The Boy Who Went to Sevagram with an Impeccable Record

He arrived in Sevagram in 1979 with something that most of his batchmates were still building: an academic record that announced itself. Ranked twelfth in Matriculation across all of Punjab. Distinction in Science at Intermediate. A seriousness about ideas that expressed itself in long debates, a chess board, and an almost reverent relationship with the music of Mohammed Rafi.

Then something happened. Or, more precisely, something stopped happening. Within months of reaching Sevagram, Bharat Sharma found himself in the grip of an attitudinal shift he has never been fully able to explain — not even decades later. The books were set aside. The cricket field, the chess board, the long evenings of music and philosophy filled the hours that study might have claimed. A man who had gone to Sevagram with everything needed for distinction graduated having used very little of it.

He has thought about this for a long time. He still does not know precisely what happened. But in trying to understand it, he has written some of the most honest and precise passages in this archive.

A Family in Perpetual Motion

He was born on 31 October 1960 in Moga, Punjab, into a family that had left Jalandhar behind a generation earlier and never quite settled anywhere since. His father joined the Post and Telegraph Department in 1956 and spent years on Army deputation. His mother, now ninety-three, was a homemaker who held the household together through the many transfers and transitions. His two brothers were born in Moga — one became a judge before retirement, the other died in 2013. His father retired in 1993 and passed away in 2014.

For a family that moved as often as the postal routes required, schooling was a succession of institutions: Matriculation at Model Academy, Jammu; Intermediate at Vishnu Inter College, Bareilly. He was a boy who carried his curiosity with him from city to city. Civil services was the plan — he had even begun a graduation with that intention before changing course.

When he got selected to MGIMS in 1979, and a few other medical colleges, the choice was Sevagram. The orientation camp at Gandhi’s ashram was, in his own words, a totally different experience. The camp at Dhanora organised by the Community Medicine department gave the batch its first real sight of rural health in all its complexity. Both experiences left marks. He respected the teachers at MGIMS for their commitment. He admired them for the depth of their knowledge.

What the Hostel Took

The trouble, if trouble is the right word, was less dramatic than it sounds. It was simply the hostel’s extraordinary abundance of other things to do.

There was Naval Bhatia, whose company was made for talk — warm, meandering, largely useless, and somehow essential. There was Daljeet Sandhu, with whom discussions swung between silliness and genuine sagacity, sometimes within the same sentence. Ajit Saste’s room was a kind of temple to Mohammed Rafi, where an afternoon could dissolve entirely among the songs. Then there was Dhaval Ghala, heavily influenced by Rajnish, who would simply walk into any room and deliver a discourse on whatever topic had seized him that morning. No time limit applied.

Chess consumed them too. A friend had developed the habits of a military commander at the board — his face suffusing with concentration as each move deepened, his opponents using his self-absorption to occasionally remove a piece when he wasn’t looking. He lost more than he should have. The group found this pitiable and satisfying in equal measure.

Cricket took the other hours. Bharat played for four seasons, as an all-rounder who opened both batting and bowling. His best bowling figures, preserved in memory with the precision of a man who has replayed the over many times: nine overs, four maidens, seven wickets for twelve runs. He also represented the football and table tennis teams.

He literally opened his books two months before the first MBBS examination. The pattern, once established, proved stubborn. Subsequent efforts to reshape it failed. He passed. He always passed. He simply never discovered what he might have been if he had used what he had brought.

“I wish I could go back to MGIMS,” he has written, “and do what I was capable of. Alas, the clock cannot be turned back.”

Three Portraits

Among the pieces Bharat has written about his Sevagram years, three carry particular weight — not as medical history, but as small, precise portraits of the place and the people it gathered.

The first is about the cadaver. He spent two hours a day with the man for more than a year, he writes, in complete silence and without communication of any kind. They did shocking things to him — severed his limbs, sawed through his skull. He never complained. He always appeared, in Bharat’s memory, reassuringly serene. Totally forgiving. Nobody knew what he had done in his lifetime. His name was not on any register. His gift to medical education was given without his being asked, or at least without anyone present to record his consent. That extraordinary dignity in death, Bharat writes, deserves to be remembered.

The second is about Holi. Their first Holi in MGIMS. A little bhang, taken with the innocence of those who have not yet learned what it does. The sense of time dissolving. Space becoming unreliable. A friend who hid under his bed until evening because he was certain he would be propelled into space. The memory still makes Bharat chuckle.

The third is about Dr. M.L. Sharma, the Principal. Called in for an indiscretion, Bharat entered the office already apprehensive. Sharma, without preamble, asked him to speak the truth. Before he could begin, Sharma erupted: “Don’t tell lies!” — and blasted him for several minutes without allowing a single word of response. At the end, a caution. Bharat nodded and exited quickly. He remembers Sharma for his kindness.

After Sevagram

He completed one house job in Medicine at MGIMS. In 1986, he joined the Indian Army Medical Corps, where he served until retirement in 2018. He lives now in Mohali, Punjab, with his wife, who taught intermittently for approximately twenty years. His daughter is a psychologist, married to a software engineer at Microsoft’s headquarters in America. His son is in the Army.

The life that followed Sevagram was a long one, marked by service and by the particular discipline that the Army imposes on the restlessness that hostel life never quite resolved. He is, by his own account, a better physician for having gone to Sevagram, even having used only a fraction of what he carried there.

Whether that is enough is a question he has the honesty to leave open.

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Dr. Bharat Sharma completed his MBBS from MGIMS Sevagram and joined the Indian Army Medical Corps in 1986, serving until retirement in 2018. He lives in Mohali, Punjab. He believes MGIMS is one of the finest medical colleges in the country — a conviction that coexists, without apparent contradiction, with his equally firm belief that he wasted most of his time there.