A Village Boy in a Roomful of City Students

The first memory that rises, like the scent of wet earth after rain, is not of his childhood in Chirgaon but of Sevagram in 1970.

He sees himself standing awkwardly at Annapoorna Hostel — a village boy in a roomful of confident city students. Subhash Jain’s family had garlanded him at the railway platform before he boarded the train. Pramod had arrived alone, clutching a small suitcase, his heart heavy with both fear and excitement. The Jhansi boys, smart and self-assured, clustered together. He was the odd one out — the lad from Chirgaon.

But he carried something they did not: an unspoken bond with Dr. Sushila Nayar, whom the world called Badi Behenji but whom his family called Buaji. She had contested Lok Sabha elections from Jhansi and visited them often. Two years earlier, she had told his father she was starting a medical college in Sevagram, Maharashtra, based on Gandhian principles. They had nodded politely, assuming it was one of those grand ideas that vanish in the air between cup and lip.

By 1970, the college was real. And Pramod Gupta was in it — through two lies and one stubborn heart.

From Chirgaon to Gwalior to the Grain Business

He was born on 4 January 1950 in Chirgaon, a town in Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh. The town had its own quiet distinction: it was home to Maithili Sharan Gupt, the poet they called Dadda, whose wife was his father’s aunt. Poetry, in that household, was a family matter.

His childhood schooling was a patchwork — a government primary school with classes spilling under a neem tree, a headmaster who renamed him Pramod on the spot because Ghanshyamdas sounded like an old man’s name, and who fixed his birthday to a round January date because the Hindu calendar meant little to the school register. In one morning, identity was rewritten: new name, new birthday.

For college, he went to Government Science College in Gwalior, a city famous for its temples and its Chambal dacoits in roughly equal measure. After his B.Sc., he returned home and joined his father and brothers in the grain business — selling wheat and pulses wholesale, spending evenings counting cash until his fingers ached, attending evening law classes under Agra University. Two years into his LLB, life seemed set.

Then the debate at home became fierce. His brothers were already doctors — one in Meerut, another in Gwalior. They saw no need for a third. His family asked: why throw away law after coming this far? But his heart tilted toward medicine. Law and business filled his pockets; they did not fill his soul.

He resisted all persuasion. He would sit for the exam.

The Interview and the Two Lies

The entrance test was held at AIIMS Delhi. He cleared it and was called to Sevagram for interview.

He travelled with four others from Jhansi — Subhash Jain, the late Rajendra Jasoria, Rakesh Agrawal, and Suresh Jain. They were city boys, sons of well-connected families. On the day of departure, Subhash’s family came in full force: cousins, uncles, aunts, garlands, sweet boxes. Pramod had a small steel trunk and a tiffin from his mother. Someone in the crowd whispered: Yeh gaon ka ladka kaise chalega? He heard it. He smiled.

At the interview, the panel had Dr. Sushila Nayar, Dr. L.P. Agrawal, and government officials. She asked why he had left law for medicine.

He lied without shame. “To serve the poor.”

She pressed: “What social work have you done?”

Another lie. “We built a temple in our village and opened it to Harijans.”

She seemed satisfied.

Thus, through two lies and one stubborn heart, Pramod Gupta entered MGIMS. He has never hidden this — he states it plainly, with the equanimity of a man who understands that the lies were, in their way, sincere. He did want to serve. He did believe in the ideal. The lies were not inventions so much as accelerations — the truth of what he intended, stated before he had done it.

The Ghazal at Pavnar

Six of them formed a group in those first months — not by choice but by hunger and circumstance: four from Jhansi, Dr. Puri from Jalandhar, and Pramod from Chirgaon. They had an unspoken rule at Babulal’s canteen: the bill would be split six ways, whether you ate or not.

The ragging by the 1969 batch was a rite of passage — they made the newcomers write their practical notebooks, asked them to sing, dance, mimic. The newcomers resented it briefly and soon discovered that what was happening, beneath the surface of the mischief, was brotherhood. Within months, the two batches were bound like Ram and Lakshman.

It was in Pavnar, during their first social service camp, that something else happened — something softer and more lasting than any formal instruction. They dug soak pits, none of them having wielded a spade before. Girls balanced baskets of mud on their heads, laughing at the boys’ clumsy efforts. And in the evenings, Praveen Gill sang.

Her voice rose into the warm Pavnar air — Shiv Kumar Batalvi’s haunting ghazal, in Punjabi, about beauty and longing and the slow passage of time.

मैनु तेरा शबाब लै बैठा,

रंग गोरा गुलाब लै बैठा।

किन्नी पीती ते किन्नी बाकी है,

मैनु ऐहो हिसाब लै बैठा।

Decades later, even as she married into the civil service and lived a life far away, that ghazal remained lodged in Pramod’s memory, sharper than any anatomy lecture. Pavnar had seemed not a dusty village but a stage touched by poetry. These things — the mud, the song, the evening light — were what Sevagram was actually teaching, beneath the lectures and the examinations.

A Career of Unlikely Elevation

He completed his MBBS under a contract binding him to rural service. He was posted to Pithoragarh in the Himalayas, twenty kilometres from town. The compounder welcomed him warmly: Doctor sahib, do not worry, we have four doctors here, you need only come once a week. He did not visit even that once, yet drew his salary for three years. Bureaucracy, like God, worked in mysterious ways.

After Sevagram, he went to BJ Medical College, Pune, for his MD in Medicine. They were outsiders — the Sevagram boys. No one said it aloud, but it was understood. Dr. G.S. Sainani was his professor — respected, feared, clinical, prone to correcting mid-sentence: This is not Sevagram. Read more. He studied harder, slept less, rewrote every lecture, and passed. Not because he was brilliant, but because he endured.

Then Delhi called. The Modi group of industries sought doctors for their new pharmaceutical venture. He became medical director, introducing three molecules — radiopaque dyes, dazazole, and aminocor. His first patient was Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, suffering intractable heart failure. Pramod stood by his bedside — awed and nervous — and did what Sevagram had prepared him to do: he was present, attentive, and useful.

He went on to work in Saudi Arabia for fourteen years as a medical consultant in Tabuk — the first non-Muslim in such a role. He returned to India, settled in Noida, and continued with Modi Pharma. Their product Betadine reached every hospital shelf in the country. Before Covid, he travelled twenty days a month, conducting CMEs in Bangladesh, lecturing in Kenya and Tanzania.

At seventy-six, he keeps a quieter routine: two hours of chamber practice, no emergencies, and the peace of knowing he has walked a long road.

The Thread from Chirgaon to Sevagram

Looking back, he sees a thread running from the neem tree in Chirgaon, where he sat cross-legged as a boy listening to Dadda’s verses carried on the air, to the neem-shaded hostels of Sevagram. He sees jalebis sweetening his primary school admission, lies smoothing his medical college interview, ragging forging his friendships, a ghazal haunting his evenings in Pavnar. He sees the hesitant boy who counted grain coins become the man who stood at Sheikh Abdullah’s bedside. And through it all, he sees Dr. Sushila Nayar’s vision — the audacity of planting a medical college in a village — that changed not just one Chirgaon boy’s life but the lives of generations.

If there is nostalgia, it is not only for youth or friendship, but for the faith placed in small beginnings. In Sevagram, under the humblest roofs, they built not only a college but also themselves. Half a century later, those bonds remain the truest wealth.

Dr. Pramod Gupta completed his MD in Medicine from BJ Medical College, Pune. He served as Medical Director with the Modi group of industries, introducing pharmaceutical molecules to the Indian market. He worked for fourteen years as a medical consultant in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, as the first non-Muslim in such a role. He oversaw international divisions of Modi Pharma across twenty-seven countries. He lives in Noida.