A newborn, cradled by gravity’s gentle pull, lies horizontal—safe, still, untouched by expectation. That posture—serene, surrendered—is not unlike the ocean’s horizon: wide, calm, and quietly balanced.
But the day that child rises—wobbly, uncertain—a silent revolution begins. Like a sapling leaning toward light, the child moves from safety into story. From lying still to daring to stand. And in that simple, staggering act, life shifts—from something that merely happens to us, to something we step into. Not just growing up, but becoming. Not merely becoming someone, but becoming part of something—a living, unfolding story of what it means to be human.
And perhaps what makes us humane is not just our ability to tell stories, but our willingness to witness them in others. Because everyone carries a story. But someone has to care enough to see it. To listen without agenda. To hold space without rushing in to fix.
Now, I always admit—I’m not a trained photographer, nor a classically trained storyteller. What I carry is quieter: the foundational discipline of clinical medicine, shaped by Baba—my father—a humble neighborhood doctor, one of those now-rare family physicians, whose wisdom stretched far beyond his ₹50 consultations.
Let me first expose my story of leaning towards photography. It didn’t begin with galleries or grand ambitions—it began in an anatomy class.
Back in anatomy classes—usually after marathon table tennis matches or tea-fueled canteen debates (our own humble version of Chai Pe Charcha, minus the PR)—I was often the last to arrive. I could barely see over the 20-25 heads in front of me, packed tighter than spinal nerves squeezing through a lumbar foramen. Everyone craning. No one yielding.
So, I found a solution.
I borrowed Baba’s SLR camera and his telephoto lens, clipped a Sony Walkman to my waist, stood on a bench at the back, and started recording dissections.
Not for art. Not yet. Just to see what I couldn’t.
I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t just capturing anatomy. I was learning how to see.
To frame. To focus. To preserve.
That was my first brush with what would later be called “medical photography.” At the time, it was just problem-solving born of curiosity.
A point to be noted—quite literally. That same camera belonged to Baba, who, apart from capturing the occasional family photograph, only used it to take pictures of his patients. On the back of each photograph, he’d scribble the diagnosis and treatment—his own analog EMR. Quiet. Ingenious. Practical. That was Baba—making meaning out of the ordinary, without ever calling it genius. He never called it documentation. He just called it remembering.
Because for Baba, medicine was never just science—it was deeply interdisciplinary, and inherently interactive.
On slow Sunday evenings, when the clinic was closed and the world had softened—and the neighbourhood grew quiet, except for the buzz of televisions tuning in to Chitrahaar—he would sit me down and say:
Always start with the history. Not the disease—the person. The story is the foundation of diagnosis.
He taught me that to heal, you must first listen. And observe. That the body speaks, but only if you’re patient enough to hear it—not just with instruments, but with attention. And that storytelling in medicine begins not with talking, but with looking. And listening.
Closely. Quietly. Without rush. Without ego.
That’s when I began to understand that storytelling isn’t only about what’s said. He taught me that in medicine—or anything—storytelling is not about drama, but about discipline.
It begins with two deceptively simple, yet deeply demanding acts: Observation and Listening. Not passive reception, but active presence.
Then comes the next layer in sequence: Acknowledge. Interpret. Assimilate.
Each has its own rhythm and role.
Acknowledge—because before we can understand a story, we must first accept its existence. It’s not about agreeing or fixing—it’s about creating a space where the other feels real, heard, and held. A simple act of recognition says: I see you. I’ve heard you. You matter. Recognition is the first act of respect.
Interpret—because once we’ve held the story gently, we turn it in our minds like light through glass. Interpretation isn’t solving—it’s sensing. It’s the art of reading between silences, beneath words. Not to judge, but to understand what’s beneath the surface.
Assimilate—because some stories don’t end when they’re told. They echo. They settle into the folds of our thinking, altering how we notice, how we care, how we act. Assimilation is what makes observation and listening transformative. Assimilation is where wisdom takes root.
Only then can we truly Act—with clarity, compassion, and integrity. Not from impulse, but from insight. As Baba often reminded me, “what your mind doesn’t know, your eyes can’t see.”
Six words. The anatomy of a story.
Six pillars. The architecture of rational compassion.
For understanding. For honoring the story before rushing to respond.
Years later, when a stroke left Baba bedridden, he spoke not of legacy, but of learning. He reminded me that enrolling me in visual arts and music at a very young age wasn’t a side interest—it was purposeful. A quiet, deliberate training of the senses. To discipline the mind not just to look, but to see. Not just to hear, but to listen. To pay close attention—because in both medicine and life, attention is the first act of care.
He knew, long before I did:
The finest storytellers are not born of words alone, but of stillness.
Of study.
Of a gaze that notices what others miss—
and a heart that listens before it speaks.
The practice of medicine—or public health—is not rooted in machines, nor in algorithms. It begins in the quiet story carried by the pulse—that gentle, defiant, lateral pressure exerted on the arterial wall, the only thing standing between life—so often accidental, and death—always inevitable.
Now, as I gently approach the threshold of fifty, I find myself returning often to Gurudev Rabindranath. There’s a story I keep close: when W.W. Pearson once asked both Tagore and Gandhi to name their greatest vice and virtue, Mahatma offered a thoughtful, layered response. Gurudev, ever precise, answered with a single word:
Inconsistency.
That word lingers. And over time, I’ve made peace with it.
My path has never been linear. From studying medicine to navigating corporate healthcare, from academia to visual storytelling in public health—mine has been a journey of curves, not ladders.
Ladders are made for ascent, for hierarchy, for arrival, to achieve.
But curves invite presence. They turn you gently, asking you to slow down, look around, reconsider. They don’t always take you higher—but they often take you deeper.
I’ve never been an aspirant in the modern sense. That wasn’t a word we grew up with. We didn’t talk of “career goals” or “personal brands.”
We had dreams. Big, impractical, glorious dreams.
While ambitions chase outcomes, dreams ask different things of us—things rooted in possibilities.
They ask us to wander. To wonder. To imagine without guaranteed return.
[So, ‘you may call me a dreamer (or a neurodivergent), but I’m not the only one.’]
And through every pivot, one thread has remained: stories. First, between man and medicine. Now, between public health and planetary health.
As I grow older, I find myself drawn more and more to those who live in step with the quiet rhythms of nature—far from the ego and the restless theatre of self-proclamation of a so-called (urban) civilization. Not the puppetry of polished façades, but the presence of lives shaped by land, by weather, by the slow turning of time.
Our origin. Our ancestors.
The ones we now call indigenous—but who have always simply been.
Keepers of old rhythms. Teachers of quiet knowing.
It feels like a return:
To Baba’s quiet teachings.
To Tagore’s reverence for earth system.
To the slow, patient craft of listening—
to the language of nature, and the unspoken truths of being human.
Listening before speaking. Seeing before assuming.
So in the years ahead, I choose to remain unfinished.
To stay open.
To stay curious.
To embrace my inconsistencies as signs of movement, not mistakes.
To keep becoming—not someone, but something—part of a larger story still unfolding.
To explore the big question—what makes us human (and humane)?
I’ll keep looking for stories that thread the well-being of people with the well-being of the planet. Stories not just of survival, but of quiet resilience.
Of remembering.
Of returning.
Of finding, in the rhythm of the Earth, something that feels like home.
Because in the end—
Stories are important,” the monster said. “They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth. Because humans are complicated beasts,” the monster said.
And perhaps… my story has always been about learning how not to be one.
This birthday, I return — not with answers, but with attention.
To the moments I missed, the silences I spoke over, the truths I rushed past — both at home and in the world outside.
To the faces I didn’t fully see, the voices I didn’t fully hear. Maybe I wasn’t ready then. Maybe I wasn’t still enough to notice.
So this is also an apology — not loud, not performative, but personal. Because শুধু তাই পবিত্র, যা ব্যক্তিগত — only that is sacred, which is personal.
Not a checklist. Just a breath. A wish.
[Today, on my birthday, apart from Baba, I want to dedicate this reflection to three remarkable individuals—people I’ve had the privilege of knowing personally. But truthfully, they’ve been much more than that: my lighthouses. Each of them is either just past sixty or nearly there—a milestone often labeled “retirement age.” But they seem to have misread that as "refinement age" or missed the memo. They’re still radiating suspicious levels of energy, possibly due to some secret elixir (or maybe just black coffee and sheer defiance).
Dr. Raj Shankar Ghosh. The person who offered me a compass in the wide, complex terrain of public health communication. From him I learned that if you want to speak of health, you have to first understand people. Not data points. Not dashboards. People. That insight continues to shape everything I do.
Sudripta Tagore. A quiet force who helped me rediscover education—not as instruction, but as insight. He brought me back to Rabindranath—not the one framed on the wall, but the one who invited us to think freely, to question deeply, and to see the world as interconnected. Through him, I relearned that education isn’t just about knowing more—it’s about becoming more open.
And finally, Dr. Kausik Ghosh, a respected and rational orthopaedist in his own right—my namesake and my anchor (though, ironically, not showing up here on LinkedIn). Often described as “the brother I lost in the Kumbh Mela,” he’s the kind of person who’ll stand beside me without conditions—even if the world (and sometimes my own family) disagrees. Everyone needs one person who shows up. I’m lucky mine also happens to be an intellectual sparring partner and occasional co-conspirator in existential dilemmas.
Each of them, in their unique and quietly rebellious ways, has helped me sit with one important question: What does it truly mean to be human—and humane?]