What is a mentor?

This is from an invited post I wrote on the Facebook group 'Learning General Surgery'.

During my residency at Maulana Azad Medical College, I was initially assigned to the unit of the head of the department, Dr TK Malik. The less said about that part of my residency, the better. However, I did have good second and third year residents from whom I learnt how to look after patients. Halfway through my second year, Dr Malik retired and a new unit was created with two Consultants, Dr Vinod Malik and Dr Ram Kaza. Being the most junior unit at the time, they had the Saturday emergency and were always short of staff. For a considerable period of time, there were no third year PGs, no first year PGs and no regular Senior Residents. There were, however, two second year PGs, Brundaban Nahak and me. Dr Vinod Malik and Dr Ram Kaza were gentle bosses, allowing us to figure out how to keep the day to day running of the unit going, putting up with the occasional bizarre things we did out of lack of immediate supervision in the emergency and teaching us their meticulous approach to surgery. Both have remained good friends and advisors across the rest of my career. Those were the years of film cameras and I don't think I have any photos with them.
After I finished my MS, not finding a senior resident position open to me at MAMC, I eventually found a position in the University College of Medical Sciences. I was in Dr VR Minocha's unit. He was also the head of the department. He was strict but very fair and an excellent administrator. I learnt a lot of Urology from him and Dr Sanjay Gupta, the other Consultant in the unit. Here I also encountered Dr PK Mishra, who after having done a PhD in GI Surgery at AIIMS had somehow ended up at UCMS. I was already interested in GI Surgery and he stoked my interest further by telling me about his days in AIIMS. He too has remained a good friend and advisor.
When, after 2 years, I got into the M Ch, GI Surgery at AIIMS, I encountered the trio of Dr TK Chattopadhyay, who was the head of the department and Dr Peush Sahni and Dr Girish Pande who were the two Consultants. They all had very unique personalities, Dr Chattopadhyay, mercurial and moody but very friendly when he got to know you, Dr Peush Sahni, calm, gently sardonic and an excellent teacher and Dr Girish Pande, savagely sarcastic with no tolerance for laziness but a deep empathy both for the patient and for us which he took care to hide until it was time to leave. All three were very good surgeons, Dr Chattopadhyay, well known for esophageal surgery, Dr Peush and Dr Girish revelling in hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery. They often came at night when we were doing challenging emergency cases, something I had not seen happening in MAMC or UCMS.
After I finished my M Ch, I decided that I wanted to learn to do a liver transplant. AIIMS was trying to start a liver transplant program but the first 4 attempts had not succeeded. Just before I finished my M Ch, I did a liver biopsy under local anesthesia on the patient which who would later go on to be the first successful liver transplant at AIIMS. However, all I saw of transplantation during my M Ch was one organ procurement during which I was occupied with breaking ice.
Since I had a wait of at least 2 years for the Transplant Fellowships (I would have to take the USMLE exams and then apply), I looked for a Research job and was lucky to be introduced to Dr Sanjeev Gupta. He was a Gastroenterologist who had decided to spend most of his time in basic research. I joined his lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and committed to two years of basic research. Sanjeev has one of the most fertile minds I have encountered. He would come up with new ideas for research projects almost before we could test the old ones. Those were most productive years and I enjoyed working with animals and cell cultures and with DNA and RNA and proteins. The lab was a sort of United Nations with post-docs from Japan, Italy, Germany, China, Korea, Taiwan, Jamaica. I'm still in touch with Sanjeev who is now Professor of Pathology and Medicine and holds the Eleazar and Feige Reicher Chair in Translational Medicine. Hopefully we can find ways to collaborate on research again.
I started my fellowship at the Thomas Starzl Transplantation Institute at an interesting time. Dr John Fung was the head of transplant (he would later move to the Cleveland Clinic but has remained in touch and helped me in many ways since). Dr Starzl was no longer operating but he was very involved in the liver transplant program. Trials were beginning of a tolerogenic protocol of immunosuppression. The protocol could only be used in living donor liver transplants as it required exposure of the recipient to donor antigen presenting cells a couple of weeks before transplant so everything had to be carefully scheduled. The living donor liver transplant program was being driven by Dr Amadeo Marcos, one of the pioneers of adult-to-adult living donor liver transplantation. Dr Starzl would attend the research meetings as well as the Pathology meetings at which the patient's liver biopsies were discussed. Sometimes he would visit the patients as well. Also there was Dr Kareem Abu-Elmagd, who headed the intestinal and multivisceral transplant program. Those were the busiest years of the program (he would also move to the Cleveland Clinc later) and between the adult and the pediatric programs, more than 50 intestinal or multivisceral transplants were being done every year. I have remained in touch with Dr Kareem since then and he advised us when we did the first living donor intestinal transplant in India.
I had interviewed with Dr Samiran Nundy on one of his visits to Boston (where his son was doing a residency in those days) and he had invited me to join the GI Surgery department at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.
The liver transplant program at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital was predominantly living donor. Dr Soin was running the program after Dr Subhash Gupta had moved to Apollo. I learnt the finer points of living donor liver transplantation from Dr Soin and from Dr Rahul Kakodkar and Dr Anand Ramamurthy who had been part of the program almost since its inception.
Dr Nundy is one of those rare mentors who takes pleasure in the success of those whom he has taught. When I did the first liver transplant as head of the unit after Dr Soin and most of the rest of the team had moved to Medanta, he was in the operating theatre, reassuring me "don't worry, if anything goes wrong, I'll take the blame." Fortunately, it went well.
Of all these mentors, I would single out Dr Starzl and Dr Samiran Nundy for the impact their proteges have had on the world of transplantation, all over the world and in India.

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