A Steel Trunk and a Folding Cot

His father paid the fees and they walked together to the newly built hostel, carrying a steel trunk and a folding cot between them. The hostel faced the principal’s office, close to the tennis court, near the girls’ hostel. From the dining hall came the aroma of dal and rice, mixed with the scent of neem from the trees outside. Evening prayers had already begun somewhere across the campus, the chants echoing as the sun dipped behind the Sevagram trees.

Rajeev Chaudhari had arrived at MGIMS.

He had been born eleven years earlier two kilometres away — in Waghada, a tiny village a stone’s throw from Sevagram, dusty lanes and mud homes and mango trees swaying under the sun. He had taken his first breath in a small clinic where Sister Talpade, the nurse who owned the place, had helped bring him into the world. His father was a freedom fighter and a small farmer, tilling fifteen acres and, over the years, supplying grain to the institutions of Sevagram — sacks of jowar, wheat, pulses, and groundnuts loaded onto a bullock cart and driven to the college. The people on the interview panel knew his father. They knew his family’s honesty and struggle.

When Rajeev walked into MGIMS in 1970, he was not discovering a new world. He was arriving at a place that had grown up alongside him.

The Shooter Who Preferred Sports to Books

He was born on 14 October 1949, the second year of independent India. He was never, by his own admission, a topper. He loved sports more than books — a preference that never entirely reversed itself, even through five years of MBBS and the decades that followed.

His early years were spent in Waghala. For high school, he walked to Wardha and studied at Craddock High School, the pride of the district, with its red-tiled building, stern teachers, and sun-baked playgrounds. There, he shared classrooms and dusty playing fields with boys like Ulhas Jajoo and Abhay Bang — then a year or two behind him, names that would later carry considerable weight. Ulhas would become Professor and Head of Medicine at MGIMS. Abhay would win national admiration for his pioneering work in rural Gadchiroli.

At school, Major Chaturvedi spotted Rajeev’s shooting ability during NCC drills. Soon, he and his friends Shyam Babhulkar, Pawar, and Saklecha had formed a shooting team. They won local and university championships. At nationals, a lack of training and guidance held them back — a frustration that taught him early that talent without support arrives only partway.

In 1970, MGIMS announced its entrance test. It was only the second year of the college. The exam was held jointly for MGIMS, AIIMS, and BHU, with no paper on Gandhian thought for this batch. Rajeev cleared it and was called for interview.

Before the interview, his father visited Santoshrao Gode — a freedom fighter, Zilla Parishad president, and a man who knew Dr. Sushila Nayar well. Gode’s assessment was frank: there were too many VIP candidates this year. Perhaps try next year. His father only smiled. “We will try our luck.”

The interview was conducted first in Hindi. Seeing the boy stumble, they shifted to Marathi. Dr. Sushila Nayar was there, and Mrs. Pratibha Patil, and Manimala Chaudhary — the same Manimala Chaudhary who had loaded grain onto a bullock cart at their house in Vaghada. They asked the usual question: Why do you want to become a doctor?

He did not have a rehearsed answer. He told them: I live close to Sevagram. Villagers need doctors. I want to come back and serve them.

It was true. There was no drama, no borrowed dream.

He got in.

The Hostel, the Humour, and the Elections

Dr Rajeev Chaudhari completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the second batch of 1970. Born in Waghala, a village neighbouring Sevagram, he grew up in the home of a freedom fighter-farmer, in surroundings that were simple, disciplined, and deeply rooted in rural life.

When he entered MGIMS, he found himself in a world that was at once austere, chaotic, and unforgettable. In 1972, he shared a small, dimly lit hostel room with Bajrang Prasad Pandey, an endlessly patient roommate who tolerated Rajeev’s pranks with remarkable calm. The plaster had begun to peel from the walls. The ceiling fan groaned louder than it spun. Nights stretched late into the darkness, with whispered conversations, laughter, and the sound of footsteps fading after the warden’s rounds.

Rajeev had a favourite joke about their academic standing in the batch: “Hum dono first aate hain — ye upar se, aur main neeche se.” The room would erupt in laughter, loud enough for someone in the corridor to bang on the door.

Hostel life carried its own rituals and rebellions. During the Ganpati festival, only bhajans were allowed over the loudspeakers. Film songs were strictly forbidden. Yet every year, a few “filmy bhajans” somehow found their way into the programme. Chits would appear in the names of teachers such as Dr M. L. Sharma and Dr S. P. Nigam, though the teachers themselves had no idea their names were being used. Picnics, too, were banned, but after much pleading, the warden, Nalinitai Ranade, finally relented and allowed the students to go to Tadoba. On examination mornings, the girls would gather outside the boys’ hostel with bowls of curd. Each boy had to stop, eat a spoonful, and leave with a chorus of good wishes ringing in his ears.

The Strike That Changed MGIMS

Some events in an institution’s history arrive through formal decisions. Others arrive through the stubbornness of particular people at particular moments.

The opening of postgraduate programmes at MGIMS was the second kind.

Dr. Sushila Nayar and her chief advisor from AIIMS Delhi, Dr. L.P. Aggarwal, held a principled position: Sevagram should create family doctors for villages, not specialists. Postgraduate seats would produce people who left rural medicine for urban hospitals. The students of the early batches held a different view. Jobs were scarce. Village practice was difficult without advanced training. The argument was not abstract — it was about the futures of sixty young doctors per batch who had given five years to the institution and needed somewhere to go.

It was Rajeev Chaudhari from the 1970 batch, Vinod Ughade from 1969, and Asha Ramachandran from 1973 who led the protest.

Asha, fierce and fearless, made the argument as personally as it could be made: she placed her bangles on the table and said, if you cannot fight, wear these. Her words burned in them. They pushed. They persisted. They did not stop until the 1973 batch became the first to receive PG admissions at Sevagram.

It was a structural change that transformed the institution — one that every subsequent batch benefited from. It had been forced not by administrators but by students who refused to accept that the situation was fixed.

From the Boy Who Failed to the Professor Who Taught

He failed more times than he could count during MBBS. This is not a detail he conceals — he states it plainly, with the equanimity of a man who has made his peace with how things actually were and what they actually produced.

Not all of Rajeev’s student memories were warm. He failed more times than he cared to count during MBBS. One memory stayed with him for years. He walked out of the Preventive and Social Medicine examination convinced he had done enough to pass. When the results came, his name was missing. He later learnt that the professor was upset because he had not purchased the textbook he had written. Even Dr Sushila Nayar argued on his behalf, but the decision stood.

Yet the student who struggled through examinations eventually found his way. He completed his MD in Forensic Medicine from Indira Gandhi Medical College and moved to Mumbai, where he built a distinguished academic career. In April 1995, he was appointed through the MPSC as Professor in the Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology at KEM Hospital and took charge as Head of the Department, with Dr Walter Vaz serving alongside him as Lecturer. Among the students of the 1970 batch, he was the first to rise to the rank of professor.

Perhaps because he knew failure so intimately, Dr Chaudhari was drawn to students who had almost stopped believing in themselves. They sat quietly in the back rows, avoided eye contact, and carried the weight of repeated disappointments. He would call them aside, spend extra hours with them, test them patiently, and keep encouraging them until they began to regain confidence. Many of those same students eventually passed their examinations. He would often say with a smile, “Send me donkeys and I will turn them into horses.” His students knew he meant it.

The barefoot boy from Waghala, the NCC shooter who loved sport more than textbooks, the student who stumbled through his interview in Hindi and was rescued by the examiners shifting to Marathi, the young man whose father had loaded grain onto a bullock cart for the same people who were sitting across the table from him — this was the boy who eventually headed a department at KEM.

He owes this, he has said, to MGIMS: to its teachers who pushed, its culture that nurtured, its spirit that never allowed you to give up.

That is how a barefoot boy from Waghala walked into Sevagram and found his way into the world. The distance between them was two kilometres. The journey took a lifetime.

Dr Chaudhari married Dr Kamlesh, who completed her MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Their elder son, Dr Kushagra, completed his MD from K. J. Somaiya Medical College, specialised in Pediatrics, and now lives in Detroit. Their younger son, Aroop, completed an MBA and works in Mumbai.