There is a moment that Haresh Sidhwa returns to when he thinks about the doctor he became. He is a resident in Medicine at MGIMS, sometime in the mid-1980s. His head of department, Dr. O.P. Gupta, looks at him and says, simply: “Haresh, you’ve exhausted your leaves. If you go to Goa, your house job will be incomplete. This chance won’t come again.”

Haresh had booked tickets. The hotel was paid for. His friends were waiting.

He cancelled the trip. They teased him mercilessly. But that evening, sitting in the ward with a chart in his hand, he understood that the decision had just saved his career. The Medicine seat that might have slipped to a classmate came to him instead. A Goa holiday that he did not take turned out to be the hinge on which everything turned.

He has thought about this kind of thing a great deal — the small, contingent moments on which a life pivots. Sevagram produced a surprising number of them.

Steel City to Wardha

He was born on 1 March 1961 in Ulhasnagar, near Kalyan. His father was an electrical engineer who had joined Tata Steel in Jamshedpur just two months after Haresh’s birth. The family stayed there until his father’s retirement in 1992. His mother was a homemaker, the quiet, reliable force behind the household. He had a younger brother, Sanjay, who would one day become a doctor too. His story, when it came, would not be a happy one.

Haresh studied at Loyola School, Jamshedpur, from Class One to Ten — a school that was strict about discipline, English, and expression. Father O’Connor, the principal, would thunder in class: “Don’t just write, write well!” Dickens and Shakespeare were on the syllabus. Until Class Seven, the Bible was a regular subject. Those early lessons embedded themselves. By the time Haresh sat for medical entrance exams, he could produce long essay-type answers in proper English, structuring thought the way the Loyola masters had taught him. In Sevagram, this served him well — especially for the Gandhian thought paper, which rewarded people who could argue with some elegance.

Jaideep Laxman, who would become his 1979 batchmate, was a junior at Loyola. Their paths had been crossing for years without either of them knowing it fully.

After school, Haresh moved to Nagpur for his 10+2 at SFS College — Hislop had no hostel — and for BSc Part I. Jaideep was living barely half a kilometre away, and they became study partners. Because Haresh had studied in Jamshedpur, he was classified as non-Maharashtra, which closed the doors of GMC and most state colleges. The national colleges — AIIMS, BHU, JIPMER, Pondicherry — were theoretically possible but geographically distant. He fixed his hopes on MGIMS and waited.

The telegram confirming admission arrived. His heart leapt.

Orientation and the First Lessons

The orientation fortnight in Gandhi’s ashram was unlike anything Haresh had experienced. At Loyola, he had already been trained in discipline. Khadi felt no burden. The excitement of finally being in a medical college made everything else seem small.

What the camp gave him, more than the formal instruction in Gandhian thought, was the first long look at his classmates. Some had come from poor villages, their English shaky, their money thin. Narayan Marathe and Ashok Kamble, in particular, carried the full weight of difficult beginnings on their backs. Within days, Haresh felt the particular texture of Sevagram’s social world — a place where convent-educated boys and girls from Bombay shared benches and dining halls with first-generation students from Vidarbha’s smaller towns. The campus had a way of compressing these distances, if not quite eliminating them.

He moved into Boys’ Hostel Block A, first floor. His neighbours were Rajiv Chatterjee, Bharat Bhushan Sharma, Jaideep Laxman, Subodh Mohan, Rajender Singh Nandal, and Sunil Jain. Ragging was mild — a little leg-pulling from seniors like Rupak Datta and Malhotra, but mostly affectionate. Tarvinder Singh Oberoi, from the 1976 batch, discovered they had studied at the same Nagpur college and took particular care of him.

Friendships settled into their shapes: Subodh Mohan, Rajendra Nathani, Bharat Bhushan Sharma, Vimal Dubey, Daljit Singh Sandhu, and Haresh at the centre of a circle that held throughout. His bond with Rajiv Chatterjee grew especially close — Rajiv’s father was a professor of PSM at MGIMS, his sister Gopa three years senior. She tied rakhi on Haresh’s wrist and has continued the ritual for forty-five years.

Cricket and a Slip Fielder’s Instincts

Life was not only medicine. Haresh played cricket as a right-hand batsman and slip fielder, his reflexes a product of years of Loyola sports. He played alongside Bharat Sharma, Girish Muzumdar, and others, under the coaching of Narender Kapathia, who drilled a strategic philosophy into them: “Never let the field dictate your play. Make the field move for you.”

He also acted in an English play directed by Sunil Takiar, and travelled to GMC Nagpur for inter-college competitions. His years in Sevagram had, as Sevagram tended to produce, an extraordinary social texture — friends from a dozen states, cricket debates into the night, the particular camaraderie of people thrown together with no shared history except the common ordeal of examinations.

Some classmates lost steam. Brilliant students who had worked fiercely for admission drifted, overwhelmed or quietly burnt out, and stumbled through exams. Sevagram tested resilience as methodically as it tested medicine.

The House Job That Almost Wasn’t

After MBBS, Haresh chose Paediatrics as his house posting — his first love. Then the department’s faculty left, almost simultaneously: Dr. B.D. Bhatia, Dr. Anand Dubey, and Dr. N.M. Mathur departed, leaving only Mrs. Chaturvedi. The seat shrank to one and went to Nisha Shah. Haresh shifted to Medicine.

Which brought him to that evening when Dr. Gupta told him not to go to Goa.

He stayed. The Medicine seat came. He did his MD alongside Anil Ballani, Arvind Ghongane, and Subodh Mohan. His thesis on antidepressants and irritable bowel syndrome was supervised by Dr. A.P. Jain. He worked under giants: Dr. Gupta’s patience, Dr. Jain’s thoroughness, Dr. Ulhas Jajoo’s sharp eye, Dr. S.P. Kalantri’s insistence on clinical reasoning. The wards were his university in the truest sense.

Loss and Grief

In 1988, tragedy arrived without warning. His younger brother Sanjay, fresh from completing his MBBS examinations at Maulana Azad Medical College, died in a road accident. He was twenty-three. Their parents never fully recovered. Haresh carried the grief in the quiet way of someone who has decided that work is both tribute and therapy.

When he opened his private clinic in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, on 13 December 1993, he named it Sanjay Clinic. It is still the same name.

Thirty-Two Years in One Chair

For thirty-two years, he has sat in the same chair in Vasant Kunj, listening to patients. He has built his practice on what Sevagram’s Medicine department taught him: minimal tests, careful listening, a doctor’s hand on the pulse, a stethoscope on the chest, a clinical diagnosis reached the old way.

In an era of CT scans and high-end laboratory panels, he still trusts the old methods. Sevagram trained him to be patient-friendly, to avoid over-investigation, to use medicine with restraint. That discipline has not left him.

He married Rajani in 1990, a paediatrician from JN Medical College, Ajmer, who completed her postgraduation later. Their elder son Jatin is a dermatologist. Their younger son Divyanshu completed his MD in Medicine and is now training in endocrinology.

When MGIMS friends gather — and they do, in WhatsApp threads and occasional reunions — something particular happens that their respective wives have noticed for years. “We never saw such camaraderie in our colleges,” they say. The friendships forged in Sevagram’s compact, intense world have a quality that is difficult to explain and apparently impossible to dilute.

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Dr. Haresh Sidhwa completed his MBBS and MD in Internal Medicine from MGIMS Sevagram. He opened Sanjay Clinic in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, in December 1993, named in memory of his younger brother. He has practised clinical medicine there for more than thirty years, relying on the bedside methods his Sevagram teachers instilled.