Pre-MGIMS: A Childhood of Distance and Determination

She was born in January 1961 in a village that sat on the Karnataka–Maharashtra border, claimed by both states and served adequately by neither. Her father was the first engineer the village had produced. Her mother had spent her days in the unbroken labour of a rural household — grinding jowar before dawn, fetching water, tending the farm, managing everything that a life without infrastructure requires — and had understood, with the particular clarity of someone who has had no choices, that her daughter must have some.

“Study,” she had said, not as encouragement but as instruction. “Be free from this.”

The family moved to remote mining towns when Neena was still small, and the schools in those places were inadequate. Her parents sent her to St. Joseph’s School in Kamptee, which had a hostel, because it was the best option available and proximity was not a criterion they could afford.

She was six years old. On her first evening, she was left in the playground while the other girls were away. She climbed to the top of a slide and sat there, small and alone, looking at a world that had no familiar coordinates. She did not cry. She does not know, even now, exactly why she did not cry. She stayed on the slide until someone came.

That early experience of managing displacement without collapse is one she has returned to in her account of herself — not as a formative wound but as the first evidence of a quality she would need repeatedly. The boarding school years taught her to adapt quickly, to find pleasure in the company of strangers, to become at home in institutions. She moved between schools as her father’s postings dictated — Kamptee, Bishop Cotton in Nagpur, Saraswati Vidyalaya — each transfer requiring the same recalibration she had first performed at six years old on a playground slide.

For most of school, Neena was a bright student. But in Class XII, poor choices and the confusions of adolescence pulled her down. Her marks suffered. Medical admission seemed out of reach.

Her father, however, refused to surrender. She appeared for several entrance examinations and failed, including at Sevagram. She joined BSc, but decided she would make one more attempt. This time she prepared only for the PMT examination for MGIMS.

The telegram arrived after a difficult few weeks. An anaphylactic reaction to Septran had left her drowsy for days. She sat the MGIMS entrance examination with Avil still in her system. So worried was her father that he even asked the invigilator to wake her if she fell asleep during the paper.

Then she returned home and waited, expecting very little.

One paper, however, had gone better than the others. She had spent the previous days reading all four recommended volumes on Gandhian Thought after someone warned her that this paper often decided who got in and who did not. Perhaps the advice came at the right time. Perhaps she had absorbed more than she realised.

Whatever the reason, it was enough.

When the telegram finally arrived, it changed the direction of her life in an instant. What had seemed like another disappointment suddenly became a new beginning.

Her father, who had carried quiet anxiety about his daughter’s future through two difficult years, read the telegram more than once before he allowed himself to believe it.

She was in.

The MGIMS Years

The orientation camp felt less like an introduction to medicine and more like an initiation into a way of life. There were khadi clothes, prayers, shramdan, sweeping, simple meals, and long conversations. For Neena, already hardened by hostel life, nothing felt strange.

The ashram introduced her to the astonishing diversity of her classmates. There were polished students from Delhi, fashionable girls from Mumbai, confident Puneites, and quieter students from villages and small towns. Sixty-five strangers arrived. A batch was born.

The hostel gave her a room of her own — an extraordinary luxury for a girl who had spent her childhood in shared school dormitories — and she loved it with the straightforward pleasure of someone who had not had one before. On a later visit to Sevagram, she stood outside that first-floor room and told the girls leaning on the balcony that it used to be hers.

“Which batch, Ma’am?” one asked.

“1980,” she replied.

Their faces shifted into the expression reserved for things that happened before their parents were born. She felt, briefly, the distance of forty years made physical.

Nagpur was close enough that she went home most weekends. Her mother fed five or six girls without apparent effort and packed breakfast for the Monday morning train — a ritual that her batchmates still mention when they recall those years, because the food was what home-cooked food always is when you have been living on institutional mess for five days. Aruna and Kumud Agrawal were the regulars; Kalpana Bhargava came when she could. They watched films. They shopped. They ate until they were full and then ate a little more. On Mondays they ran from the station to make Dr. Sutikshna Pandey’s physiology lecture at eight, which closed its doors at exactly eight and did not reopen them for stragglers.

She was not drawn to sports or drama, which were the two channels through which Sevagram’s extracurricular life organised itself. She was drawn to quieter forms of making: rangoli, for which she and Alka Ravekar won a consolation prize at the first batch gathering; reading, which she did with the sustained appetite of someone who had grown up in a household where books were a reliable pleasure; and the particular Sevagram occupation of long walks around the campus in the evenings, where the conversations that shaped the next decades took place without anyone knowing that was what was happening.

The first year passed in a blur that was partly excitement, partly homesickness, partly anatomy, and partly the slow discovery that becoming a doctor was a more complex undertaking than the ambition to become a doctor had suggested. She was not, she says with clarity, a distinguished student. She was thorough. She was present. She passed her examinations without drama. She did not top anything, although she eventually did exceptionally well in Gynaecology— which she had failed in the first attempt, and which she then passed with marks good enough to represent a reversal so complete that it still slightly puzzles her.

The second MBBS years were spent peering into microscopes and memorising pharmacology. She admired teachers like Dr. Pratibha Narang and feared others like Dr. Nasruddin Khan, whose viva voce examinations reduced her mind to a blank page.

One memory stayed with her. During a forensic viva, Dr. Nayak asked her the IPC section for murder. She guessed 300 because it was close to her roll number. By sheer luck, she was right.

Final MBBS brought clinics, patients, wards, and seriousness. Medicine, Surgery, and Paediatrics came alive. But just when she thought she had found her footing, she failed.

Gynaecology undid her.

She still does not know how she gathered herself, studied a subject she had never liked, and returned to pass with good marks. But she did. The day she finally became a doctor remains one of the happiest days of her life.

Internship, Friendship and Marriage

Internship began under a shadow. Her failure in final year had left her withdrawn and ashamed. Then came her surgery posting under Dr. Suhas Jajoo.

Dr. Jajoo had humour, patience, and the rare gift of making work enjoyable. Every day he would ask if the interns had found a hydrocele case. Eventually they did. The thrill of surgery lifted her spirits and brought her confidence back.

Outside the wards, friendship shaped her Sevagram years. Long walks, roasted potatoes, collected stones, shared secrets, and endless conversations filled the evenings. Two of her closest friends, Kalpana and Sarita, are no longer alive, but their memory remains vivid.

Internship changed more than her confidence. Somewhere between ward rounds, rural postings, and long conversations, she and Sanju grew close. During one such posting, they decided to get engaged.

She still remembered running back to the hostel, breathless with excitement, to tell Pratima Kothare, a friend who would later become family. Then came the letters. Kumud Agrawal received pages full of details, emotion, and gossip. Aruna Vanikar, practical and career-focused even then, received a much shorter note, stripped of drama and gossip.

Their marriage unfolded in the way the best Sevagram marriages often did: slowly, without drama, through shared work and long hours together. During internship, they were posted to Hinganghat, where a small hospital and limited resources revealed people as they really were. He was the boy from Konkan who had arrived at MGIMS unable to speak Hindi and had found his voice through patience and the bansuri. She was the girl from the Karnataka–Maharashtra border who had learnt resilience through setbacks and recoveries. Somewhere in the middle of ward work, night duties, and village postings, they recognised something in each other.

They married in 1987 while both were house officers, earning ₹750 a month between them — barely enough, yet somehow enough.

As a house officer, Neena worked in Anaesthesia and Ophthalmology, marking the end of her years at MGIMS. She first chose Ophthalmology for postgraduation, but later moved to MD Anaesthesiology at IGMC, Nagpur.

Choosing Anaesthesia, and the Logic of the Choice

She had wanted Obstetrics and Gynaecology from her clinical years, which is a common destination for women in medicine and was, in her case, a genuine preference rather than a default. The final year changed her view. She found the specialty, under the particular teaching circumstances of those years, less accessible to her than she had expected.

House jobs in Anaesthesia and Ophthalmology followed her MBBS, and Anaesthesia revealed itself as something she was good at in a way that she had not anticipated.

She chose an MD rather than a DGO because she needed, quickly, to contribute to the household she was building. Her father had told her, with the same plainness he had always used: go to Sevagram, I will manage.

She went. She managed. Now it was time to return something.

Career, Writing and the Mountains

Her career with Coal India stretched across decades — steady, purposeful work first as a medical officer and later as Chief of Medical Services. The job took her to remote mining areas, including parts of Chhattisgarh, but she managed transfers with the calm of someone who had learnt, very early in life, how to adapt to unfamiliar places.

Alongside her administrative work, she continued to practise anaesthesia. It kept her grounded, current, and useful. Kavita Lokhande, her MGIMS batchmate, became a colleague in Coal India and later a close friend, the kind whose bond extended to the next generation as well.

When retirement came, she accepted it without fuss. She had risen as high as a doctor could in the mining sector. The title was impressive, but what mattered more to her was that the work had been done well.

Private practice never suited her. She never enjoyed asking patients for money and knew she would not be good at it. Simplicity came more naturally.

She and Sanju have one son, now an engineer settled in Chicago. Books remained her lifelong refuge. Over time, reading led to writing. What began as poems and scattered fragments slowly became a way of making sense of politics, faith, anger, joy, and the world around her.

What she had not expected was that the most visible part of her life would begin after retirement.

Travel and trekking became her second life.

For years, Sanju urged her to join him on a trek. She resisted. Finally, at the age of fifty-two, tired of his persistence, she agreed to climb Rajgad. She expected it to be a one-time adventure. Instead, the mountains claimed her.

She went on to trek across the Sahyadris — Harihar, Ratangad, Kalsubai, Alang-Madan-Kulang, and Bhairavgad. Then came the Himalayas: Kedarkantha, Roopkund, Kuari Pass, Bhrigu Lake, Tarsar Marsar, and Sandakphu.

The greatest challenge was Mount Kilimanjaro. She climbed it with four MGIMS alumni, including her batchmate Mudit Kumar. Standing at Uhuru Peak, 19,341 feet above sea level, exhausted and exhilarated, remains one of the proudest moments of her life.

She later completed the Pangong Frozen Lake Marathon with Dr. Parag Shah and other MGIMS alumni. In 2023, she earned a diploma in archaeology from the Institute for Oriental Studies in Thane, giving formal shape to a long-standing fascination with forts, temples, ruins, and the stories hidden inside old stones.

What MGIMS Left Behind

MGIMS shaped Dr. Neena in ways no degree ever could. It gave her teachers who taught ethics, empathy, simplicity, and respect for patients. It gave her friendships that outlived distance and time. It gave her confidence, even after failure.

Most of all, it gave her a way of living.

The teachers who made her feel seen remain part of her life. Dr. Pushpa Chaturvedi still calls when she visits Nagpur and arrives for a meal as though no time has passed. Friends such as Aruna Vanikar and Kumud Agrawal — the same girls who once ate her mother’s food on Nagpur weekends — remain woven into the fabric of her life.

She carries Sevagram’s simplicity deliberately. She has never been drawn to the accumulation of money or status that some medical careers encourage. She prescribes carefully, investigates cautiously, charges honestly, and is known by patients for doing so. These are not rules she adopted later. They are the residue of an education.

The telegram that arrived after the anaphylactic reaction, in those years when nothing seemed to be going as planned, set everything in motion. She is too practical to attribute everything to luck. Her own work carried her the rest of the way.

But she also knows that without that telegram, none of it would have had anywhere to begin.

Dr. Neena Thosar completed her MD in Anaesthesiology from IGMC, Nagpur. She served with Coal India for more than two decades and retired as Chief of Medical Services. She now lives in Nagpur.