The Interview He Had Not Prepared For

He had prepared for the wrong interview.

Rakesh Sood arrived at MGIMS in 1977 carrying precisely what everyone had told him to carry: freshly acquired khadi, memorised answers about Gandhi’s associates and the obligations of rural service, a considered position on the importance of wearing plain cloth. He was dressed in a white kurta-pyjama that felt more like a uniform than an outfit. He had purchased all four books on Gandhiji listed in the MGIMS prospectus and studied them diligently. He had attended coaching at Sachdeva PT College in Patel Nagar, though most of the preparation had been self-directed. He was ready.

Dr. Sushila Nayar — Badi Behenji — looked at him and asked simply why he wanted to become a doctor.

He told her about his father: an insulin-dependent diabetic who needed injections three times a day. He wanted to become a doctor to help him, and perhaps one day to do research that would ease the burden for diabetics like him. She listened, and nodded.

Then Dr. L.P. Agarwal, the eminent ophthalmologist from AIIMS Delhi, produced the question that determined everything.

“Do you watch cricket?”

Rakesh was a cricket buff. He lit up, involuntarily.

“Yes, sir!”

“What colour clothes does Kerry Packer’s cricket team wear?”

In the mid-1970s, Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer had turned cricket on its head with World Series Cricket — a rebel competition that introduced coloured clothing, night matches under lights, and a showmanship that the established cricketing order found alarming and the viewing public found irresistible. It was not a topic on any list of expected MGIMS interview questions. It was, however, a topic on which Rakesh Sood had views.

“Coloured clothes,” he said. “Not white.”

“Name three players from Kerry Packer’s circus.”

“Viv Richards, Barry Richards, and Dennis Lillee.”

The panel smiled. More cricket questions followed — about players, about the structure of World Series Cricket, about the confrontation between Packer’s organisation and the established Test-playing nations. Rakesh answered each one without hesitation. The Gandhi texts, the khadi, the rehearsed lines about rural service — none of it came up. Not once. The interview that had been designed to test his Gandhian credentials tested instead his knowledge of Australian fast bowling and Caribbean batting.

When the list was pinned outside the principal’s office, his name was at number fourteen.

He was born on 3 June 1958 in Delhi. His father worked in the National Sample Survey under CGHS; his mother was an Upper Division Clerk in the Ministry of Commerce. He had begun schooling at Lahore Montessori School before moving to Harcourt Butler Senior Secondary School in Delhi, then Government College in Gurgaon for B.Sc. He had planned to sit the pre-medical entrance examination after his first year of B.Sc., but the death of his uncle interrupted that plan; he finished his graduation before attempting again.

His entry into the orbit of MGIMS came through a friend, Ashok Bansal, who had been admitted to the 1976 batch and spoke warmly of the institution. Motivated by that recommendation, Rakesh appeared for the MGIMS entrance test with the seriousness of someone who had been told the place was genuinely different. He was not disappointed. He had read the four recommended Gandhi texts. He had bought the khadi. He had prepared for questions about khadi’s symbolic significance and Gandhi’s associates and the obligations that rural medical practice imposed.

Instead, he was asked about Kerry Packer.

He has considered this for many years and concluded that it was the perfect interview question. What you cannot rehearse reveals what you actually know and who you actually are. His knowledge of cricket was unperformed, unstrategic, spontaneous. It said something about the person — about the range of his curiosity, the breadth of his attention, the pleasure he took in knowing things. The interview had, in its oblique way, done precisely what it was designed to do.

Baptism by Fire at Sevagram

The literal baptism that Sevagram offered its new students arrived the following day. In the orientation camp at the Ashram, Sunil Gandhi — a fellow student from Bombay — accidentally swapped Rakesh’s bucket of cold water with one of boiling hot water. Before either of them registered what had happened, Rakesh had poured it. His friend who stammered badly under stress, tried to warn him but could not get the words out in time.

Blisters. Two weeks of daily dressings in the Surgery OPD at Kasturba Hospital. The scars that remain are, he has said, marks of his literal baptism by fire at Sevagram.
It was not the last surprise the institution had for him. As the weeks passed and the campus became familiar, he discovered that several of his seniors were connected to him through invisible threads he had not known existed. Sunil Dargar from the 1974 batch — his father worked in the same government office as Rakesh’s mother. So did the father of Jayashree Sutaone. And Suneela Khurana, who later married Arvind Garg — her mother shared a desk with Rakesh’s mother at the Ministry of Commerce. They were strangers who had been connected, through their parents’ offices, long before they became friends. Sevagram had simply made the connection visible.

Learning the Sevagram Way of Medicine

The institution’s approach to clinical medicine was, he came to understand, the thing that distinguished it from other places he would later encounter. Sevagram taught its students to diagnose with their hands and eyes and ears before they reached for technology. To listen before they tested. To think before they ordered. This was not merely a Gandhian principle — it was, in the hospital settings of a rural area with limited resources, a necessity. You became expert at the examination precisely because the examination was often all you had.

Years later, when Rakesh had completed his MD and joined Escorts Hospital as a cardiologist, his colleagues watched him arrive at diagnoses that baffled them.
“How are you doing this without echo? Without cath?” they asked.

He had a simple answer: he had been trained to listen. To observe. To think. MGIMS had given him the clinical intelligence that equipment can amplify but cannot manufacture.
He joined the 1977 batch as a young man who had prepared the wrong answers and had the right ones already inside him. That, it turned out, was the most important thing he could have brought through the door.

He thinks of the interview as a kind of parable. The texts he had studied, the khadi he had worn, the answers he had memorised — these were his idea of what MGIMS wanted. Kerry Packer and Dennis Lillee — these were what he actually was. The institution had seen through the first to find the second, which is, after all, what a good medical education is trying to do.

He is still grateful to Dr. L.P. Agarwal — whoever on that panel had loved cricket enough to ask about World Series — for the question that found him out, in the best possible sense.

Dr. Rakesh Sood completed his MBBS at MGIMS Sevagram with the 1977 batch and stayed on for postgraduate training in General Medicine at his alma mater. Under the guidance of Dr. A.P. Jain, he wrote his MD thesis on “Clinico-Immunological Correlative Study of Pulmonary and Meningeal Tuberculosis with Special Reference to Cell-Mediated and Humoral Immunity.”

His years in the Department of Medicine were shaped as much by friendships as by academics. He spent sleepless nights in the wards, long hours in seminar rooms, anxious mornings facing professors during rounds, and busy days attending calls and seeing patients in the OPD up the hill at Sevagram. Those years were shared with colleagues such as Vijay Kathuria, the late Ashish Kulkarni, K. Madhusudanan, Samir Mewar, Anil Gomber, Deepak Telawne, Chandrashekhar Singh, Haresh Sidhwa, Anil Balani, Arvind Ghongane, and Subodh Mohan.

Into the Villages with Ulhas Jajoo

Sood arrived in Sevagram at a time when Dr. Ulhas Jajoo drew medical students the way a flame draws moths. They crowded around him—captivated by his fierce intelligence, his restless energy, and his conviction that medicine could not be practised from behind hospital walls. He spoke of villages, of poverty, of crops ruined by failed rains, of roads that vanished in the monsoon, and of illnesses that began long before a patient reached a doctor.

Once Sood entered the clinical side after passing First MBBS, he joined that restless band of students—BB Gupta, KK Aggarwal, Sunil Dargar, VK Gupta—who followed Jajoo into the villages around Sevagram. They walked along dusty roads, ducked into dark huts with mud floors, sat with farmers and labourers, and listened. The villagers spoke of failed harvests, debts, dry wells, daughters to be married, sons without work. Illness was there, but often far down the list. Sood began to see that money, roads, crops, and clean water could shape health far more powerfully than any prescription pad.

What began as admiration soon turned into a lifelong bond with Dr. Jajoo. Decades later, when Sood married in November 1987, Jajoo was there.

From Sevagram to Delhi

After completing his MD, Sood went to Delhi and sought out his Sevagram friend KK Aggarwal, who had already joined Moolchand Hospital and was beginning his rise in cardiology. Sood joined the hospital the very next day. Those were the years when thrombolysis was transforming the treatment of heart attacks, and he became involved in several clinical trials testing streptokinase in acute myocardial infarction.

Around 2010, he moved to Fortis Hospital, Shalimar Bagh, where he eventually became Senior Director. Yet beneath the titles and technology, he remained, at heart, a Sevagram doctor. He still believes that the patient’s story often reveals more than the scan, that hands laid carefully on the chest and abdomen still matter, that tests should be ordered with restraint, and that sometimes the wisest prescription is to stop medicines rather than add new ones.

He trained at MGIMS in an era when young doctors relied more on their eyes, ears, and hands than on machines. He carried that confidence into the rest of his career. Today, he lives and practises in Delhi with his wife and daughter.