I am not sure when I started writing. Somewhere between a patient’s bedside and a colleague’s funeral, it became necessary — to hold on to people and moments that would otherwise slip away without record.
I have practised medicine in Sevagram for four decades. These essays come from that life — from the wards, the teaching rooms, and the families I have sat with at the end. The institution that shaped it all is MGIMS, where medicine has always been practised with conscience rather than convenience.
They are not academic papers. They are not memoirs. They are simply what happened, and what I made of it.
A dying woman and her devoted husband, both poor, both believers. She has end-stage cancer. She is not afraid. He knows he is about to lose her. He is not anxious. Vitthal holds them both steady. I watched this and understood, for the first time, what palliative care really means.
Read the essayFour years my senior at GMC Nagpur. My registrar when I was a fumbling MD resident. Gentle, unhurried, deeply religious. He taught medicine the way he lived — without noise, without drama. When death came for him, he met it the same way.
Read the essayA water crisis in Sevagram forced classes to seven in the morning. A railway crossing threatened to make even that impossible. What the students and teachers did next is a small story — but it tells you everything about the spirit of this place.
Read the essayThese three essays are a beginning. Behind them sits an archive of writing spanning twenty-five years — on patients, colleagues, institutions, and the ordinary life that runs alongside all of it.
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