his urban posting at the district hospital in Amravati. Surgery found him during his house jobs, in the way that it finds most surgeons: through the combination of manual pleasure and intellectual demand that no other specialty quite replicates.<\/p>\n\n\n
Narayan obtained his MS in General Surgery from GMC Nagpur in 1982. His guide was Dr. RN Das, then one of Nagpur’s most respected surgical teachers. The thesis examined genitourinary tuberculosis \u2014 biopsies from patients presenting with this difficult-to-diagnose condition \u2014 appropriate work for a surgeon training at a centre where tuberculosis was still ubiquitous and where the diagnostic limitations of the era made tissue examination essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the MS, he spent a year at Bhatia Hospital in Mumbai, acquiring the speed and variety of exposure that a large private Mumbai hospital in the 1980s could offer but a government teaching hospital could not \u2014 faster throughput, sicker emergency presentations, the particular discipline of working without a net. He returned to Maharashtra in 1985, served for four years as an MMHS Class II officer at the Civil Hospital in Amravati, and then joined Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh Memorial Medical College, Amravati in 1988 as a faculty member in the Department of Surgery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He stayed at PDMMC for more than three decades. The trajectory he followed there \u2014 assistant professor, associate professor, professor, head of department, dean \u2014 is the standard academic arc, and there is nothing standard about how Narayan moved through it. He organised the Maharashtra State Surgeons Conference in January 2020, serving as Organizing Chairman, and delivered the KC Gharpure Oration himself \u2014 one of the most respected lectures in the Maharashtra surgical calendar \u2014 on Republic Day of that year.<\/p>\n\n\n
Narayan Umale served as Dean of Dr. Rajendra Gode Medical College in Amravati, one of six members of the GMC Nagpur class of 1973 to hold a deanship. The others were Padmakar Somvanshi at PDMMC Amravati, Prakash Wakode at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College Nagpur, Abhimanyu Niswade at GMC Nagpur, Vinayak Sabnis at KJ Somaiya Medical College Mumbai, and Madhukar Parchand at GMC Nagpur and institutions in Miraj and Kolhapur. That six members of a single batch should rise to lead medical colleges is itself a measure of what a generation of doctors trained in government institutions could become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A deanship in a Maharashtra government medical college is partly administrative and partly political \u2014 managing faculty, infrastructure, Medical Council inspections, student welfare, and a budget that is always insufficient. Narayan navigated it with the qualities that had served him in the operating theatre: directness, a tolerance for complexity, and the understanding that most problems in institutional life, like most problems in the abdomen, resolve if you address them early and completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His wife, Dr. Kumudini, is a gynaecologist with a DGO from Gajara Medical College, Gwalior, who has run her own practice in Amravati alongside his academic career. His daughter Sayali followed medicine \u2014 MBBS from GMC Nagpur, MD in Radiology from MGM Aurangabad, and a senior residency in Radiology at MGIMS Sevagram. The family practice, across two specialities and two generations, has served Amravati for thirty-five years.<\/p>\n\n\n
Narayan still thinks about the palm-reading. Not because he believes in it \u2014 he is too systematic a surgeon for that \u2014 but because Wankar’s prediction was accurate in a way that went beyond the choice of speciality. Surgery is not simply a technical skill. It is a disposition: the willingness to make a decision under uncertainty, to commit to an action whose consequences cannot be fully predicted, and to take responsibility for the outcome. Narayan has practised that disposition in the operating theatre, in the faculty meetings, and in the dean’s office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He is now in the later years of a career that has left its mark on PDMMC Amravati in the most durable way \u2014 through the surgeons he has trained, who carry his methods into their own operating rooms, in Amravati and beyond. The palm, it seems, told the truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"