“Ravi, fifteen votes will decide Nagpur University’s future,” said Shrikant Jichkar, standing in the Sevagram hostel courtyard with the urgency of a man who believed electoral outcomes were always the consequence of the last conversation held. He had the energy of someone who had never once doubted that he could persuade a room, and more often than not he was right. “Don’t worry, Jichkar-ji,” Ravi Mulay replied, handing over a list of supporters. “Sevagram will not let you down.”

Jichkar was from the 1972 GMC Nagpur batch — a doctor who had entered student politics with the same intensity he had brought to medicine and would eventually bring to an assembly seat in Maharashtra. He was not wrong to seek Ravi’s help. The batch of 1980 had, through a combination of strategic alliance and genuine enthusiasm, made itself heard in the Nagpur University student elections, cycling to arts and commerce colleges in the surrounding area, building support with the patient groundwork of people who understand that politics and medicine share an essential skill: the ability to listen.

Ravi has looked back at those years with a clarity that acknowledges what he was at the time. Young. Swept by the energy of collective action. Unable, as he puts it, to separate right from wrong when a crowd was moving. The particular episode he most regrets involved a strike whose consequences included the departure of Dr. K.K. Trivedi, a teacher he had genuinely admired. The slogans they raised, the momentum they sustained, the immaturity of their rebellion — he would erase that memory if he could. He cannot. It is part of the record of who he was in those years, and he holds it without flinching.

From Jabalpur to Sevagram via a Last-Minute Form

He was born on 12 November 1961 in Jabalpur, the son of Balwant Renukadas Mulay of the Indian Army — a man decorated with the Vishisht Seva Medal, presented by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself, for distinguished service of a high order. The medal sits in the family’s memory as evidence that discipline and loyalty, sustained over decades without public drama, are eventually recognized. His father had once harboured a dream of becoming a doctor; the fees at Banaras Hindu University, in the years when he was young enough to go, had been beyond the family’s means. The dream closed. He entered the army. He rose. He retired. His son became the doctor he had not been able to become.

The family moved with army postings — Jabalpur, Bombay, Pulgaon — and Ravi’s childhood was therefore a series of new classrooms, new accents, new social geographies. He grew up reading widely: the Gandhi Seva Sangh library in Sevagram’s Mahadev Bhavan became, in his teen years, one of the places he visited regularly, its shelves carrying histories and biographies and the texts of the freedom movement that would eventually serve him well in the PMT’s Gandhian Thought paper.

His father retired and moved to Sevagram. He joined MGIMS as Chief Executive Officer. This proximity — his father as the institution’s CEO, himself as a student applicant — could have been either an advantage or a complication. In practice, it was neither. His father handed him the form with perhaps ten minutes remaining before the deadline and said, simply, that it needed to be filled. Ravi rushed to the administrative office, filled it before the window closed, and submitted it to Mr. Deshmukh with the particular relief of someone who has completed an important task only slightly later than would have been ideal.

He was admitted. The uniform fact of his father’s position in the institution gave him the poise of a local, without the familiarity that would have made learning too comfortable.

The Break with Ragging

The batch of 1980 arrived in Sevagram with the intention of ending the ragging culture that preceding batches had sustained with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This was less a manifesto than a collective mood, shaped partly by the severity of what they had encountered in the first weeks — Paresh Desai and Nalin Chaudhary shaving their heads in defiance was the emblematic gesture — and partly by the straightforward recognition that humiliation is not a foundation for community.

The cost was real: seniors who might have passed down books, notes, and institutional wisdom now had no reason to do so. The batch found its own sources and managed. Ravi accepted this arithmetic without complaint. The knowledge that they had been the generation in which the practice stopped was, in retrospect, worth the inconvenience.

In the hostel, the circle that formed around him was his permanent landmark across those years: Rajiv Singh (then Rajiv Pawar), Kalpana Bhargava, S.P. Singh, Monica Naik, Mudit Kumar, Sweety Taneja. They were a Maitri group in the literal sense — a collective of warmth — sharing the particular intensities of medical school: the examination anxiety, the small celebrations, the late-night conversations that were not quite about medicine and not quite about anything else.

After MBBS, Ravi took house jobs in dermatology and surgery. Dermatology attracted him for a season — he pushed Nagpur University, collecting syllabi from Bombay and Goa, to start an MD programme in the specialty, and within a year or two they did. He never joined it. By the time it existed, his circumstances had shifted, and Pathology had come to seem more suited to the kind of doctor he was: thoughtful, observant, interested in the underlying structure of disease rather than its surface presentation.

His MD years in Pathology were shaped by Dr. Kiran Swaroop, a senior who combined rigor with kindness, and by two external examiners whose entry into the viva should have been worrying. Dr. Chitale arrived dressed like a film star — Panama hat, floral shirt, bright trousers. Dr. Wagholikar introduced himself by explaining that his name had two parts: Wagh, the tiger, and liquor, his passion. “Remember both,” he said, “and you will understand me.” The batch stood in the corridor before the examination and tried to decide whether to treat this as reassuring or alarming. They went in. They passed.

After MD, Ravi joined Pravara Institute of Medical Sciences in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, then BHEL in Bhopal, where he spent nearly two decades in corporate medicine — efficient, well-organized, and, as he came to experience it, increasingly soulless. The practice of medicine within a corporate framework imposed a rationality on clinical decisions that was useful in some respects and limiting in others. He found himself missing the texture of clinical engagement that Sevagram had prepared him for.

The call came from Ashok Raghuvanshi — his batchmate, now a cardiac surgeon of national standing — with the directness of someone who wastes neither words nor opportunities. “Would you like to come abroad?” Four years in the Cayman Islands followed, then Bhopal again, then the decade in Africa.

He has said, in various ways across the years, that he could practise medicine anywhere in the world with reasonable confidence because Sevagram had given him roots rather than protocols. This is the single thing he returns to when asked what the institution provided.

The sentence that still works, decades after graduation, in any room where MGIMS alumni gather, is simply: “I am from MGIMS Sevagram.” He has watched faces shift when he says it — softness, recognition, the particular ease of people who share a reference that needs no explanation. It is not a tribal loyalty but something that feels, to him, more like the recognition of a shared formation: a set of values that were absorbed in a specific place and have proved durable.

He lives now in Bhopal. He reads voraciously, travels when he can, and keeps in touch with the Maitri group that formed forty years ago in the boys’ hostel over samosas and examination anxiety and the particular camaraderie of people who have had to find their own way through something together.

Dr. Ravindra Mulay completed his MD in Pathology from MGIMS, Sevagram. He worked at Pravara Institute of Medical Sciences, Ahmednagar, BHEL Bhopal, and in the Cayman Islands. He lives in Bhopal.