A Newspaper on a Flight

In 1977, Sandeep Jeste’s father was on a work trip to Kolkata, travelling in his capacity as a senior officer at the Reserve Bank of India. On the flight, he picked up a copy of The Indian Express and read a small advertisement: Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram, was accepting applications. He folded the page carefully, carried it home to Mumbai, and set it before his son.
“Apply for this,” he said.

Sandeep had just missed admission to the Bombay Corporation medical colleges — JJ, KEM, Nair, Sion — by four marks. Four marks in the year’s examination had been the difference between a medical seat in Mumbai and no seat at all. He was a Mumbaikar through and through, raised in Malad, schooled at St. Anne’s High School and Mithibai College in Parle, fluent in the cadence and expectations of the city. A village in Wardha district had not featured in any version of his future he had imagined.
He applied.

The Train and the Book

The journey from Dadar to Nagpur took many hours. On the platform at Dadar, Jeste ran into Sunil Gandhi — another student travelling for the same interview, a name he did not yet know would become a batchmate and a close friend. Sunil had a copy of My Experiments with Truth. Jeste had not read it. He borrowed it.

He read Gandhi through the night as the train moved northeast, through the changing landscape from Maharashtra’s coast to its interior. It was not a calculated preparation — the interview was the next day and there was no time for calculation. But something in the reading steadied him. He thought of 1893, of another train journey, of a man thrown off at Pietermaritzburg and the life that changed because of it. Gandhi’s life had pivoted on a train. In a smaller way, Jeste’s was pivoting on this one.

He was ranked eleventh on the admission list. He learned this only after initially misreading his position: the number 311 appeared beside his name, and he spent a tense few minutes convinced he was 311th out of 316 candidates before someone explained that the first digit was a code. It is the kind of story that stays in the memory not for its drama but for the small light it casts on how anxiety makes fools of even careful readers.

Childhood in Malad

Medicine had been in his sights from childhood — not because his parents pushed him toward it, but because of his uncle, Dr. Dilip Jeste, the first Indian to become President of the American Psychiatric Association, and his aunt, a noted paediatrician from JJ Hospital. Their dedication had lit something in him from an early age and eventually drew him toward obstetrics and gynaecology.

The Interview

His father accompanied him to Sevagram. They stayed with a relative in Wardha. The interview itself was brief. Dr. M.L. Sharma, the Principal, looked at his certificates, noticed he had taken typing as a vocational subject in school, and asked — adjusting his glasses — how typing was useful in life.

Jeste smiled. “Typing helps us write good letters, draft essays, prepare certificates. Even write novels, if we wish.”
Sharma chuckled and nodded. “Okay, you may go.”
By evening, his name was on the list.

Outside the principal’s office, a student from the 1975 batch tried to pull a prank. Jeste’s father was watching from a distance. The prank did not succeed.

The Khadi and the Train Floor

There were four of them from Mumbai in the 1977 batch: Suchitra Pandit, Ravindra Bhatnagar, Sunil Gandhi, and Jeste. During vacations, they travelled home together in unreserved compartments, spreading pages of The Times of India on the floor to sleep. The carriage smelled of biscuits and metal and the particular tiredness of long-distance trains. They talked through the nights and arrived in Mumbai rumpled and happy.
Khadi was, for Jeste, never an imposition. He had always liked it. He bought finely woven khadi from the well-regarded shop in Mumbai’s Fort area; later, he moved to khadi silk, and the tailors at the shop would smile at the quality of fabric he brought in. In Sevagram, where the available khadi was coarser — the Wardha variety was plain and functional — he stood out as the Mumbaikar who wore the fabric with something approaching elegance. His Bombay counterparts, he noted, brought refined khadi from the city; students from vernacular-medium schools across Maharashtra arrived in the plainer variety and struggled initially to keep up with English-language lectures. These differences eroded over months, as they always did in Sevagram, ground down by shared meals and shared examinations and the levelling effect of a place that did not much care where you had come from.

What the Village Gave the City Boy

The aloo parathas of the first few hostel mornings became, in memory, a kind of benchmark — food that tasted as good as anything he had eaten in Mumbai, precisely because he had not expected it. The mess food that followed was less romantic. They prayed for home cooking. They ate what was available.

The Ganesh Festival. The village postings. The particular intimacy of a small campus where teachers knew students by name. The first time he saw a patient in the wards, and understood that the body before him was a life, not a case study. These accumulated slowly, without drama, into something that reshaped how he understood medicine.

Dr. Sandeep Jeste completed his MBBS at MGIMS Sevagram and stayed on at his alma mater to pursue postgraduate training in obstetrics and gynaecology. Under the guidance of Dr. Shakuntala Chhabra, he worked on a thesis that explored how antepartum perception of fetal kick counts could be used to monitor fetal wellbeing. His co-residents during those years included Swaraj Chowdhry and Suchitra Pandit. He now lives in Mumbai. His younger brother, Milind, joined MGIMS in the 1982 batch; he passed away in May 2025.