SUNIL PANDYA: A RENAISSANCE MAN

On 9 November 2024, I had emailed Sunil Pandya, “I suddenly remembered when I first heard of you! Roop Gursahani … had started a project on evoked potentials, etc. … with a Dr Shuba Pandya at Bombay Hospital. I remember his telling me ‘She and her husband are so well read in all fields and are so intelligent! They are a Renaissance couple’. I saw you first, of course, only in 1993 at Grant Medical College (GMC) at your lecture on the pathology of the spinal cord.”

His response was characteristic of the man: ‘Thank you for this very interesting information. It was kind of Roop. I recall the talk on the spinal cord and how you made kind comments on it. I continue to treasure those comments.’

Again, as was typical, this response was sent 7 minutes after my mail to him.

I have been privileged to have had the finest teachers all my life, and I have heard some scintillating talks. The talk by Dr Pandya at the GMC in 1993 remains among the 10 best lectures that I have ever heard. What a pity that it has not been recorded for posterity!

Between 1993 and 1996, I used to send Dr Pandya photocopies of all the articles on medical ethics that I thought would interest him. I was aware that he and colleagues had started a newsletter which had soon metamorphosed into a journal about medical ethics. I was a subscriber because I believed (and still believe) that such efforts must be encouraged materially, beyond mere lip service.

In 1996, he invited me to join the editorial team of the Issues in Medical Ethics (now renamed Indian Journal of Medical Ethics [IJME]). At the first editorial meeting that I attended, he asked me to call him by name, rather than the formal ‘Dr Pandya’. Our editorial board meetings were held in his departmental office in KEM hospital and so, we met often after that. Even after I moved to Bengaluru, we met on a regular basis, because he was a frequent visitor to the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), in his position of Chair of the selection and promotion committee. On most of these visits, he would gift me a book from his humongous library.

Like so many others, I was the beneficiary of his astounding breadth and depth of knowledge on subjects related to medicine as well as other esoteric topics. I do not know how he managed it, but he had access to vast amounts of quixotic and offbeat information, from sources across the world; he would then send out packets of this information on email to many. Clearly, though, he also had a separate list of email recipients. Because he knew that I was an inveterate punster, he would make it a point to email me puns when he came across them. (Olinda Timms writes, in IJME, about the mails that he would send her, on her own topic of interest).

Because of our common interests and views, we often collaborated and published articles on the history of medicine and science and on ethics, in this journal, as well as in Current Science and The Oxford Illustrated Companion to Medicine. Our final article––in preparation for the last 15 years!––is almost complete but will now, sadly, have to be published without him as co-author.

Despite our age difference of 25 years, we got along well and had a special equation; though I suspect that many would be able to say the same!

His impeccable manners and honesty however did not mean that he was starchy––far from it, in fact. He had an extreme sense of mischief. He loved to tell people about how I was in the habit of catching random people on the street and forcibly making them donate to IJME! Because no one doubted his honesty, people truly believed this and I once told him that soon even I would start accepting this as gospel!

Stephen Lock, ex-editor of the British Medical Journal (now BMJ), once emailed me ‘Sunil writes like a dream’. He was referring to the fascinating ‘Letter from Bombay’ that Sunil used to write on a regular basis in the Journal, in the late 1980s. These letters, like the ‘Letter from Bombay’ (later, ‘Mumbai’) that he wrote in this Journal, provided intellectual and humanitarian insights into the practice of medicine and healthcare in Mumbai.

Was he perfect? No, it would appear. At a conference that we had organized in Nagpur in 2001, a student of his commented that he (Dr Pandya) was guilty of not censuring obviously wrong treatment by a patient’s previous doctor. As I recall it, Dr Pandya’s solution, for such situations, was for us to be diplomatic and offer appropriate advice to the patient, while simultaneously trying to avoid any reference to the poor medical skills of the preceding physician.

Though he never spoke ill of any individual, he was crystal clear about criticising, even in print, those in positions of power who chose not to improve the lot of the people, especially the poorest. In this manner, he was replicating the thought process and behaviour of Sir William Osler, who, too, was guilty of sparing individuals, but was a great believer in improving the medical profession. This was apt: Sir William was Sunil Pandya’s hero (along with Gandhiji).

I was fortunate enough to meet him and chat––on books and on history of medicine, obviously––for one hour on December 7, just 10 days before he passed away peacefully at home.