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anand

anand
nadkarni , maharashtra

Dr Anand Nadkarni (67) stands by the side of a grey concrete road, wearing a white churidhar, beige half-sleeved cotton kurta and chocolate brown shoes. He wears rimless specs and his head is bald on top with hair on the sides. Beaming at the camera, he holds a dark brown wooden walking stick in his right hand. The tip of the stick rests on the road near his right foot. A black autorickshaw is near him and approaching the camera. A crimson car is overtaking the auto. Two-wheelers are parked to the right and there is a cream multi-storeyed building at the far end of the road.
Sitting on an ash grey sofa with a leaf-green wall behind him is Anand, wearing an off-white half-sleeved kurta and matching pyjamas. Holding a small red object in both hands he is smiling as he offers it to a mocha-brown-and-tan striped cat standing on the sofa next to him. The greenish-grey head of another cat sitting behind the brown cat pops up over the top of the brown cat’s body.
Anand, wearing a pale sky blue half-sleeved kurta and a white dhoti edged with gold zari, sits on a chocolate brown wooden divan with his feet stretched out and resting on a glass-topped coffee table. He is looking into an open laptop resting on his lap. The long cushion on the divan seat is covered with a turquoise blue fabric with a white floral print. On the cream wall behind it there is a large rectangular ‘scenery’ painting in a chocolate brown wooden frame. The side of the divan extends into a side table with a single drawer. Books are stacked on this table.
Anand wearing his pale blue kurta is standing in the kitchen in front of a stainless steel gas stove with four burners. There is a pressure cooker on the left back burner and a steel kadai on the left front burner. Anand is stirring something in the kadai with a long-handled spatula. Behind the black kitchen platform the wall is covered with light brown tiles. The kitchen cabinets on top are finished in chocolate brown with steel handles.
From left to right: Anand’s wife’s aunt, Shakuntala Apte (80), wife Savita Apte (53), Anand, and son Kabeer (24). Kabeer alone sits on a light brown plastic chair. The others are seated on an L-shaped dark brown wooden divan with its cushion covered in a striped fabric of yellow and violet. Shakuntala has short, curling, white hair with a side parting. She sits on the short end of the L, wearing a beige sweater left open in front to reveal a faded grey nightie dotted with small magenta and white flowers. She holds a white porcelain cup in her right hand. Savita, sitting cross-legged, is wearing a white churidhar and a round-necked, three-fourth-sleeved kameez printed with light pink flowers on a sky-blue background. She holds a red porcelain cup in her right hand. She and her aunt are smiling at each other. Anand, holding a green cup, is dressed in his off-white kurta and matching pyjamas, and chocolate brown socks. Kabeer has a thin beard and moustache and black-framed specs. He wears black shorts and a maroon T-shirt. He is holding a brown acoustic guitar and he and his father are looking at each other, laughing. Covering the deep orange wall behind them is a row of images in dark brown rectangular frames. Extreme left shows two colour photos of the front half of an alligator, placed one above the other. Next to it is a poster of the Hollywood film “The Dark Knight”. Next to it are two posters one above the other. The top one is a painting of a blue sky with pink hot air balloons, white sand below it along a turquoise blue river, brown hills and white houses with the heading BRISTOL in white capitals. The picture below is of a red and yellow train with white ice-capped mountains behind. Next is a film poster of the original Star Wars movie. To the right of this poster, a black T-shirt printed with a white logo on the chest hangs on a yellow plastic hanger. The logo is a skull and instead of crossbones below it there is a pitchfork crossed with a shepherd’s crook and the words ‘SEA SHEPHERD’ in white capitals below it. Next to it, the extreme right, is a blank whiteboard with the word TOMORROW written at the top in blue marker pen.
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“Never shy away from asking for help if you need it in order to go forward”

When Anand Nadkarni was in sixth standard in Parle Tilak Vidyalaya he was thrilled to be chosen to play the role of Chanakya in a 20-minute skit during the annual school function. Just before he could go on stage, a friend asked him whether he had considered how his appearance would be received by the audience: wearing a wig and dhoti with heavy steel calipers on his legs and orthopaedic shoes. Anand froze. Afraid of cutting a sorry figure and facing ridicule, he almost backed out but luckily his father Madhusudan was around.
 
The scene to be enacted was Chanakya being insulted by Dhana Nanda, the last Nanda king of Magadha. Madhusudan told his son: “Pour all the anger you were aiming at King Nanda towards those who start jeering at you.” Anand followed his advice. After a few catcalls in the beginning the audience listened in rapt attention as Anand vented his fury at the king. Recalling the incident, 67-year-old Dr Anand Nadkarni says, “It restored my self-esteem and taught me that one needn’t be judged by appearances.” The following year he wrote his first play with historical characters that he enacted: “I wasn’t embarrassed to wear costumes anymore.” He is grateful that the teachers and students fully accepted him as he was (he wrote an article in the school’s centenary issue).
 
Dr Nadkarni, founder of the Institute for Psychological Health (IPH), is also an award-winning Marathi playwright, author of 17 award-winning books, and a musician with three albums under his belt! The six-year-old who started crying, “Oh, I can’t walk” after being infected by the polio virus could never have imagined what his life would turn out to be. In fact it was a miracle that only his legs were affected by the virus. Anand remembers how when he was around nine he became a case study at the Children’s Orthopaedic Hospital in Worli where doctors found evidence that he had been attacked not by polio-myelitis, which affects the spinal cord, but encephalitis, which affects the brain. They marvelled at how his intelligence had remained intact.
 
Born in Jalgaon, which had only one child specialist back then, Anand’s mother Nirmala moved with him to Mumbai so he could get the best treatment. Madhusudan, a lecturer in Organic Chemistry (who retired as principal of Bandodkar College of Science in Thane) moved from Jalgaon to Ambajogai and joined his family in Mumbai a few years later. Nirmala had started the first ever Montessori school in Jalgaon, which Anand attended, and had stopped teaching to devote her time to his care.
 
“My parents told me, focus on what you can do, rather than what you cannot,” says Dr Nadkarni. Since he couldn’t join his mates on the sports field, he learnt how to do running commentary for seven types of sports, cricket being his favourite. Not a single match went by in school without him commentating. In the residential colony where they lived he started playing table tennis, calipers notwithstanding. “Assimilation” and “initiative” have been his watchwords throughout his life. “But asking for help is not surrendering,” he says. “The sympathy-empathy game starts in my own mind. If I ask for help because I feel inferior, that is pleading. But if I ask for help to complete a specific task, and I can be of help to that person in return, that is interdependence.”
 
After corrective surgery on both legs, Anand could walk without calipers. He completed his MBBS and M.D. in Psychological Medicine – he stood First in the M.D. Examination in the University of Mumbai. After working as a lecturer in K.E.M. Hospital, in 1986 he and two others co-founded Muktangan, a de-addiction and rehabilitation institute. He started IPH in 1990 with the goal of de-stigmatising Mental Health (MH). With a 400-member team that includes 120 professionals it is possibly the country’s largest voluntary group working in MH. In 1991 IPH started organising an annual career perspective conference, VEDH (Vocational Education Direction and Harmony), attended by students, parents and teachers.
 
Dr Nadkarni is a busy man today, seeing an average of 40 clients in his psychiatry practice over a 10-hour schedule, besides speaking at events and programmes or on TV, or attending plays – all this while tending to his disability-related health issues. After he turned 35 there was a “re-emergence of the disability” in the form of non-healing ulcers and infected veins. Wherever he journeys he carries along a foldable stool, since his legs shouldn’t be left hanging for long. His travel kit also includes, besides pressure bandages for his feet, two other vital ingredients. He discovered that moist skin is vulnerable to ulcers and devised his own method of keeping it at bay by drying his feet after a bath with a hair dryer and applying paraffin jelly.
 
Dr Nadkarni married Savita Apte (now 53) in 1998. She joined IPH in 1993, and completed her MSc and PhD after marriage. Their son Kabeer (24) is a wildlife researcher and plays the guitar. Their daughter Sukhada is also a psychiatrist, is married, lives in Indore, and has a five-year-old son, Angad. Kabeer admires his father’s work ethic and the multiple interests he nurtures, besides his work: history, cinema, literature, and philosophy, besides a passion for travel. “He has never let his limitations stop him from doing what he does,” Kabeer says, recalling a family trip to Sri Lanka when his father insisted on climbing to the top of Sirigaya Rock in 40-degree heat, holding Savita’s hand and taking occasional 10-minute breaks.
 
“Don’t get so carried away with your goals that you drift away from your purpose,” is Dr Nadkarni’s advice. And his purpose? He says it should be the same for everyone: “To develop yourself daily to become a better human being.”

Photos:

Vicky Roy

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