How do I continue to improve upon my craft?” I asked my professor and mentor Dr Ari Chacko over dinner. He was retiring from the Department of Neurological Sciences at the Christian Medical College in Vellore after having served it assiduously for over three decades. “You have to repeatedly watch your surgical videos,” interjected his teacher, Dr Mathew Chandy, who had helmed the same department for several years and whose home we were at for the feast. I used to do that with my father, himself a neurosurgeon, I reminisced. Ari, as everyone fondly calls him, continued the conversation: “You have to go back to every surgery and analyse every movement, and you’ll decipher for yourself how many of those steps were unnecessary. I’ve realised that with this approach, over the years, my movements, which might appear to be slow, have, in fact, become very purposeful.”

Revisiting him after several years of leaving his nest was a separate education in itself. When I first joined my training as a surgical toddler, it was he who taught me how to pee in the proverbial neurosurgical pot. Wetting one’s feet was equivalent to burning one’s fingers. Precision was key. Rigour in examining a patient, exactness in studying the scan, definiteness in performing the operation, and meticulousness in postoperative care and preparing a patient’s discharge summary were constantly imbibed every single day for every single patient. “Any time you try and cut corners, you’ll land up in a mess,” he used to say. And if ever he got away with it, he was reminded of what his witty mother used to tell him: “You have more luck than sense!”