Sevagram, 2026: This is not a book about medicine, though medicine runs through every page. It is not a book about rural India, though Sevagram, Gandhi’s village, forms its setting. It is, simply, a book about choices: the small accidents that begin a life and the larger decisions that quietly shape it.
I did not plan to write a memoir. The idea felt unnecessary, even vain. My days were spent inside a rural hospital, treating patients who would never make headlines. What story could that possibly hold? But colleagues, students, and friends kept urging me to write before the details faded. I resisted for years. Then one day I began.
What follows is the life of a middle-class boy who drifted into medicine, arrived in Sevagram with ₹650 a month, and never really left. I came with more enthusiasm than skill. I stayed because the work mattered. Along the way I learned science, unlearned certainties, made mistakes, and tried again. I have recorded both the successes and the failures as honestly as I can.
This is a chronicle of five decades of medical practice, from the 1970s to the present, at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. It is also the story of a hospital growing with its village, improvising daily, and stretching limited resources to meet unlimited need. Much of what I know about medicine I learned not from textbooks but from patients: farmers, labourers, mothers, children, people who walked miles to reach us and trusted us with what little they had.
There are clinical puzzles, research studies, and ethical knots with no clean solutions. There are malaria wards and snakebites, traditional healers and new machines, deaths we could not prevent, and the occasional recovery that felt like grace. There are funding shortages, bureaucratic tangles, and the small absurdities of public institutions. Above all, there are people, students who arrived eager to change the world, colleagues who became family, and villagers whose quiet resilience kept us going. Some names are changed, but the stories are true.
This is not a textbook or a policy manual. It offers no systematic lessons and no grand theories. Nor is it a sermon. Poverty here is neither romantic nor picturesque. Rural India can be generous and harsh in the same hour. I have tried to show both.
If you are a young doctor, you may find an honest account of practising medicine where investigations are few and judgment matters most. If you work in public health, you may recognise how policies look on the ground, where a missing drug or a delayed decision can change a life. If you are simply curious, you will meet a village and its hospital as they are, without embellishment.
Do not expect heroics. Most days are made of smaller acts: listening carefully, making the best decision with limited tools, admitting uncertainty, and learning from errors. Medicine, in the end, is less about drama and more about steady work done well.
The chapters move roughly in time, though each stands alone. You may read them in order or wander. Some pages describe suffering and failure. I have not softened these, because medicine does not. Pain, too, is part of the truth.
Memory is fallible. Conversations are reconstructed; motives are interpreted; events are filtered through my own lens. Wherever possible, I checked records and colleagues. Where I could not, I relied on recollection. I have tried to be fair to others and to myself. If I appear occasionally foolish or wrong, that is because I often was.
Many stories remain untold: confidences that must stay private, wounds better left closed. What is here is what could be told honestly.
This book exists because others insisted it should. I stayed in Sevagram because my family accepted a modest life without complaint. I learned from patients who trusted me and students who questioned me. Whatever I gave this village, it returned more.
That, perhaps, is the only explanation I can offer for these pages and for a life that began by accident and stayed by choice.