The Turning in PGI’s Corridors

He was a schoolboy in New Delhi when his sister fell ill and the family travelled to PGI Chandigarh for treatment. He was perhaps twelve or thirteen, and the visit was not, in the usual sense, a memorable one — an unwell sibling, anxious parents, the institutional smell and fluorescent light of a teaching hospital. But he remembers walking through PGI’s corridors, watching doctors move with quiet urgency, and feeling something clarify inside him. Not ambition exactly. Something quieter: recognition.

He has never been able to describe it more precisely than that. He saw the doctors and knew, in the particular way that children sometimes know things before they can explain them, that this was what he wanted to do.

Delhi to Sevagram

Varinder Singh Bedi was born and raised in New Delhi, his father Harbhajan Singh Bedi an officer in the Indian Air Force, his mother Harsurinder Kaur a homemaker. He attended school entirely in Delhi — primary, secondary, higher secondary — and after his 12th briefly pursued a BSc in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, sitting simultaneously for entrance examinations at AIIMS, Delhi, and MGIMS.

A friend told him about MGIMS. He was drawn not only to the academic reputation but to the particularity of the place — a medical college built on Gandhian principles, located not in a city but in a village. He read everything he could find about Gandhi before the entrance examination: the autobiography, the essays, whatever was available in Delhi. He appeared for the exam at the Delhi centre and was called for interview.

Two days before the interview, he and his uncle travelled to Sevagram. They stayed at the Civil Guest House near the State Transport bus stand. The next morning, Varinder walked out into a landscape that felt alien — rustic, humid, radically different from the urban pace of the capital he had never properly left.

Sevagram was a village. Dusty lanes, a different diet, Marathi conversations he could not follow. At first glance, it seemed impossible that this was the place where he would spend years of his life. And then, slowly, over that first morning, something shifted — the same shift others had described, the same quiet that descended on people in Sevagram and eventually began to feel less like absence than presence.

The Interview and the Wait

He does not remember the interview clearly. The swirl of uncertainty. A panel of faces. Questions he cannot now reconstruct. He walked out unsure.

The letter arrived. He was in.

Orientation

The camp at Gandhi Ashram was the formal beginning. Early morning prayers before sunrise. Simple communal meals. Shramdan in the ashram’s fields and grounds. Sessions on ethics, service, and the Gandhian vision of what a doctor should be. Students from different states, different languages, different assumptions about what the next five years would look like — all of them beginning to adjust, simultaneously, to a place that asked more of them than competence.

He was allotted a room in E Block, Boys’ Hostel. The language barrier was real — Marathi was incomprehensible, and Hindi helped only partially in a campus where the local staff and many teachers spoke Marathi as their first language. But his batchmates from across India helped him. The friendships formed in those early weeks, provisional and slightly desperate, became the durable ones.

The Village and the Ward

The community education programme sent each batch to an adopted village. His batch went to Karanji Kaji, a small settlement that had no electricity and roads that became difficult after rain. They went door to door, barefoot sometimes, taking health histories, identifying disease patterns, watching the distance between medicine as it was taught in classrooms and medicine as it was needed in the world.

These visits were, in retrospect, the education that no lecture hall could have provided. He learnt, before he could articulate it, that diagnosis required listening before it required instruments; that a patient’s reluctance to return for follow-up was not a failure of compliance but a consequence of cost, distance, and the competing demands of a life lived on thin margins.

The first delivery he witnessed. The first life he lost. These memories remain sharp in a way that examination questions do not.

Vascular Surgery and the Scalpel That Carries Sevagram

He became a vascular surgeon. The precision and control that surgery demanded — the steadiness of hand, the clarity of judgment under pressure, the habit of thinking three steps ahead — were qualities that MGIMS had cultivated not through surgical training alone but through the entire texture of life in that village. The early mornings, the discipline, the village postings, the expectation that a doctor’s responsibility did not end when the ward round did.

Every time he holds a scalpel, he says, he carries with him the values of Sevagram. It is the kind of statement that can sound like performance but in his case clearly is not. He means it precisely: that the habits formed in that village — of humility, simplicity, and the understanding of service as something that precedes technique — are present in the operating theatre with him, in the same way that a craftsman carries the memory of early instruction even at the height of his competence.

The boy from Delhi who walked into Sevagram feeling it was impossible that this could be his place walks out, in memory, as someone who had found the place that made him.

Dr. Varinder Singh Bedi completed his MBBS at MGIMS Sevagram, pursued surgical training, and became a vascular surgeon. He lives and practises in India. He still remembers the early morning chill of Gandhi Ashram, the quiet pride of khadi, and the corridors of PGI Chandigarh — where, as a schoolboy watching doctors move with purpose, he first understood what he wanted to do.