The other candidates waiting outside the interview room at MGIMS had, by the sound of their low voices and the flutter of the papers in their hands, prepared the usual answers. Why do you want to become a doctor? They had their reasons ready: to serve rural India, to honour Gandhi’s legacy, to heal the suffering poor. These were good answers. They were also, for many of them, true. But when Anil Akulwar’s turn came, he told the panel something no one else that day had thought to say.

“Sir,” he told Dr. M.L. Sharma, “right from childhood I have had a huge phobia of mathematics. I wanted to run away from maths, so I chose biology. And for a biology student, the only option left is to become a doctor.”

The panel burst into laughter. Dr. Sushila Nayar — Badi Behenji, as she was known — smiled and asked if he intended to become a doctor while carrying that fear in his heart.

“No, madam,” he said. “If given a chance, I will surely become a doctor you would be proud of.”

They laughed again. They also, as he found when the list was posted, admitted him.

He was born in Nagpur, where his father worked in the Indian Railways. He had attended a local school in Dhantoli before joining Hislop College for B.Sc. Part I. He was not, by his own account, a student with a grand sense of vocation. He had drifted away from mathematics and toward biology by the logic of avoidance, and had followed that logic to its natural conclusion: the medical entrance examinations.

He was sufficiently well-prepared to sit for multiple tests. He went to Banaras Hindu University for the BHU exam — a journey itself, in those days — and then travelled directly from the examination hall to the railway station, because the next day he had to appear for the Sevagram PMT. The two exams fell on consecutive days, and the only way to sit both was to treat the interval between them as a train compartment.

On the platform at Banaras, he approached the Sarvodaya bookstall that sold books on Gandhi, Vinoba, Bhoodan, and the khadi movement — a particular category of literature that had found a reliable market among aspirants to MGIMS, whose entrance paper included a section on Gandhian thought. He told the bookseller he was going to sit the Sevagram PMT. The bookseller smiled, as if this were a perfectly ordinary thing to hear, and produced a bundle of books he kept specifically for the purpose. Anil bought them, settled into his seat, and spent the next eighteen hours reading about a man he would shortly be expected to know well.

He sat the PMT the following morning at GS College of Commerce in Giripeth, Nagpur. A fortnight later, a telegram arrived from the Principal of MGIMS, asking him to come for interview.

He had not, it must be said, presented the most auspicious picture when he arrived. He had worn a simple cotton shirt and terry cotton trousers. Outside the room, candidates in khadi were rehearsing their answers. Inside, the panel — Dr. Sushila Nayar, Ms. Manimala Choudhary, Principal I.D. Singh, Dr. L.P. Agarwal the AIIMS ophthalmologist — sat in the particular silence of people who have conducted many interviews and are no longer surprised by anything.

Anil answered the question about his motivation with the honesty about mathematics. He then answered a question about khadi — where to buy it in Nagpur, which he knew from Khadi Bhandar near Shukrawari Talao Mahal and Andhra Khadi Centre near Anand Talkies. When Dr. Sharma pointed out that khadi was also available at Gandhiji’s Ashram, he apologised for the omission. Finally, he mentioned his father’s employment in the Indian Railways.

Not a single question on physics, chemistry, or biology. Not a question on general knowledge or Gandhian philosophy. He left the room with no clear sense of how he had done.

When the list appeared, his name was there.

His father paid the tuition fee of ₹1,200. The hostel fee was ₹100 a month.

He would serve in the Indian Army after MGIMS — a fact that sits interestingly alongside the story of a boy who had chosen biology to escape mathematics. Military medicine demands its own particular discipline: precision under pressure, clear thinking in difficult conditions, the capacity to act when the framework of a well-equipped hospital is not available. These are things Sevagram also teaches, though it teaches them in a gentler register.

Sevagram’s method was immersion. The orientation camp at Gandhiji’s Ashram, the dawn prayers, the shramdan, the khadi — these were not a preamble to medical education but a continuous part of it. The institution believed that what kind of doctor you became was inseparable from what kind of person you were, and that the person was still being formed when you arrived. The curriculum of daily life at Sevagram — the cleaning, the spinning, the communal eating, the prayers in several languages — was as serious as any lecture in Physiology.

The batch of 1977 arrived in a Sevagram that had matured from the raw improvisation of 1969. The hostels were built. The new hospital on the hill had opened. The library was stocked. The initial uncertainty — whether this village college would amount to anything — had been settled by the results of eight years of graduates. Anil Akulwar walked into an institution that knew what it was. He had only to decide what he would make of it.

He made a great deal of it. The capacity he had shown in his interview — to say the true thing clearly, without ornament, without concern for how it might land — turned out to be exactly the quality that a medical career in service of others requires. You cannot examine a patient well if you are not prepared to report accurately what you find. You cannot treat effectively if you are not prepared to acknowledge what you do not know. Honesty, which Anil had brought into the interview room as a kind of improvisation, turned out to be a professional discipline.

The friends he made at Sevagram would remain. This is a recurring fact in the Sevagram archive — the friendships formed there carry a particular durability that alumni speak of with a consistency that begins to feel like a defining characteristic of the place itself. Something in the conditions — the smallness of the campus, the shared privation, the daily rituals that required people to be present to one another — created bonds that subsequent decades of dispersal have not dissolved.

The batch of 1977 was the last to be selected by interview. From 1978, the process changed — only the written entrance test, no interview. Anil Akulwar had been examined as a human being as much as a student. The interview that had seemed arbitrary, even absurd in its casual informality, was asking something real: what are you like? What do you say when you have nothing rehearsed? He had passed that examination before he passed the medical one.

He returned to Sevagram after the Army — another circle completing. He went back as a different person, carrying what military service had made of the formation Sevagram had begun. How those two educations combined in him is a story that belongs to the wards and offices of his subsequent career, in which the values of both institutions — discipline, service, the subordination of self to purpose — were available to anyone he treated.

He has not forgotten the seventeen-year-old who stood in that interview room knowing nothing about the Ashram’s khadi outlet and told the selection panel he had been running from mathematics all his life.

He has not needed to forget it. It was, as it turned out, the best thing he could have said.

Dr. Anil Akulwar completed his MBBS at MGIMS Sevagram with the batch of 1977. He served in the Indian Army as a medical officer and later returned to Sevagram. He practises in Nagpur.