Ann and me had the privilege of speaking at the TOUCH conference for Christian medical students and doctors at Vishakapatnam in August 2025. Our thanks to Dr. Ragasudha and her team for organizing this conference and for their hospitality. The theme of the conference was “Live As You Are Called”.
I gave a talk on the topic, “Stock-taking and Planning for the future”. We live out our lives doing the things we want and soon realise that most of our time is spent. It is essential that we periodically take stock of our lives, ask God to examine us and then take steps for the remaining days of life – that they may be fruitful and acceptable in God’s sight. We lived at the Makunda Christian Hospital in Assam for nearly 30 years – years of challenge as well as blessing. Verses from the Bible were a source of inspiration and instruction to us. I have spoken from the lessons we learnt from some of these verses and stories from our life.
Please click on the link below to listen to my talk.
May our lives be well-planned and a blessing to many.
After nearly 30 years at the Makunda Christian Leprosy and General Hospital, Ann and me moved to the Christian Medical College at Vellore in 2022. Our work changed from intensive hospital activity – surgeries, patients, ultrasound scans and managing administrative work to talking to students and faculty in a large medical college and visiting many mission hospitals. As we engaged with many young people on the college campus, God brought to remembrance our own experiences in our youth as well as our experience working with school and college students in later years.
In February 2023, Ann was invited by the students staying at CMC’s Fitch Memorial Women’s Hostel to speak at their Special Service 2023 on the topic, “Being Undefiled”. How can a young person living in today’s world be undefiled by the many bad things that happen in it? How do we choose the right company, be ever vigilant about the subtle messages that people send, stay away from temptation, heed God’s soft voice while not allowing the voices of the world to overcome it and purpose in our hearts to remain undefiled?
She spoke from many illustrations in the Bible and explained how these stories from Biblical days are still relevant today and how we can use the many lessons learnt to be the people that God wants us to be. This is a regular chapel service with songs, prayers and announcements. Ann’s message starts at 26:15 (apologies for short periods of audio interruption in the recording).
After nearly 30 years at the Makunda Christian Leprosy and General Hospital, Ann and me moved to the Christian Medical College at Vellore in 2022. Our work changed from intensive hospital activity – surgeries, patients, ultrasound scans and managing administrative work to talking to students and faculty in a large medical college and visiting many mission hospitals – to observe and learn from as well as assess and advise. Many experiences from Makunda (including painful ones) became blessings as we could speak from personal experience to people who were going through the same difficulties.
In April 2023, I was invited to speak at the CMC College Chapel and chose one of my favorite passages from the Bible – Hebrews 11:1 to 12:2 and spoke on the topic of Faith. Faith is essential for a living relationship with God. We should be willing to see through His eyes at the world around us, listen to His instructions and receive strength and encouragement to carry out the work that is entrusted to us – all done by faith, knowing that inspite of our weaknesses, seemingly impossible situations would be overcome by faith in an all-powerful yet loving God.
In this message, I talk about faith from the passage in Hebrews with illustrations from great Biblical characters and some stories from my life. This is a regular chapel service with songs, prayers and announcements. My message starts at 26:54
After nearly 30 years at the Makunda Christian Leprosy and General Hospital, Ann and me moved to the Christian Medical College at Vellore in 2022. Our work changed from intensive hospital activity – surgeries, patients, ultrasound scans and managing administrative work to talking to students and faculty in a large medical college and visiting many mission hospitals – to observe and learn from as well as assess and advise. Many experiences from Makunda (including painful ones) became blessings as we could speak from personal experience to people who were going through the same difficulties.
In October 2022, I was invited to speak on the topic, “Prayer and Revival” at the CMC College Chapel. Prayer or ‘communing with God’ is an important element of Christian life – it enables us to see through God’s eyes at the world around us, listen to His instructions and receive strength, wisdom and encouragement to complete the tasks given to us.
In this message, I talk about prayer and its effect on revival with some examples from my life. This is a regular chapel service with songs, prayers and announcements. My message starts at 31.45
I had written two previous blog-posts on my experience with biodiversity documentation ( All things bright and beautiful ) 1 and some sample photos ( All things great and small) 2. Following on with the song by Cecil Frances Alexander, I have named this post after the third line of the song:
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The Lord God made them all
As I had mentioned in an earlier post, my interest in biodiversity documentation arose from suffering a myocardial infarction in 2008 3 – a reminder that some of the painful and difficult experiences in our lives are permitted by God to lead us into a new direction or introduce us to something new that He wants us to experience.
After nearly 30 years at the Makunda Christian Leprosy & General Hospital in Assam, my wife Ann and I have moved to the Christian Medical College, Vellore as consultants to the Missions Department. Our work involves visiting mission hospitals across the country. On most of these visits, we get up early in the morning to walk around the campus of the hospital that we are visiting or surrounding areas to document the biodiversity of that location. This has enabled me to upload a growing number of observations after leaving Makunda to iNaturalist 4 – I have over 20,000 observations of nearly 3000 species on this website from India at present and lead the observers from the country 5. This is a map of the location of my observations from India (till May 2023):
Over the years, I developed a deep curiosity about all living things. This led to photographing everything that I saw, identifying them and learning about them. It led to publication of articles and the writing of short chapters and a growing understanding of God’s wise and wonderful natural world.
In November 2022, I was invited to speak on “Biodiversity Documentation and Research” – a part of the “Nature Talks” series at the Christian Medical College. A recording of this talk can be viewed by clicking on the link below. Please note that there were some internet disruptions during the talk and you can skip over the section between 25.50 and 29.50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9XVPXJFu-I
I became interested in this activity when I was 44 years old and I am surprised at the power of our God-given brains that enable us to learn something new and do well at it inspite of the passage of time. I did all this work without taking leave from my busy work as a surgeon at Makunda – on early mornings and late nights. I hope that those who listen develop an interest in the world around them and marvel at the creations of a wise and wonderful God.
The Azim Premji Foundation (1) was started in 2001 by Mr. Azim Premji, Chairman of Wipro (2) and India’s top philanthropist to promote primary education in the country. Wipro is one of India’s leading information technology companies and Mr. Azim Premji was the first Indian to sign up to the Giving Pledge (3), a campaign led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
In 2020, when the first Covid wave struck India, many hospitals were overwhelmed. The Azim Premji Foundation stepped into the breach and funded several hospitals in remote rural places to combat the pandemic and stay afloat in the face of severe adversity (4). Makunda was one of the hospitals that was privileged to benefit from this initiative by the Foundation.
When we started our partnership, Mr. Narayan Krishnaswamy (Director – Human Resources at the Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives) took the extra step of understanding the work at Makunda. After a few interviews, he decided to write our story in the form of a cartoon strip in a publication brought out by the Foundation called “The Dispatch” to motivate young people to consider a life of rural service.
Ann and me are privileged to have our story told in this format by such an eminent Foundation. We thank Mr. Narayan Krishnsawamy and the creators of the cartoon strip, Mr. Bijoy Venugopal (Script) and Mr. Tadam Gyadu (Art) for the beautiful way in which they have brought out our story – we pray that it will inspire those who read it, bring glory to God and lead some to a journey of faith like the one that we were privileged to embark on. May God bless Mr. Azim Premji and all the staff of his companies and the Azim Premji Foundation and continue to make them a blessing to many.
I was introduced to Dr. Vijayalakshmi Bhatia, Paediatric Endocrinologist and Professor of Endocrinology at the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI), Lucknow last year by Dr. Cijoy Kuriakose, Endocrinologist at the Christian Fellowship Hospital at Oddanchatram, in Tamil Nadu, where I had the privilege of working as a junior doctor between 1987 and 1990.
After email exchanges and a phone conversation, Dr. Bhatia invited me to speak to the DM and MCh (super-specialty postgraduate medical course) students at the SGPGI on Community Outreach, in her words, “to inform the participants that there are other ways to look at patient care than the straight-jacketed multispecialty hospital background they are used to and empower them to think of patients against the background of their family, society and environment”.
The talk was given in August 2021 and has been uploaded to the National Medical College Network – National Telemedicine Portal (Telemedicine Division) at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India: https://nmcn.in/video_list.php
I thank Dr. Cijoy Kuriakose for introducing me and Dr. Vijayalakshmi Bhatia for inviting me to talk about the story of our work at Makunda. We pray that the talk will create awareness of the situation in needy parts of the country, especially among the poor and marginalized in remote rural areas.
The video of the talk can be viewed by clicking on the link below:
Christian mission hospitals today face a plethora of external and internal challenges. Some are flourishing inspite of the challenges, several have closed and many are just holding on.
In 1992, within a year of our marriage, my wife, Ann and me visited the Makunda Christian Leprosy & General Hospital in a remote rural part of Assam in northeast India. The hospital had been closed for the previous 10 years and faced severe problems that appeared almost insurmountable. We felt that God was leading us to join this hospital because it was in a remote rural thickly populated area with no other high-quality healthcare facility nearby – thereby having a high potential for transformational impact. We restarted medical work in March 1993 with a commitment to stay on till January 2022. (1) Today, Makunda is a thriving community bringing transformation in many areas, especially to the poor and marginalized.
How did a hospital with severe local problems and enormous challenges renew itself to become a transformer of many communities? It is all because of the grace of God and the hard work of numerous staff who joined us – especially those who had no obligation to do so and in the early years with all its difficulties.
Our main contribution to the work at Makunda was perseverance. Many mission-hospital workers give up too soon in the face of adversity – we simply stayed on, doing the best we could each day, plodding on till major changes started to happen. We also learnt to put ourselves in the shoes of the people we are called to serve as well as the people we had been given to work with. We thank God for each other – Ann and me complemented each other in our work, God had blessed each with an unique set of strengths and we played our roles, Ann with her gift of empathy and comfort and me with my gift of analysis and planning. As we go through Christian life, we yield ourselves to the Master, to be chipped and shaped into what He wants us to be, learning through trials and mistakes, becoming better each day. As a couple, Ann took on more of the soft role of prayer and personal involvement with people while I took on more of the hard role of being blunt and uncompromising when required. Both roles have their place in Christian management and must be administered in the correct doses.
A few days ago, I was invited by the Dr. Jyothsna M.J., Medical Superintendent of Unicorpus to speak to the “Healthcare Community Fellowship”. The Unicorpus Health Foundation was started in 2015 by 4 alumni of the Christian Medical College, Vellore and is today growing in many areas providing services to people in Hyderabad and beyond. I thank them for inviting me – may God bless their work and make them a blessing to many.(2)
Through our 29-year experience at Makunda, we have been guided by verses from the Bible in developing the correct attitudes. Successful mission hospital work happens when we are able to interact with our staff, students, patients and partners in the correct manner – this brings people to us, to join us as staff or use our services as poor patients, thereby fulfilling the mandate for which we exist. In the short video that follows ( a recording of my talk to the Healthcare Community Fellowship), I have reflected on key Bible verses, “golden drops of wisdom” that guided us to the right attitudes to adopt and which led to the major changes at Makunda. May these verses be a source of wisdom, strength and encouragement to others working in missions across the world and help them become ‘salt and light’ to the communities they serve.
When I did my undergraduate medical studies in Madras (present-day Chennai) in the early 1980s, I had the privilege of attending the St. Andrew’s Church (The Kirk). There, I met Pastor David Singh with whom I had many long talks over several years. He was one of my early mentors and introduced me to community health work at the church’s community health program at Thirupalaivanam village. Many years later (in 2007), Ann and me met him again in Richmond, Virginia where he was pastoring a church. This resulted in him visiting us in Makunda and to several years of partnership between his church and organization in the USA with our hospital – yearly staff and student retreats as well as financial support to the expansion of the hospital’s work in obstetrics and paediatrics.
The St. Andrew’s Church (fondly called the Kirk) was built by Scottish missionaries and has a rich legacy over 200 years. Its building and architecture are unique and many great men and women were associated with it over the two centuries of its existence. A brief account of its work has been presented as a documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=780_668IGG0 – further details of the church and its ministry can be found on its website: https://www.thekirk.in/index.php
As part of the Bicentenary Celebrations of the church, March 2021 was dedicated as “Healing Month” with sermons centered around the healing ministry of the church. Ann and me were privileged to be invited to sing/speak at the morning service (with the theme verse John 15:16) on the 14th of March 2021. I used this opportunity to talk about my association with the church, share a personal testimony and challenge healthcare professionals and the church to missionary service. Ann and me thank the pastor and the church committee for inviting us to speak at this great church on “Medical Missions – Journeys in Faith”.
Mission hospitals were established by the church in remote and needy parts of the world where they transformed healthcare, bringing life and healing to numerous poor people who had no other options. Unfortunately, a large number are sick today and many have closed. We need a new impetus to healing sick hospitals and starting new ones in areas of need. May God place this vital burden on the hearts of church elders and the congregation so that the medical ministry of the church is a blessing to many. May young men and women in our churches today consider medical missionary work as a part of their career when God puts them into healthcare courses.
This video is made by the media team of the church and starts with organ prelude, worship led by my college junior Dr. Anita Chelliah and welcome by the Pastor, Rev. Isaac Johnson with announcements and introduction at 24:27 by the Secretary of the church and my school classmate, Mr. Dulip Singh. A short documentary on the “Healing Ministry in Chennai” is shown from 32:20 and my sermon starts at 52:47 with Ann singing the song, “His Eye is on the Sparrow” at 1:43:50. This is followed by intercessory prayer and the closing part of the program. You may listen to the entire program or parts of it by clicking on the link below:
In this post, I wish to introduce my blog-readers to Dr. Eby Daniel, a physician working at the Christian Fellowship Hospital at Rajnandgaon in the Chattisgarh state of India. He has started a podcast with each episode containing an interview with someone working in Christian missions and has called it “Chat with Eby”. There are also other playlists containing Christian meditations, Mission hospital videos etc. – you can see all of them on his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9BiQMPpSkgIl2ecTtXJ8fg
I had the privilege of being interviewed by him in his latest podcast, responding to thought-provoking questions that are relevant to young medical (and other) people considering a career in missions.
In this interview, questions have been raised on several topics on which I have written earlier (references in brackets to earlier blog-posts and external links) including finding God’s will for our lives (1,2), early days at Makunda (3), strategic planning(4), the “Makunda Model” and poor-centric strategies (5,6), preventing “Mission Drift” (7), my experience with leprosy (8) and myocardial infarction (9), biodiversity documentation (10,11), choosing a life partner (12), excelling in studies (13) and concluding remarks on decisions relating to missions (14).
I hope that you will like listening to Eby’s channel and his interviews with other people – I’m sure that you will (like me) subscribe to his channel too. Please click on the video link after the following references to listen to this podcast containing Eby’s latest Chat – with me.
The Sparrow's Nest 