‘My biggest achievements have been my students,' says Mumbai-based Dr Ashwin Mehta

Dr Ashwin Mehta and Dr Chandrashekhar Meshram

An 85-year-old cardiologist, Dr Ashwin Mehta, is sort of a legend among the medical fraternity in Mumbai. In the 1990s, he was possibly the first in the city to use primary angioplasty in acute myocardial infarction (PAMI) in heart attack cases. Before that, he also helped set up the cardiology department at the Sion hospital and then went on to teach there, training thousands who went on to serve in smaller towns.

"My biggest achievement has been the students," says the doctor who has treated four prime ministers, including Morarji Desai, Chandra Sekhar, Deva Gowda, and Rajeev Gandhi, and seven Bharat Ratna awardees like Lata Mangeshkar, Ravi Shankar, J R D Tata, Nanaji Deshmukh, and J P Narayan.

He won the Padma Shri award in 2004, and then, last week, he was selected for the Padma Bhushan. Nair Hospital's cardiologist Dr Ajay Chaurasia, one of Dr Mehta's students who refers to him as ‘ABM', says, "I completed my super speciality training under him at Sion hospital while pursuing my post-graduation. He has been an astute-born healer and a teacher par excellence. Whatever I am today, I owe it to him."

Dr Mehta has seen the world change, the political systems shift, and the medical field evolve with changing times. "In the days when I was a medical student in the '60s, I had an opportunity to treat Pyarelal Sharma (Laxmikant-Pyarelal) and I had to stay the whole night holding his hand and noting his blood pressure because there were no monitors. Now everything has changed; we are now in a world where robot-assisted surgeries are not too far in the future to be widely used."

Dr Mehta wants the expansion of good, quality, and affordable treatment to the remotest parts of the country, which he says has not happened. "Nobody should be dying through ailments when they can be saved," he says.

Meanwhile, he continues his practice at Jaslok Hospital even at this age.

The second doctor to be feted is a neurologist from Nagpur selected for the Padma Shri award. Since the early '90s, Nagpur's Dr Chandrashekhar Meshram made it his mission to reach as many Indians as possible, carrying the torch of science and rational thinking. He aimed to educate the masses about brain diseases like epilepsy and its various manifestations. He held programmes on All India Radio, appeared on Doordarshan, and even wrote for newspapers.

Last year, he became the first Indian trustee of the World Federation of Neurology (WFN), established in 1957, and just a couple of days ago, was selected for a Padma Shri.

"My dream is to see a society aware of brain diseases with access to affordable diagnosis and treatment," he says, adding that even now, a person living in urban cities as well as rural areas is considered as being possessed by a ‘devi' or a ghost during an epilepsy attack.

While his outreach programmes have not immediately convinced everyone in the audience to seek treatment, "a few people from that audience have later become an example for others as they saw them become better".

Flagging the divide in treatment between urban and rural areas, he said there is a need to improve public health facilities beyond our cities, as even after so many years, things have not changed much. "Whenever we hold outreach programmes in rural areas or small towns or when people come from such areas to the cities for our programmes, we provide anyone diagnosed with a brain disease with a month-long supply of medicines, as these may not be available in their hometowns at government hospitals or private medical shops," he says.

Dr Meshram's paths have crossed with those like the late Dr Narendra Dabholkar - founder of Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti - and he has also worked closely with Shyam Manav who started the state's first anti-superstition society.

Manav recalled, "We were in our 20s when we met through J P Narayan's Tarun Shanti Sena, and we both desired the betterment of society."

Even as the two had to walk on very different roads, the one common intersection was superstition. Manav says that even as doctors are people who dedicate their lives to science, there are very few doctors like Meshram who have been able to apply rational thinking to their work or are aware of the ills of society.

Another Ayurveda practitioner from Pune - 95-year-old Manohar Dole - also won a Padma Shri award in recognition of his setting up an eye clinic in Narayangaon under Pune district from scratch.