The question, when it came, was not about the Krebs cycle or the pharmacology of penicillin. It was not about Gandhi’s salt march or the principles of rural health. Dr. L.P. Agrawal, the eminent ophthalmologist from AIIMS Delhi, leaned forward across the interview table and asked, in careful Hindi: Gai-bhainso ko jo chara khilate hain, use kya kahte hain?

What do you call the fodder fed to cows and buffaloes?

Chandrashekhar Singh did not hesitate for a second. “Chitta,” he said, with the confidence of someone who had spent his childhood watching cattle fed in the yard outside his family’s mud-walled home in Dobhi, Jaunpur district, eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Dr. Agrawal smiled. He had been testing not knowledge but origin — trying to establish whether this young man truly came from a village or had merely claimed it on a form. The smile said: he does. The smile said: this one is genuine.

Another professor, sterner, followed with a question about caste discrimination. Chandrashekhar’s answer was direct, practical, rooted: what mattered was cleanliness and dignity, not caste. The food of a man from any community was acceptable if the space was clean. The food of a Brahmin was not acceptable if the space was not. Simple. The panel listened and were satisfied.

That was the interview. That was how a village boy from eastern UP, who had never spoken English aloud in his life, walked into MGIMS Sevagram.

Dobhi, Jaunpur

He was born on 26 January 1957 in Dobhi, a village in the Shahganj block of Jaunpur district. The date — Republic Day — was not something he had chosen, but it arrived with a certain weight. His father tilled a small patch of land. The family’s rhythm was the rhythm of the monsoon and the harvest; what the rains gave, you ate, and what the rains withheld, you waited out.

His schooling began at a modest middle school in Senapur, Kerakat block. For high school and intermediate, he attended Shri Ganesh Rai College in Dobhi itself. He took his BSc at a local college nearby. The education was solid in its way — the sciences taught, the mathematics drilled — but it was education conducted entirely in Hindi, and spoken English was simply not something the system required of him or offered him.

He wrote English with flair. In school and college, his English essays consistently earned full marks. What he could not do was open his mouth and produce the language with any confidence. He had assembled it from textbooks, carefully, in silence. It lived in him as a written thing.

When his elder brother — who had gone to Bombay and was doing well — sent him an application form for MGIMS Sevagram, Chandrashekhar filled it with a mixture of hope and uncertainty. His brother had written: Doctor ban jao. Gaon ke liye bahut bada kaam hoga. Become a doctor. It will be great work for the village. He was not sure he was doctor material. He had always assumed doctors were born to a different order of ability — something he had watched from outside, not felt from inside. He had been a strong student, but not, he thought, in that way.

The telegram arrived. Interview, Sevagram.

Arrival

Sevagram in the late 1970s was khadi and neem trees, prayers at dawn, and a pace of life that moved closer to the village than to the city. For Chandrashekhar, this was not alien. It was, in certain respects, a formalised version of what he had always known. The mud paths, the shared taps, the food cooked simply and eaten together — none of this required adjustment.

What required adjustment was language. The English-speaking classmates — from Bombay, from Delhi, from the English-medium schools of Maharashtra — were not enemies, but they were a different species. They spoke with a fluency he did not have. They called themselves doctors in their carriage and their conversation even before they had earned the right. He and the other Hindi-speaking students formed their own island: Vijendra Chauhan, R.P. Mishra, Ram Veer Singh, Vijay Jaiswal. Hum toh Hindi mein hi baat karenge, they declared. We will speak in Hindi. And they did.

The hostel assigned him Room 10, first floor, Block A. It was a small room with a wooden desk, a metal cot, and a window that looked out onto the path between the hostel and the lecture hall. Within weeks, the room had expanded in practice — friends drifting in from Maharashtra, from Delhi, from wherever they had been posted. Deepak Telwane, Sunil Mapari, Gautam Daftary. The borders of language softened over samosas from Babulal’s canteen and the particular intimacy of shared examinations.

The Spoken Word

The English problem did not resolve itself quickly. It was his bane and his embarrassment through the first year, through the second. He understood; he could not speak. He sat in lectures absorbing content that made sense to him and felt the humiliation of knowing that expressing it would betray him.

He found a way through. He wrote. His case notes were careful and complete. His theory papers were, as they had always been, strong. He built a reputation, quietly, as a student who was more than his spoken manner suggested.

The dissection hall was democratic in its way. It did not ask you to speak; it asked you to observe, to handle, to understand what was in front of you. He was good at this. Physiology experiments had the same quality — precise, repeatable, verifiable. Biology, in its practical form, did not require eloquence.

The wards, later, were harder. Presenting a case to a consultant in English was the crucible, and he passed through it imperfectly but honestly. His consultants understood what they were dealing with and marked accordingly — on knowledge, not on accent.

Medicine in the Classroom, Medicine in the Field

The community medicine component at MGIMS was not supplementary. It was structural. The villages around Sevagram were not backdrop; they were curriculum. Students spent weeks in primary health centres, in sub-centre postings, in the adopted villages that each batch was assigned.

For Chandrashekhar, this was familiar ground. The filariasis camps — trudging through Vidarbha villages at night, bending over microscopes to find nocturnal parasites wriggling on slides — felt less like fieldwork and more like a continuation of what he had always observed at home. The hydrocele and cataract surgeries conducted in makeshift operating theatres under canvas tents were something else: medicine stripped of all pretension, placed directly in the life of the people who needed it. He assisted, and in assisting he understood what his teachers were trying to show him.

The professors themselves were something to learn from. Dr. A.P. Jain, who joined in the final year, delivered a lecture on oesophageal bleeding that Chandrashekhar still recalled decades later. Dr. O.P. Gupta, from Chirgaon near Jhansi — gentle, sincere, a man with whom Chandrashekhar felt a quiet kinship of geography and temperament. Prof. S.P. Nigam in Medicine, whose lectures on clinical gait were theatre and science simultaneously, who acted out each walking abnormality with the commitment of a performer who has decided the audience deserves his full attention.

After Sevagram

After MBBS, he did his house jobs in Medicine and Paediatrics. The MD in Medicine followed — three years under Dr. U.N. Jajoo, working in the wards and building his thesis on tetanus. When he presented his dissertation at Bombay Hospital years later, Dr. Patel — who had himself done pioneering work on tetanus — was quietly surprised to find his own papers cited in a Sevagram dissertation. So, Sevagram reads Bombay too, he remarked.

Armed with an MD, he returned to his village with the intention that the situation required. He would serve his own people. The plan made sense from every angle except the angle of how villages actually receive returning doctors. What he found was not the reception he had prepared for. The villagers wanted the injection that worked overnight, the glucose drip that sparkled with visible action, the immediate and legible sign that medicine had occurred. His rational prescriptions competed, badly, against quacks with theatrical remedies.

He was disillusioned. He had not expected gratitude, but he had expected to be useful. He was useful, but less so than he had believed he would be. He moved to Banaras — against his family’s wishes, carrying the weight of a choice that disappointed people he respected — and built a practice there from nothing. In thirty-five years of work in Varanasi, he has made it his own.

The Echo

He sits in his clinic in Banaras and patients file in. The day moves as days do, in the small increments of other people’s illness and recovery. And sometimes he hears, underneath the familiar sounds of a consultation room, something older.

Agar Chitta ka jawab de sakta hai, toh doctor ban sakta hai. If you can answer what fodder is called, you can become a doctor.

He answered. He became one. The rest is the life that followed from a village boy knowing the word for what cattle eat — knowing it not from a book, but from watching it happen, every morning, in the yard outside his father’s house.

Dr. Chandrashekhar Singh completed his MD in Medicine from MGIMS, Sevagram. He practised for a brief period in his home district before moving to Varanasi, where he has run a medical practice in Internal Medicine for over three decades. He lives and works in Varanasi.