I missed it by just one mark.

That was the sentence Raju Shah kept repeating to himself the day his sister got into medical college and he did not. It was 1977, the transition year when Maharashtra’s education system was shifting from Interscience to 10+2, and the collateral damage of doubled student numbers and unchanged seat counts had fallen disproportionately on his cohort. His sister had made it. He had not.

He locked himself away for six months and prepared with a seriousness the first attempt had not demanded. He applied to AIIMS, AFMC, and MGIMS Sevagram. Manipal offered a confirmed seat for fifty thousand rupees. He was in Manipal to submit the draft when, on a whim, he consulted an astrologer in a hotel room.

The man charged twenty-five rupees, looked at Raju’s palm, and said almost casually: you’ve wasted your money. This seat is not yours. You’ll get in elsewhere.

Raju laughed it off and travelled home. The next morning, a telegram arrived from MGIMS Sevagram: he had cleared the entrance exam and stood twelfth on the merit list. His mother asked: should we still go ahead with Manipal? He said no, without hesitation. They got the Manipal draft refunded and packed for Sevagram.

The Village and the Wards

He was born on 8 October 1960 in Baroda, the second of four siblings. His father was a radiologist who had established a clinic in Bandra in 1952 that would become the axis of the family’s professional life. He had grown up in Mumbai, studying at Bandra English School, St. Theresa’s High School, then Parle College — the batch whose timing was the worst it could be.

The village MGIMS had allotted to the 1978 batch was Kutki, three miles from Sevagram on unpaved roads with no electricity after dark. The batch went door to door, learnt to survey and listen before prescribing, understood health as something determined by water quality and housing as much as by pathogens and diagnoses. For Raju, who had grown up in Bandra with the sea wind and the noise of Mumbai’s suburbs, Kutki was education in the sense MGIMS intended: not supplementary to medicine but foundational to it.

The teachers made an impression that has not worn with time. Dr. S.P. Kalantri and Dr. K.K. Trivedi were among the finest — firm, fair, deeply human. They taught medicine and taught, without naming it, how a doctor should inhabit the relationship with a patient.

His Father’s Diagnosis

He was still in second MBBS when his father was diagnosed with colon cancer. Surgery. Chemotherapy. The particular slow deterioration that cancer imposes on a family. Raju had been reading his father’s radiology books with increasing curiosity during this period, finding in them an unexpected pull toward the discipline that had shaped his father’s professional life.

“His father left knowing that Raju would carry forward his work. That knowledge gave him peace. It gave Raju purpose.”

His father made his decision in the final hours — removing his oxygen tube in front of the family, seventeen hours before he died. He was fifty-eight. A few days after his death, Raju began his first house post in radiology.

The career he had imagined — surgery, perhaps ophthalmology — receded. His father had left him a clinic established in 1952 and a legacy of honest practice. The letter his father had written from his sickbed — before my eyes close forever, I wish to see at least one of my sons take the reins — had arrived when Raju was in his final examinations. He had read it. He had answered it.

His father left this world knowing that Raju would carry forward his work. That knowledge gave him peace. It gave Raju purpose.

Building the Practice

He enrolled for his DMRD on 15 March 1985. The years that followed were grinding in the way that building something from a difficult starting point always is: leave at 7:30 a.m., reach Tata Hospital by 8:15, snatch ten minutes for lunch, return to the clinic until 8:30 in the evening. He and his brother trained alternately so the clinic was never unstaffed. They built step by step — X-rays, IITV, portable X-rays, sonography, colour Doppler, DEXA scans, then a pathology unit in collaboration with Metropolis. More than forty people work with them now. Each step was earned.

The practice has always been free of commissions — a principle his father established and Raju maintained against the grain of an industry that has largely normalised referral payments. He has kept the clinic open to the poor and underprivileged without qualification. He married in December 1984. His wife Mita devoted herself to their home and family. Their daughter Kinjal is a dentist; their son Vrajang is a commercial pilot on the Airbus 320.

When he reflects on the trajectory — the one missed mark, the Manipal astrologer, the Sevagram telegram, his father’s letter from the sickbed — he sees the whole of it as a single continuous line. He missed the seat he was trying for and ended up at the seat he was meant for. He chose radiology when no one coveted it and watched it become one of the most important disciplines in modern medicine. He was, as it turned out, simply ahead of his time.

Dr. Raju Shah completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the class of 1978. He trained in radiology at Tata Hospital, Mumbai, completing his DMRD and later his MD. He has practised radiology in Bandra, Mumbai, for over four decades, continuing the clinic his father established in 1952.