Finding the seizure, even when the scan looks normal.

I trained at MKCG Medical College, Berhampur, and at NIMHANS, Bengaluru, and have spent twenty-eight years on the faculty at AIIMS — one of the busiest operative environments anywhere in the world. A single outpatient clinic sees forty to fifty patients. Together we perform roughly 130 operations and 30 Gamma Knife procedures each week. A working day that begins at eight in the morning and seldom ends before nine at night is the ordinary rhythm of this work.

From that sustained volume, over nearly three decades, has come an operative experience of more than 25,000 surgeries. A load of this size might be expected to leave room for little else. I chose to treat it as a foundation rather than a limit: the breadth of clinical material it brought, and the discipline it demanded, are exactly what made the research possible.

Everything below is bound together by one idea — translation: carrying each clinical problem from mechanism and biomarker through to a new operation, an affordable device, or a definitive trial.

The department was founded in March 1965 by Prof. P. N. Tandon and Prof. A. K. Banerji. On independent international assessment (EduRank, 2026) it now ranks first in India, second in Asia and eleventh in the world in neurosurgery. That is the measure of a team, not of any one person.

A post-doctoral fellowship at UCLA showed me what a complete, multidisciplinary programme could achieve. I returned resolved to build one at home — writing the grant as Principal Investigator for the Centre of Excellence for Epilepsy and as Co-Principal Investigator for the MEG Resource Facility, which together established the country's first such centre and the first magnetoencephalography facility in India. The aim I set for it was to work out the mechanisms of epileptogenesis and to propose newer paradigms of management through a systems-biology approach — magnetoencephalography, cellular electrophysiology, immunohistochemistry and advanced brain mapping, including electrical source localisation, in one place.

Around them sit translational-neuroscience and molecular-diagnostic laboratories, and a programme that unites neurologists, radiologists, physicists, pathologists, geneticists, engineers and data scientists in a single team. A generation of residents, fellows and doctoral scholars trained here now lead departments across India and abroad.

That work has been carried outward as well — to Nepal, Rabat, Tel Aviv and Surabaya. With Prof. Manjari Tripathi I co-led the first-ever ILAE Surgical Mentorship Programme, hosted at Dr Soetomo General Academic Hospital in Indonesia: four weeks of online teaching and multidisciplinary case review, then an intensive fortnight on site in May 2024 — case conferences, hands-on workshops in electrocorticography, video-EEG and seizure semiology, and five operations performed alongside the local team. It was built for continuation rather than as a single visit, with monthly case reviews between Surabaya and New Delhi, and it helped seed Indonesia's first sustainable, indigenous epilepsy-surgery programme in a country of more than 270 million people.

Thirty-three years of teaching, and the part of the work I would least willingly give up. I am Chief of the Epilepsy and Functional Neurosurgery fellowship programme at AIIMS, and the department takes residents through the largest case exposure any centre can offer anywhere in the world.

I was taught this way myself. At NIMHANS, Bengaluru, I trained under stalwarts of the discipline — the late Prof. B. S. Das and Prof. B. A. Chandramouli. At AIIMS I was mentored by legends of Indian neurosurgery: Prof. P. N. Tandon and Prof. A. K. Banerji, who founded this department in 1965, and Prof. V. S. Mehta, Prof. A. K. Mahapatra and Prof. B. S. Sharma, who built it into what it is. Whatever I have been able to do rests on what they taught me.

A generation of residents, fellows and doctoral scholars trained here since now lead departments across India and abroad — which is the only measure of teaching that finally counts.