The day Manish Kothari walked into the MGIMS notice board area and found his name listed as a fee defaulter, printed in plain black ink for the batch to read, the world did not end. It simply became more precise. He had no money for the examination fees. His father, a schoolteacher who earned ₹175 a month, had sent ₹150 — an act of sacrifice that left nothing spare. There was no way to pay without help, and the only person he knew well enough to ask was Nalin Chaudhary.

Nalin paid without discussion. He did not mention it again. The following morning he said, “Come on, let’s go for tea,” and the matter was closed. Years later, Krishna Mohan has said that this was the kind of grace that carried him through Sevagram — the quiet kindness of people who noticed what was needed and provided it without the theatre of generosity.

He was born on 8 August 1959 in Baireddypalle, a village in Chittoor district that stood at the last edge of human settlement before the Seshachalam forest began. The population was barely a thousand. His father Subramanyam taught science at a high school in Narapalli. There was no doctor in the village, no person in the family who had ever practiced medicine, no particular reason to imagine that the son of a schoolteacher in a remote Telugu district would one day be performing 75,000 gastrointestinal endoscopies in Hyderabad.

The village had one bus. It arrived at eleven each morning carrying newspapers — three or four Telugu dailies, passed from hand to hand until evening, their pages soft with use. On Wednesday nights, the Panchayat’s radio drew the entire neighbourhood: Binaca Geet Mala, Ameen Sayani’s warm voice, the crackle of film songs that came to feel like the sound of the world beyond the forest. He listened to everything. He absorbed everything. He had a near-photographic memory and held the pen in a peculiar fashion — tilted and reversed, as though writing backwards — a quirk that became his signature across five years of MBBS, noticed by seniors and teachers alike.

The School That Burned

In 1971, when he was in the seventh standard, the school building caught fire and reduced itself to ash. For months, the class met under trees. When it rained, there was no school. The replacement was a temple: twenty children behind the deity, ten in the kitchen, a single teacher explaining physics and chemistry by lamplight on a stone floor. He studied like this for four years. His father, watching, pushed him into mathematics — not because the boy wanted it, but because fathers of that generation did not often ask what boys wanted. Composite mathematics. He struggled. He scored 69 percent. He left it and chose biology.

At a junior college fifteen kilometres away, he met Nagendra, a boy from Vijayawada who became his first serious mentor. Nagendra taught him how to frame answers in English, how to carry himself in conversation, how to read a question for what it was actually asking. He topped the school examinations — unheard of for a biology student, since toppers were always from the mathematics stream. For the first time, he believed he could become a doctor.

The medical entrance examinations crushed that belief twice. Each failure was a withdrawal into silence, which was the only response his circumstances afforded. His mother, watching, wrote to her sister in Sevagram. Her husband was Dr. B.C. Harinath, who had returned from the United States with a PhD in Biochemistry and joined MGIMS as head of the department in 1970. He summoned his wife’s nephew to Sevagram.

The date was 16 September 1979. Dr. Harinath’s son Ashok was having a birthday. Before Krishna Mohan could set down his iron trunk, he was confronted: “Unless you work day and night, you will never become a doctor. If you cannot slog, forget medicine altogether. Go prepare for an M.Sc. in Organic Chemistry.” There was no welcome, no adjustment period. Only the productive shock of someone who will not allow you the luxury of settling into your own inadequacy.

The Laboratory and the Australian Woman

He began on 1 October 1979 as an assistant to the laboratory technician in Dr. Harinath’s department. He washed petri dishes, arranged ELISA trays, prepared charts for postgraduate students. The department worked on filariasis. He worked in the evenings on the entrance examination, page by page, night after night, while the rest of the campus slept.

A watch arrived one morning — purchased by Dr. Harinath and handed over not as a gift but as the removal of an excuse. “You said you had no watch. Now you do. Be on time.” This was the discipline. It was not unkind. It was the opposite of unkind.

Six weeks before the 1980 PMT, Dr. Harinath sent him to Delhi, arranging a stay at the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi. The Gandhian Thought paper was the decisive one, and Krishna Mohan’s Telugu-inflected English was still not fluent enough to write well under examination pressure. At the Nidhi, he met an Australian woman — a Gandhian — who took it upon herself, over dinner each night, to ask him what he had read about Gandhi that day, to correct his grammar, to polish his expression, to teach him how an answer built itself into a shape that an examiner would follow. Night after night, she worked on him with the patient intensity of someone who has found a purpose.

He scored high enough to rank 21st. He could have taken a seat under the non-Maharashtra rural quota. Dr. Harinath would not allow it. “One more boy or girl from a small village could become a doctor if you leave that seat,” he said. Krishna Mohan took admission on general merit.

Sevagram and What It Gave

He walked into the orientation camp carrying the particular anxiety of a person who has never crossed his district’s borders, who does not speak the language of most of the people around him, and who knows that the gap between his preparation and theirs is wide enough to fall into.

Jayant Vagha, from Nagpur, extended friendship immediately. Mudit Kumar, whose mother spoke Telugu, provided warmth. Vinaya Soman, Debjyoti Malakar, Nalin Chaudhary, and Ramani formed the circle that sustained him. He borrowed books, accepted money for fees without embarrassment, wore the same four shirts and four trousers through five years of MBBS, managed on breakfast of milk and bananas that cost less than two rupees daily. The library was his refuge: he read from nine in the morning until nine at night, making notes in the cramped handwriting that circulated among batchmates who copied them faithfully and scored well on the contents.

The examinations rewarded this. First MBBS: second in the batch. A gold medal in Biochemistry. First rank in Forensic Medicine, ENT, Ophthalmology. By the final year, the boy who had arrived unable to speak Hindi or manage a full sentence in English was, without announcement, near the top of his class.

His MD examination in Medicine began in failure — nerves overwhelmed competence in the practical, the words came too fast, the clarity dissolved under the examiners’ gaze — and he failed. The same pair of examiners returned six months later. He passed without difficulty. One of them, he was later told, had expressed regret about the earlier verdict.

In 1992, he married Vasundara, who had completed her MBBS from Kurnool Medical College and wanted, in a husband, someone who would refuse dowry, pursue learning without stopping, and believe that medicine was work to be done seriously for the rest of a life.

Kuwait, Cancer, and the Work That Continues

After MD, after years at Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad, after DM in Gastroenterology from Osmania Medical College, after thirteen years at University Hospital in Kuwait, he came back to India in 2011. Since 2016, he has been at Basavatarakam Indo American Cancer Hospital and Research Institute in Hyderabad. In the past decade, he has managed more than 75,000 cases, the majority of them gastrointestinal cancers. He has trained doctors, contributed to oncology practice, and built a career of the scale that might have seemed implausible to the boy in that village where the school had burned down.

He still holds the pen wrong. Seniors noticed it in 1980. His patients’ families notice it now. He has never bothered to correct it. The words come out clearly enough regardless of the angle of the hand that writes them.

Dr. M.C. Krishna Mohan completed his MD in Medicine from MGIMS, Sevagram, and his DM in Gastroenterology from Osmania Medical College, Hyderabad. He worked at the Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences and at University Hospital, Kuwait, before joining Basavatarakam Indo American Cancer Hospital and Research Institute in Hyderabad in 2016. He lives and practises in Hyderabad.