He was born on 18 May 1960 at Government Medical College, Nagpur — inside the institution his father would come to lead. Dr. Vikram Marwah was an orthopaedic surgeon who rose to become Professor, Head of Surgery and Orthopaedics, and eventually Dean of GMC Nagpur. Sanjay grew up in the corridors of that ambition without quite realising he was absorbing it, the way children of doctors absorb the language and ethic of medicine before they can explain either.

He did not need to search for inspiration. It lived in his house, in his father’s hands, in the evening conversations that turned on cases and procedures with the ease of a family that knows medicine as intimately as other families know their trades. He never seriously imagined any other profession.

Those who know what they want early in life are either very lucky or very clear. Sanjay Marwah was both.

The Path to Sevagram

He studied in Aurangabad through middle school — his father had moved to Government Medical College there when Sanjay was young — and completed high school in Nagpur after the family returned in 1970. He did his B.Sc. Part I at Mohota College with the standard combination of zoology, botany, and chemistry.

He missed GMC and IGMC by one percent after B.Sc. Part I. He tried the PMTs of Madhya Pradesh, AFMC, BHU, and MGIMS. AFMC called him for an interview but did not offer a seat. Raipur Medical College offered one; something held him back. He waited for the MGIMS result.

Many of his father’s colleagues had children in MGIMS — the name was familiar, and its character was familiar too: close teaching, small cohort, the warmth between students and faculty that larger institutions cannot produce. His father and he drove to Sevagram for the interview in July 1978. They returned to Nagpur the same evening. The interview had been simple — general knowledge, a gentle test of his Gandhi reading. Once his hands stopped trembling, he answered well.

Kutki and the Uike Family

The orientation camp delivered the first adjustment in expectations: morning yoga, prayers, talks by teachers who were also idealists, the first taste of the subjects — all arriving together, overwhelming in aggregate if manageable in detail.

“Those who know what they want early in life are either very lucky or very clear. Sanjay Marwah was both.”

The village was Kutki — three miles from Sevagram on unpaved roads, no electricity after dark, a river tracing its western boundary. For many in the batch, Kutki was the first sustained encounter with village life. For Sanjay, it recalled time spent with his grandfather in Madhya Pradesh. They stayed in the village for weeks before Diwali, swam in the river without a thought about its colour or clarity, in the uncalculating way of people who have not yet learned to worry about water when water is simply there.

The Uike family welcomed them as their own. When they came later to the hospital, they would seek him out. Two of their boys eventually found work in the boys’ hostel mess — a connection between village and institution that was precisely what MGIMS was designed to produce.

Ten Golden Years

His batch got along well. No one bothered much about marks or who the teachers favoured, which produced a climate of ease that examination anxiety can quickly dissolve. Two friendships stood above the rest — Sanjay Dachewar and Sanjay Potdar — both lost too early, a pain he carries quietly.

One memory from the first year remains sharp. A friend told him that some classmates had entered his room in his absence and checked which chapters he was studying, thinking he had information about the papers. He had entered Sevagram assuming his batchmates were simply companions in a shared enterprise. He learnt that day what human nature looks like when anxiety and competition arrive. Sevagram taught him this too: not only medicine but the people who practise it.

He stayed at Sevagram for ten years in all — MBBS, then postgraduate training in orthopaedic surgery. He came as the son of a man who had spent a career heading a major medical college and left as a surgeon shaped by a village institution that had given him something larger institutions could not: the kind of teaching that knows your name.

He found the woman he would marry among his Sevagram friends — the connections of those years extending into the rest of his life in the way that only the connections of youth do. He rates those ten years as the best of his life, without qualification and without nostalgia. He chose Sevagram when he could have chosen otherwise. The choice was exactly right.

Dr. Sanjay Marwah completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the class of 1978 and went on to train as an orthopaedic surgeon. He practised in Nagpur, where he also found the woman he would marry among his Sevagram friends. He rates his ten years at Sevagram as the best years of his life.