Telegram at the Cinema Hall

It was a cold December night in 1978. Sevagram had already shut itself into silence, but the Sevagram Lecture theatre was abuzz with activity. A Raj Kumar film “Barsat” was running. My friends and I were thoroughly enjoying the movie. Those days, there used to be a movie Club at MGIMS, which used to screen movies. I do not know whether that tradition is still continuing! Halfway through the movie, a postman entered the hall with a khaki bag slung across his shoulder. He walked straight to me, whispering in the usher’s ear.

“Telegram for you,” he said, extending the thin yellow slip.

I unfolded it under the flickering beam of the projector. The words swam before my eyes:

“Confirmed admission in AIIMS Orthopedics. Join by 1st December 1979.”

My heart skipped. AIIMS. Orthopedics. My dream was suddenly real. I ran out of the theatre, my friends tumbling behind me.

“Vaishwanar! I need your scooter,” I blurted out as soon as we reached the hostel.

Pradeep Vaishwanar, ever generous, handed over his keys. His blue scooter was one of the only two in our class. Rajkumar Rathi owned the other. That night, Pradeep Ahluwalia drove while I sat pillion, clutching the telegram as though it were a passport to another world. We sped down the empty roads to Nagpur, where my uncle lived. The next day I was on my first-ever flight to Delhi, nervous yet ecstatic, heading to join AIIMS as a postgraduate in Orthopedics.

That night in Wardha marked the turning point of my life. But to understand how a boy from Jalandhar reached that moment, you must walk with me back to the early 1970s—to dusty railway platforms, telegrams, khadi kurtas, and the sleepy lanes of Sevagram.

A Telegram That Changed Everything

I was born on 30 May 1955 in Mukerian,  a small town in District Hoshiarpur, where my father Shri Hari Ram Gautam was posted at that time. My father was a police inspector in the Punjab Police. We moved often, but I mostly grew up in Jalandhar. After finishing at Government High School, I joined DAV College, Jalandhar, for my pre-medical studies.

My dream was crystal clear: admission to AIIMS, Delhi. Those days, there was a common entrance exam for AIIMS, BHU, and MGIMS. I traveled from Jalandhar to Delhi and stayed at my uncle’s house to appear for the exam at a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Lodhi Estate.

Weeks later, life had almost returned to normal when a telegram arrived: “Report for interview at Sevagram.”

Sevagram? I had never heard of the place. My father and I packed our bags and boarded the GT Express from Delhi. In those days, railway reservations were a matter of fate. The station master at Jalandhar had to telegram New Delhi for onward booking. When we reached New Delhi at 2:30 in the afternoon, we rushed upstairs to the reservation office. The clerk ran his finger down a frayed register while anxious students like me held their breath. Finally, with a grunt, he nodded. “Confirmed.”

That single word opened the path to Sevagram.

Nagpur to Wardha: First Glimpse of Gandhi’s Legacy

My maternal uncle was a railway contractor in Nagpur. We spent the night at his house before taking a bus to Wardha. Wardha was a small town, unhurried, and utterly unlike Jalandhar or Delhi. My father and I stayed with a local acquaintance.

The interview at MGIMS is a blur in my memory. I vaguely remember Prof. I.D. Singh and Dr. Sushila Nayar on the panel. What I said, I cannot recall—probably the usual clichés every medical aspirant mouthed. Yet, they smiled and nodded. A few days later, I was in.

Around the same time, another telegram arrived: I had also been selected for BHU. I was torn between the two. My father chuckled, “Banaras is famous for बनारसी ठग and for strikes. Better you stay close to your uncle in Nagpur. At least you’ll have a guardian there.” His half-joking advice tipped the scales. Sevagram it was.

Sevagram in the 1970s

Stepping into MGIMS was stepping into another era. The air smelled of earth after rain, mingled with smoke from cow-dung cakes used as fuel. The hostel rooms were simple—cement floors, iron cots, and a ceiling fan that groaned louder than it cooled.

Mornings began with the clang of a bell. We trudged to Gandhi’s ashram for prayers, the sound of bhajans rising with the first light. Rows of us in khadi kurtas sat cross-legged, our voices hesitant at first, then steady.

The mess, however, was a shock. For a Punjabi boy used to chana and urad dal, the thin yellow toor dal tasted alien. I pushed my plate away the first few days. “This is water, not dal,” I complained to Ravinder Ahluwalia, my first friend from Jalandhar.

He laughed. “Give it time. Even water here has its own flavor.”

Slowly, my tongue adapted. Toor dal became as familiar as the dust in Sevagram’s lanes.

Nights were a different adventure. Power cuts were frequent. We lit kerosene lamps, their smoke stinging our eyes. Fireflies glowed outside, and sometimes a snake slithered past the hostel verandah, sending us scurrying onto cots.

At Gandhi’s ashram, where our fresh batch of sixty had gathered, I found my first friend—Ravinder Ahluwalia from Jalandhar. Soon, the circle widened to include Ranbir Singh Chiller, Hardeep Singh Harneja, Shyamchand Anand, Satyaprakash Maheshwari, Avinash Shankar, and Baij Nath Gupta. Together, we endured the hostel food, braved the summer heat, and savored the small joys of student life. Tuesdays were special, for on that day Ranbir Singh Chiller—a sturdy lad from Haryana and a devout Hanuman bhakt—would share with every hosteller the sweets he offered as prasad to Bajrangbali.

Friendships blossomed in those corridors—Hardeep Singh Harneja with his booming laugh, Shyamchand Anand with his endless jokes, and Baij Nath Gupta, who always carried an extra book. We studied late into the night, sometimes on the terrace, the stars above brighter than any electric bulb.

Hostel conversations were full of drama:
“Exams will kill us before disease kills patients,” someone groaned.
“And toor dal will finish us off before exams do,” another added.

We burst into laughter, our worries dissolving for the night.

The Skeleton in a Jute Bag

During my first MBBS days, there was a village boy who would occasionally appear at our hostel gates, a worn jute bag slung across his shoulder. At first glance, it looked like he was carrying firewood or old books. But when he untied the knot and pulled the bag open, we froze. Inside were bones—real human bones, white and brittle, rattling like loose coins.

I bought one such skeleton from him. It cost a few rupees then, nothing compared to the treasure it was for a medical student. I carried the skeleton back to my room, laid it carefully on the iron cot, and began my private lessons in osteology.

When vacations came, I decided to take it home. I wrapped the bones neatly, placed them back in the jute bag, and boarded the GT Express. As the train rattled out of Wardha, I sat stiffly, the bag at my feet. What if someone asked what was inside? What if the police checked? I can laugh now, but back then, every time the ticket collector passed, I felt a shiver. Today, the very thought is unimaginable. Carrying a human skeleton on a passenger train would have landed me in jail for illegal trafficking. But in the 1970s, it was just another eccentric part of medical student life.

The GT Express and Kishore Kumar

Our hostel window opened to the open fields beyond which the railway line ran. From there, we often saw the GT Express slicing across the landscape, its coaches glinting in the sun, its whistle floating in the hot Wardha air. For us, it was more than a train—it was a symbol of home. Each time it passed, I thought of journeys back to Punjab during vacations, of familiar faces waiting at the platform. For those trips, we relied on railway concession forms, duly signed by our Principal, Dr. M. L. Sharma.

In 1974, Kishore Kumar’s song from the movie Dost had become a national anthem of sorts. The moment we spotted the GT Express racing towards Nagpur, someone would begin humming:

“Gaadi bula rahi hai, seeti baja rahi hai… Chalna hi zindagi hai, chalti hi ja rahi hai.”

The words wrapped themselves around our lives. We were young, uncertain, always moving—towards exams, towards careers, towards futures we could barely imagine. Watching the train, with Kishore’s voice echoing in our minds, we felt both the ache of leaving and the thrill of going somewhere new. For me, that whistle of the GT Express remains the soundtrack of my Sevagram years.

Teachers Who Shaped Us

I was a serious student, more inclined to books than stage. Apart from editing the English section of Sushrut—the college magazine—I stayed away from cultural activities. My scholarship from the National Level Science Talent Search (₹150 a month) helped sustain me, supplemented by my elder brother who was an Army officer.

I excelled in studies, winning gold medals in Pathology and Surgery, topping in the second MBBS, and securing second place in Preventive and Social Medicine. But what remains etched in memory are the teachers:

Dr. R.V. Agrawal with his kindness, projecting histopathology slides and describing the cytoplasm as though it were a living story.

Drs. S.K. and Chanchal Dhawan, the handsome ophthalmology duo from Chandigarh, who seemed straight out of a film magazine.

Dr. Ravinder Narang, with his thick moustaches, nicknamed Thanedaar by us.

Dr. Karandikar tore through Dawn’s Ophthalmology at such speed that words blurred into each other. We strained to keep pace, but before one sentence could land, the next had already taken flight. His lips barely paused, the corners glistening with saliva that gathered faster than he could swallow.

And then there was Dr. S.P. Nigam, head of Medicine. Short, sharp, his English flawless. One monsoon, when a student pleaded absence due to heavy rains, he quipped, “This is not the first time India has had a heavy monsoon.” We laughed nervously, but his point stayed.

Their quirks and brilliance made Sevagram unforgettable.

Why Orthopedics?

I loved Medicine—the thrill of a murmur, the crackle in the lungs, the elegance of neurology. Yet its limits were stark. Patients with chronic illness suffered, endured, and eventually succumbed; whatever relief we offered was fleeting.

Orthopedics, by contrast, promised permanence—a bone set, a limb straightened, a life restored. It stood apart, untouched by the competition of quacks. That clarity pulled me strongly, though not without hesitation. I often worried: if I left Medicine, would I forever lose the chance to prescribe Digoxin—that most fascinating of drugs?

Leaving Sevagram

By late 1979, MGIMS still lacked postgraduate programs. Like many classmates, I sat for multiple entrance exams. Then came the telegram at the cinema hall—the one that changed everything.

I left in a rush, barely remembering if I paid hostel dues or returned my key. Life swept me away—to AIIMS, then PGI Chandigarh, then to MAMC Delhi where I spent my career, with a fellowship in Stanford in between. I became HOD of Orthopaedics at MAMC, MS LNJP chaired selection committees, served on AIIMS Rajkot’s governing body.

But Sevagram remained a knot in my heart—unfinished, unacknowledged.

But through all these years, one guilt gnawed at me: I had left Sevagram abruptly. I could not even recall if I had cleared my hostel and mess dues, or returned my room key to the warden. Sevagram had been my home for five and a half years, and I had walked away without a goodbye.

Return After Four Decades

In 2022, forty-three years later, I returned as an examiner. Walking through the old hostel, I paused at the mess. The smell of toor dal seemed to rise from the walls. In the corridors, I could almost hear the laughter of my friends, the buzz of the ceiling fan, the thud of books on iron tables.

I stood there quietly, remembering the boy who once carried a telegram in his pocket, not knowing where it would lead him. Sevagram had given me discipline, friendships, and the spirit to walk tall. For that, I remain forever indebted.