His name, technically, did not exist when he arrived in Sevagram.

He had been born Pardeep Kumar — son of Ishar Das Kapoor, goldsmith and president of the goldsmith community of Rewari, Haryana — and in the north Indian convention of his childhood, that was sufficient: given name and father’s name, no surname required. It was Maharashtra’s administrative tradition that completed him. Official documents in the state demanded three names: given name, father’s name, and family name. Pardeep Kumar Kapoor. The last word had been latent all along; Sevagram drew it out.

He has thought, in the years since, about how a place that strips away so much — comfort, privacy, culinary preference, the casual liberties of a city upbringing — can also add something. He arrived with two names. He left with three. The Kapoor had always been there; it took Wardha to make it visible.

He was born and schooled in Rewari, Haryana, in a home shaped by his father’s particular character. Ishar Das Kapoor was known in the town for something unusual: his honesty. He had been elected president of the goldsmith community repeatedly, without elections being held, because no one disputed his fitness for the role. He ran his business — fifteen to twenty workers, a modest shop on a modest street — with the straightforwardness of a man who does not separate his professional conduct from his personal one. He had not become wealthy. He had become trusted. To his son, watching from childhood, the distinction was clear and instructive.

Pardeep’s grandfather had come to Rewari from what is now Pakistan, arriving at Partition with nothing and rebuilding from bare ground. The grandfather had wanted his grandchildren to study — the thing Partition had denied his own sons. When Pardeep was the first in the family approaching the threshold of a medical career, the grandfather’s investment in that possibility was personal and urgent. Pardeep understood the weight of what he was carrying.

He completed his pre-university at DAV College in Chandigarh and returned to Rewari for pre-medical preparation. He sat the standard entrance examinations — AIIMS, AFMC, Maulana Azad, St. John’s, AMU — and did not get through. He enrolled in BAMS at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, keeping the ambition alive while preparing for another round. During this period, he spent time at Raj Ghat, buying recommended texts on Gandhi before sitting the MGIMS entrance examination. He admits, with the candour that runs consistently through his recollections, that most of what he read on Gandhi went over his head.

He was upset with his family on the morning he left for Wardha — a private difficulty he does not specify, but which coloured the departure. His father and his schoolteacher, Mr. Madanlal Agarwal, insisted on accompanying him. Agarwal had never missed an opportunity to pay respects to his own teachers; on the route to Wardha they first stopped at Burhanpur so that Agarwal could do precisely that. They reached Sevagram on July 27th, two days after leaving Rewari, and stayed at Apna Ghar, a Marwadi dharamshala near the bus station belonging to a Mr. Champalal Bamb.

Pardeep was captivated immediately. The simplicity of the buildings, the monsoon-drenched greenery, the rustic quality of the village and even the panwallahs on the street — everything felt quietly welcoming, in contrast to his inner turbulence of the preceding days. He had never travelled this far from home. He knew nobody. He did not understand a word of Marathi. He felt, inexplicably, that he had arrived somewhere he was supposed to be.

The interview panel had eight to ten people. They asked why he wanted to be a doctor. They asked about Haryana’s connection to the Bhagavad Gita. They asked about his preferences if admitted elsewhere. They tested his thinking with questions designed to unsettle. He had no letters of recommendation, no family connections to the freedom movement, no prominent uncle whose name he could invoke. He had only his honesty, which his father had modelled for him since childhood, and a calm that settled over him — to his own surprise — once he was inside the room. He answered every question truthfully.

He was selected.

Orientation at Gandhiji’s Ashram began the formation that the next five years would complete. Early mornings, prayers, the conch shell at dawn, walks on dusty paths that Gandhi had once walked, simple food that required no elaboration. He was placed in A Block, Boys’ Hostel, Room 41. In those first weeks, the batch moved together in the uncertain way of people who have not yet learned where anything is — classrooms, the dissection hall, the lecture theatres. They found each other instead.

Sunil Gandhi, Mukesh Agarwal, and others became his companions in the particular way that Sevagram friendships formed: through proximity, shared confusion, shared meals, and the slow accumulation of trust that comes from being in an unfamiliar place together. They studied together, dreamed together about the doctors they would become, quarrelled and reconciled across the years of a degree that asks more of you than examinations alone.

The teachers were exacting and generous in equal measure. The campus was spare; the intellectual life was rich. The daily discipline — khadi, prayer, shramdan, the communal eating and washing of utensils — was not merely Gandhian ceremony but a daily reminder that the practice of medicine begins with the practice of a certain kind of life. You cannot serve patients well if you do not know how to live alongside people whose circumstances differ from your own. Sevagram taught this by construction.

He was the son of a goldsmith who had been made president of his community without a vote because no one doubted his character. Pardeep carried that standard into Sevagram and into the career that followed. He has not, in the decades since, found any reason to carry a different one.

The third name — Kapoor — was there when he arrived. It simply needed a place like Sevagram to call it forward. A place that believed a person was more than the sum of their marks, more than the sum of their connections, more than the two names they had brought from home. You arrived incomplete, in some small way, and left with the full version of yourself in view.

He thinks of his father, standing behind the counter of the goldsmith shop in Rewari, chosen by his community not through competition but through trust. He thinks of his grandfather, arriving from Pakistan with nothing, wanting his grandchildren to study. He thinks of the dharamshala in Wardha, the monsoon-wet campus, the panwallah on the street who did not know him and could not speak his language and somehow made him feel he had arrived.

He has spent a career as a doctor in a profession that, at its best, is practised the way his father ran his shop: with honesty as the operating principle, trust as the currency, and the understanding that what you are for others is the only measure that ultimately counts.

Rewari gave him his values. Sevagram gave him his third name and the institution in which to apply them. He is grateful for both.

Dr. Pardeep Kumar Kapoor completed his MBBS at MGIMS Sevagram with the batch of 1977. He carries the values of simplicity and honest service instilled by his father and deepened by his Sevagram years. He practises in