The Bhangra

The room fell silent.

Dr. Sushila Nayar leaned forward across the interview table, her eyes carrying the particular warmth of someone who has just had an idea and is quietly delighted by it. The boy standing before her was tall and lanky, seventeen years old, wearing a khadi kurta-pyjama so new that the creases were still announcing themselves. She tilted her head slightly and smiled.

Toh phir karke dikhao.

Well then. Show us.

Hardial Singh blinked. This was his interview for admission to India’s first rural medical college. The panel before him included people who had walked with Gandhi, who had shaped Indian public health policy, who had built institutions from nothing in the service of the rural poor. He had been asked to dance bhangra.

When a woman who once served as Gandhi’s personal physician asks you to dance, you do not hesitate.

He shot his hands up. His feet hit the floor. He swirled with the particular joy of a teenager performing for the first time before a room full of professors, and the panel — Dr. Sushila Nayar, Dr. Jivraj Mehta, the assembled founders of MGIMS — burst into laughter. He was thanked and politely asked to leave. The next day, his name was on the final list.

He was going to be a doctor.

Three Sardars in Khadi

He was born on 7 July 1950 in Amritsar, though the family had scattered by the time he was old enough to understand geography. His father had moved years earlier to Warora, a small town in Vidarbha, where he worked as a forest contractor. The rest of the family had stayed in Delhi, and it was in Delhi that Hardial did his schooling — up to the eleventh grade at Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College in Dev Nagar, Karol Bagh. A year followed in Udhampur with his elder brother, an army man, where he completed his college studies.

His father had a strategy for his children that was practical and unambiguous: one son would become a lawyer, one an engineer, one a businessman, one a doctor. The doctor’s slot fell on Hardial. Most decisions in that household were not the children’s to make, and he accepted the allocation without argument. It was not, as it turned out, a poor fit.

His father was in Warora when the news of MGIMS reached him — barely sixty kilometres from Sevagram, close enough for the information to arrive as something concrete rather than a rumour. Dr. Sushila Nayar had entrusted the admission process to Dr. Jivraj Mehta, who had a vision for what the inaugural batch should look like: half from Maharashtra, half from the rest of India, drawn from villages and from families touched by the freedom movement, students who came from the kind of India the college intended to serve. Two from Kashmir, two from Kerala, two from Punjab. Hardial had no recommendation letter, no political résumé, no family connection to the ashram. He had a khadi kurta bought for the occasion, borrowed confidence, and a boyish smile.

And, as it turned out, good feet.

In the hostel, he was placed with Amarjeet Singh and Avtar Singh — three Sardars in khadi, marooned cheerfully in a sea of Maharashtrian, Tamil, Bengali, and Gujarati faces. There was an innocence to those early weeks, a quality of people discovering, in the constrained and communal life of a new institution, what they were made of and who they could become. The college was too new for hierarchy, too various for clique, too serious in its founding purpose for the usual social stratifications to take hold. What formed instead were friendships — unexpected, durable, and cut across every line of language and region that the India outside the campus would have insisted on maintaining.

Loyal Friends and Inventive Mischief

Hardial was not, by his own accounting, a sportsman. He was a loyal friend — which at Sevagram, where the social bonds formed in those years have held without interruption for more than five decades, was a different and equally important thing. Mangalsingh Rajput, Vinod Ughade, and Vilas Kanikdale became his closest companions. Mangal was the class comedian, constitutionally incapable of passing a situation without seeing what could be made funnier. Hardial watched his exploits with the affectionate resignation of someone who knows the friend beside him is going to do the thing regardless and has decided to be present for it.

The bucket of frogs left outside the girls’ hostel made headlines across the campus for days. Hardial had been nearby. He was usually nearby.

The hostel moved, over the years, from the converted tin-roofed barracks of the first months to proper rooms, and with the improvement in accommodation came the establishment of rituals. Every month, a group of seven or eight boys would take the bus to Nagpur. The ritual never varied: a film, a plate of chicken curry, the late train back. It was the reliable punctuation of a life that was, in most other respects, austere — the monthly allowance of the ordinary that made the extraordinary discipline of Sevagram sustainable.

The 1969 girls, by informal consensus, were dubbed Santara Bazaar. The 1970 girls were Meena Bazaar. These were nicknames of the era — playful, affectionate, entirely of their time — and they were used within the close quarters of a campus where boys and girls attended the same lectures and ate in the same mess and developed, under the Gandhian eye of the institution, the particular camaraderie of people who are not quite allowed to be friends in the usual sense and become, as a result, something more like family.

Ragging, though officially prohibited, was part of the ecosystem. Never violent, always inventive. When the 1973 batch arrived — loud, wild, and apparently unacquainted with the concept of decorum — a group of seniors took corrective action after a particularly undisciplined evening in the auditorium. Heads were shaved, courtesy of the local barber Chintamani. The message was clear. The 1973 batch, their initial wildness disciplined into something more manageable, became, in time, some of the closest friends the 1969 batch would keep.

Teachers Who Demonstrated

The teachers settled into Hardial’s memory as a collective of dedicated and exacting people who understood that their job was not to produce graduates but to produce doctors. Professor I.D. Singh, who ran the institution with the focused dual energy of a man who loved both Physiology and cricket and saw no contradiction between them. Dr. Deshkar, Dr. Sharma, Dr. Mahajan, Dr. Trivedi, Dr. Hariharan, Dr. P. Nayar, Miss Banerjee — and Dr. R.V. Agrawal, the Pathology teacher, whose no-nonsense approach to the subject was the expression of a conviction that medicine practised without rigour was not medicine at all. They were tough and they were just, and the combination produced, in students who were paying attention, the professional conscience that would carry them through fifty years of clinical practice.

What Hardial absorbed in those years was not a body of knowledge so much as a way of being present with patients. He watched his teachers demonstrate: they examined, listened, explained. They treated the patient before them as a person whose story mattered, not a condition to be processed. The lesson, absorbed so thoroughly that it became reflex, was that compassion and competence were not in competition. The best doctors were both, and the insistence on one without the other was a form of professional failure.

The Last Smallpox

After graduation, three of them — Amardeep, Avtar Singh, and Hardial — joined a smallpox eradication project funded by the World Health Organisation.

The disease was still present in pockets of rural Bihar, whispered about in villages with the particular dread reserved for afflictions that have been part of the landscape so long they feel permanent. The three doctors travelled across Nalanda and Tripura and Katchha, often in jeeps, sometimes on foot, staying in government rest houses that varied from functional to merely available. They vaccinated children, traced contacts, sat with families who needed the fear addressed before they would accept the needle. They recorded cases and filled registers and did the methodical, unglamorous work that public health requires: not the dramatic intervention of a single life saved in a single moment, but the slow accumulation of a disease’s retreat, village by village, district by district.

Smallpox is gone now — entirely gone, from the entire planet. Hardial Singh was part of the campaign that accomplished that. He was twenty-three years old, trained in a village in Vidarbha, working in Bihar under WHO supervision, vaccinating children in a country that would, within a few years, be declared free of a disease that had killed and disfigured for millennia.

He boarded a Delhi-Patna flight for the first time in his life on that posting. The allowance was decent, and the work was the most consequential thing he had ever done, and he understood both of these facts clearly.

Thirty-Four Years in One Place

He returned to Delhi and joined ESI Hospital as a houseman. What followed was not the peripatetic career of many of his batchmates — the overseas postings, the subspecialty fellowships, the institutional migrations across continents. It was something rarer and, in its way, more demanding: sustained commitment to a single institution across a working life.

Thirty-four years at ESI Hospital. From houseman to Medical Superintendent, through every intermediate rank, watching the institution change and staying to help it change well. In 1992, he completed an MBA in hospital administration — a recognition that running a hospital required a different set of skills from practising medicine in one, and that he was willing to acquire them. He saw thousands of patients, mentored hundreds of students, and retired with what he described as peace in his heart.

The peace was earned. Thirty-four years in one place, with one patient population, within one institutional culture — this is not the career of someone marking time. It is the career of someone who understood, early, that the work of medicine is partly the work of being present: returning to the same building, the same corridors, the same community, year after year, until the continuity itself becomes a form of care.

Sevagram, with its morning prayers and its shramdan and its insistence that the doctor is part of the community rather than a visitor to it, had been teaching him this since his first year.

The Silent Toast

He is seventy-five. His hair has thinned and the beard has gone grey, but every time he meets his 1969 batchmates — in Delhi, in Igatpuri, wherever the reunions take them — he becomes, briefly, the seventeen-year-old in the new khadi kurta who shot his hands up and danced bhangra before a room full of professors because Dr. Sushila Nayar asked him to and he had no reason not to.

Thirteen of that batch are no longer around. Each year, when the remaining members gather, they raise a silent toast to the absent ones. Time has taken its toll, as it takes its toll on every generation that lived and studied and quarrelled and became inseparable in a particular place during a particular decade. But what Sevagram gave them — the friendships, the values, the professional conscience, the habit of showing up for the patient before you — has not diminished with time. If anything, it has clarified.

Somewhere in a dusty file in the MGIMS archives, if such records still exist, is the admission list for the founding batch. It contains the name of a boy from Delhi who danced bhangra in his interview and was admitted on the strength of it — or, more precisely, on the strength of what the bhangra revealed about him: the readiness to be present, the willingness to be seen, the complete absence of the defensive self-consciousness that makes a person small.

That readiness never left him. It was what Sevagram had always been looking for.

Dr. Hardial Singh completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the inaugural batch of 1969. He participated in the WHO smallpox eradication programme in Bihar following graduation. He joined ESI Hospital in Delhi as a houseman and served there for thirty-four years, rising to the position of Medical Superintendent. He completed an MBA in Hospital Administration in 1992. He lives in Delhi. He is seventy-five years old.