The interview room hummed with authority.

At the centre sat Dr. Sushila Nayar — physician, public health champion, and the heartbeat of MGIMS. Beside her sat Maharashtra’s Public Health Minister, Mrs. Pratibha Patil, long before the nation would know her as its first woman President.

Dr. Nayar asked the first question. Did he do social service? Yes — every fortnight his father took them to a nearby village. They volunteered and helped however they could. She nodded, her gaze steady.

Then Mrs. Patil leaned forward. Was he interested in sports?

Yes. He played cricket.

She narrowed her eyes with curiosity. “How many runs did Gundappa Viswanath score in his debut Test?”

Santosh Gupta did not hesitate. “Zero and 137, Madam. Kanpur Test against Australia. Last year.”

A smile flickered across her face. She did not check the newspaper. She did not need to.

“You may go,” she said.

He walked out, his heartbeat louder than his footsteps.

Days later, the letter arrived: he had been selected. Three marks had once kept him out of a medical college. In Sevagram, they found him through a batsman’s silken wrists and a cricket score recalled without flinching. Strange as it sounds, a boy from Gondia found his way into MGIMS because of a moment of elegance at the Kanpur Test.

That, too, is the quiet magic of second chances.

The Three Marks

He was born on 5 December 1950 in Gondia, the eldest of six — three brothers, three sisters — growing up in a bustling joint family. His father, Gokul Prasad, taught at a middle school. His mother, Shyama Devi, anchored the home, her frail heart quietly foreshadowing a fragility that would mark her life.

In 1968, he missed admission to Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur — by just three marks. He buried his disappointment and enrolled in a B.Sc. programme at Dhote Bandhu Science College, Gondia, with no intention of giving up.

Two years later, fate knocked again. Banaras Hindu University announced the Pre-Medical Test for MGIMS, Sevagram. He had heard only fragments about MGIMS — how it blended modern medicine with Gandhian values, how it sat in the village where Gandhi had lived, how the selection favoured character as much as marks. That was enough. He registered without hesitation, cleared the written test, and was called for interview in Wardha.

He did not know then that those few minutes in the interview room — specifically, those few seconds when Pratibha Patil asked about Gundappa Viswanath — would stay with him for the rest of his life.

A Batch Unlike Any Before

The 1970 batch arrived at Sevagram with a particular demographic character that shaped its texture from the first week.

Of sixty students, thirteen came from Delhi, four each from Haryana and Punjab, six from Uttar Pradesh — most from Jhansi. A full third of the batch traced its roots to Delhi, Punjab, and Haryana. The rest came from across Maharashtra, with a scattering from other states.

The differences showed early and were more than geographical. There was a theatrical contrast between the students from Punjab-Haryana-Delhi and those from Maharashtra — in the way they dressed, the sharply tailored trousers and bright dupattas against the modest cottons of the Vidarbha plains; in the way they spoke, Punjabi’s rolling rhythm and Delhi’s clipped Hindi against the softer, singsong Marathi; in the food they craved, parathas dripping with ghee versus poha light as air, rajma-chawal steaming against humble varan-bhaat.

Even their mannerisms bore the stamp of origin. Some were louder, quicker to laugh and argue; others quieter, with a politeness that wrapped every sentence. In those first months, the lines were sharp enough to observe in the hostel mess, in the lecture halls, and on the playing fields.

Sevagram’s genius — and it was a genuine institutional genius — was that it did not try to erase these differences. It created conditions in which the differences became, over time, the material of friendship rather than division.

What Sevagram Was

He arrived to find a campus that was small, intimate, and almost familial. There were more ideals than equipment, and the ideals were not decorative — they were operational. The morning prayers, the khadi, the shramdan, the expectation that students would clean their own spaces and contribute to the community around them — these were not impositions. They were the structure of daily life, and daily life, conducted in a particular structure long enough, shapes the person conducting it.

He was trained in the understanding that a good diagnosis begins with asking good questions and a diligent bedside examination — that history-taking was not a formality before the tests but the most important clinical act of all. The teachers who delivered this understanding were not famous. They were dedicated and disciplined and present, in the way that presence — sustained, consistent, personally invested — produces more than brilliance.

He formed friendships in the Karva Group — a loose circle of classmates who called themselves a caravan, who studied together and argued and supported each other through the years of MBBS. In a campus with no other entertainment and no vehicles, the friendships formed of necessity became the friendships of choice.

After Sevagram

He completed his MBBS and went on to build a medical career in Maharashtra, contributing to clinical practice and eventually to the broader public health architecture of the state. The details of those years — postings, institutions, specialities accumulated — are the long work of a life in medicine, less dramatic than the interview room but more substantial.

What he carries from Sevagram is the understanding that medicine is not only what happens in the clinic. It is also what happens in the structure of a day — the rhythm of early rising, the attention to the person before you, the willingness to stay with a difficult question until you have answered it correctly. These were not things Sevagram taught in lectures. They were things it taught by being the kind of place it was.

He thinks of Gundappa Viswanath, who did not just win Test matches but won hearts. His debut innings of zero and 137 at Kanpur may have sealed his place in Indian cricket. It also, in one of the archive’s most charming coincidences, opened a door for a boy from Gondia who had been kept out of medicine by three marks and was let back in by a question in an interview room in Wardha, answered without pause, with the confidence of someone who has loved cricket long enough to know the scores by heart.

The silken wrists. The quiet confidence. The zero before the 137.

That, too, was a kind of lesson.

Dr. Santosh Gupta completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the second batch of 1970. He was born in Gondia, Maharashtra, the eldest of six children. He missed admission to GMC Nagpur by three marks in 1968 before finding his way to Sevagram two years later. He lives in Wardha.