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By:

Bhalchandra Chorghade

11 August 2025 at 1:54:18 pm

Healing Beyond the Clinic

Dr Kirti Samudra “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” This thought by Mother Teresa finds reflection in the life of Panvel-based diabetologist Dr Kirti Samudra, who has spent decades caring not only for her family but also thousands of patients who see her as their guide. As we mark International Women’s Day, stories like hers remind us that women of substance often shape society quietly through compassion, resilience and dedication. Doctor, mother, homemaker,...

Healing Beyond the Clinic

Dr Kirti Samudra “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” This thought by Mother Teresa finds reflection in the life of Panvel-based diabetologist Dr Kirti Samudra, who has spent decades caring not only for her family but also thousands of patients who see her as their guide. As we mark International Women’s Day, stories like hers remind us that women of substance often shape society quietly through compassion, resilience and dedication. Doctor, mother, homemaker, mentor and philanthropist — Dr Samudra has balanced many roles with commitment. While she manages a busy medical practice, her deeper calling has always been service. For her, medicine is not merely a profession but a responsibility towards the people who depend on her guidance. Nagpur to Panvel Born and raised in Nagpur, Dr Samudra completed her medical education there before moving to Mumbai in search of better opportunities. The early years were challenging. With determination, she and her husband Girish Samudra, an entrepreneur involved in underwater pipeline projects, chose to build their life in Panvel. At a time when the town was still developing and healthcare awareness was limited, she decided to make it both her workplace and home. What began with modest resources gradually grew into a trusted medical practice built on long-standing relationships with patients. Fighting Diabetes Recognising the growing threat of diabetes, Dr Samudra dedicated her career to treating and educating patients about the disease. Over the years, she has registered nearly 30,000 patients from Panvel and nearby areas. Yet she believes treatment alone is not enough. “Diabetes is a lifelong disease. Medicines are important, but patient education is equally critical. If people understand the condition, they can manage it better and prevent complications,” she says. For more than 27 years, she has organised an Annual Patients’ Education Programme, offering diagnostic tests at concessional rates and sessions on lifestyle management. Family, Practice With her husband frequently travelling for business, much of the responsibility of raising their two children fell on Dr Samudra. Instead of expanding her practice aggressively, she kept it close to home and adjusted her OPD timings around her children’s schedules. “It was not easy,” she recalls, “but I wanted to fulfil my responsibilities as a mother while continuing to serve my patients.” Beyond Medicine Today, Dr Samudra also devotes time to social initiatives through the Bharat Vikas Parishad, where she serves as Regional Head. Her projects include  Plastic Mukta Vasundhara , which promotes reduced use of single-use plastic, and  Sainik Ho Tumchyasathi , an initiative that sends Diwali  faral  (snack hamper) to Indian soldiers posted at the borders. Last year alone, 15,000 boxes were sent to troops. Despite decades of service, she measures success not in wealth but in goodwill. “I may not have earned huge money,” she says, “but I have earned immense love and respect from my patients. That is something I will always be grateful for.”

From Here to Humidity

Once famed for its seasons, Pune now has only two: hot and hellishly humid.


In 1969, The Beatles released ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ a lilting ode to warmth and renewal after “a long, cold, lonely winter.” For millions in Britain and the broader Anglosphere, the song captures the near-spiritual joy that accompanies the first rays of spring sunshine after months of gloom. To be British is, in part, to revere the sun as a guest who is fleeting, temperate and always welcome.


Today, in India, especially in Pune, that metaphor has curdled into something altogether more menacing. The sun no longer arrives as gentle deliverance but barges in like a houseguest who won’t leave, turns up the thermostat and unplugs the fan. Once famed for its moderate climate and four distinct seasons, Pune now finds itself baking under unrelenting heat, with humidity levels more appropriate for coastal cities than this inland plateau. The ‘Queen of the Deccan,’ perched on the leeward side of the Western Ghats, has become a pressure cooker - and nobody’s singing about it.


Its residents boasted of four well-behaved seasons and temperatures that gently dropped at night, permitting woollen shawls and steaming chai. That era is now relegated to nostalgia. In its place we have a relentless, humid inferno that stretches for nearly ten months of the year, culminating in brief, erratic interludes of rain or respite. Welcome to the new Pune, where summer files a restraining order against winter.


In recent weeks, mercury levels have breached 42°C, a threshold once deemed an aberration but now increasingly routine. Worse, the city has added a new meteorological torture to its arsenal: humidity.


In a place known for its dry heat, residents now suffer through 33°C that feels like 38°C. The numbers may seem minor, but the lived experience is punishing. Clothes cling. Tempers flare. Electricity bills soar. And all of this, it turns out, is a result not of planetary misfortune but of civic greed and ecological amnesia.


The science behind Pune’s descent into sweat-stained misery is straightforward and unflattering. Experts cite the ‘urban heat island effect,’ where concrete and asphalt trap heat like a pressure cooker lid as a leading cause.


The city’s rampant greyscaping has displaced its once-lush green and blue patches with glassy high-rises and manicured lawns. Rainfall, when it arrives, does so in torrential spurts, flooding the soil and saturating the air with evaporative moisture. The result is a city that is hot, humid and increasingly uninhabitable for parts of the year.


Microclimate studies show stark disparities even within the city. Affluent neighbourhoods like Koregaon Park enjoy leafy canopies and cooler microclimates, while densely built areas like Shivajinagar suffer the brunt of thermal intensification. Looming over all of this is the spectre of climate change which amplifies every local vulnerability.


The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) insists on seasonal normalcy, but reality keeps jumping the gun. This year’s monsoon, it predicts, will bring above-normal rainfall. But if recent trends are any guide, Punekars are likely to broil in humidity long before the first raindrops fall. Already, the monsoon has ‘unofficially’ hit Kerala earlier than expected, a sign that the atmosphere is no longer consulting bureaucratic calendars. In Pune, where the rains once arrived like clockwork in mid-June, their onset now fluctuates wildly, sometimes teasing in May, sometimes ghosting into July.


The consequences extend beyond mere discomfort. Prolonged heatwaves and unstable rain patterns threaten agriculture in the surrounding regions, stress water resources and strain public health infrastructure.


Worst of all, winter, which was once Pune’s pride, is now a cameo season. Where the city once enjoyed a crisp three-month interlude of cool air and clear skies, it now receives little more than a shrug. Climate data suggests that Pune is becoming a two-season city: ‘Hot’ and ‘Hotter with Humidity.’ It is a calendar with only two unbearable pages, both borrowed from Mumbai’s climatic misery.


Solutions exist, but they are inconvenient. Restoring urban green spaces, implementing sustainable construction codes, encouraging rainwater harvesting and taxing excessive concretisation would all help reverse the thermal tide. These obviously require political will and public patience, something even scarcer than shade in the summer.


In the meantime, Pune must accept a new identity: no longer regal and temperate, but flushed and feverish, its crown swapped for a sweatband.

(The writer is an independent journalist with a keen interest in environmental issues and urban ecology. Views personal)

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