It was already evening when they arrived, and I sensed a good feeling. The light had softened, retreating gently from the edges of objects, as though the day itself wished to listen to what came next. Dr. Gangadhar Sunkara came with Dr. Chinnababu Sunkavalli—both close friends, healthcare researchers, and men marked by that particular stillness one notices in those who have committed their lives to a cause larger than personal interests. Though immensely busy people, they carried no sense of hurry with them, no insistence on importance—only an unspoken gravity, an awareness that their work announced itself.

Dr. Sunkara, a pharmaceutical scientist by training and Global Program Head at Novartis in East Hanover, New Jersey, spoke softly. A native of Andhra Pradesh, trained at the University of Nebraska Medical Center for his PhD and at Fairleigh Dickinson University for his MBA, he had been with Novartis since 2002—yet none of these credentials seemed to matter. What lingered instead was his attentiveness—the way his gaze rested not on abstractions but on people who exist beyond the confines of Novartis’ world-class laboratories and factories, and who suffer a plethora of maladies.

Dr. Sunkavalli, a robotic cancer surgeon and developmental therapeutics researcher, listened with the ease of someone accustomed to standing at the edge between end-stage despair and hope. His silences were not absences but shelters—spaces in which feelings could flow without interruption. Years of working with cancer patients had refined in him a rare equilibrium: technical mastery tempered by emotional restraint, precision softened by compassion.

I published Live for a Legacy, centred on Dr. Sunkavalli’s career, in 2023, and the book has quietly found its place in the world—a live example of becoming. In the three years since its publication, it has become something of a minor classic. Not because it deals with jargon and clichés about cancer, but because it presents what patients have endured and what doctors struggled with. Dr. Sunkavalli’s presence radiates the belief that a life, when aligned with purpose, becomes divine.

Together, Dr. Sunkara and Dr. Sunkavalli embody a distinctly modern form of service-oriented science: advanced yet unpretentious, globally informed yet locally rooted, precise in method yet profoundly human in intent. They do not speak of impact as an ambition; they live it as a responsibility. One senses that their science is not something they do, but something they are—carried quietly, like an inner compass, always pointing toward service.

As tea was poured and sipped, Dr. Sunkara began speaking of leprosy—not as a statistic, but as memory. During his graduation days in Warangal, he had encountered leprosy patients directly, not through textbooks but through touch, proximity and disciplined compassion. His teacher, Prof. M. C. Prabhakar, would collect nasal secretions and mucosa from patients and have students study Mycobacterium leprae under the microscope. Long before PCR testing entered routine diagnostics, they perfected early nasal assessment skills using nasal swabs for acid-fast bacilli staining.

Dr. Sunkara spoke of how the disease often announces itself quietly—through the nose before the skin—through obstruction, crusting, or unexplained epistaxis. They learned to recognise early invasion of the nasal mucosa and to intervene clinically, not merely to treat infection, but to interrupt transmission before stigma could take hold. It was science practised like listening—attentive, patient, exact—the way one imagines a sthitaprajna might be: balanced, unmoved by rhetoric.

“Was leprosy a disease of poverty?” I asked.

He paused.

“While the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae causes the disease itself,” he said, “the conditions associated with poverty act as significant risk factors for both acquiring the infection and experiencing adverse health outcomes, including permanent disabilities.”

Then another pause, longer, weighted with the gravity of lived consequence.

“A devastating consequence of leprosy,” he continued, “is the intense social stigma and discrimination. People abandon their professions, lose livelihoods and become isolated. Fear forces them to hide symptoms, which leads to further transmission and deeper poverty.” In that moment, the disease seemed less microbial than moral—a slow corrosion of dignity, fed by isolation.

The next day, this thought followed me to the Sivananda Rehabilitation Home in Kukatpally, Hyderabad. Spread across fifty-one acres, the campus breathed a rare spaciousness, as though the land itself were offering respite. Founded in 1958 by Rani Kumudini Devi, the first woman mayor of Hyderabad, in memory of her spiritual preceptor, Swami Sivananda, the institution has, for decades, provided care, treatment and rehabilitation for leprosy and tuberculosis patients—medicine intertwined with shelter, physiotherapy with a sense of belonging.

I met her son, Raja Vikram Dev Rao, and the legendary reconstructive surgeon, Dr. S. Ananth Reddy, who has made the hospital his home and performed over 6,000 surgeries there.  As we spoke, another story surfaced, as stories often do, uninvited yet necessary. Looking at the picture of Swami Sivanand adorning the wall, I mentioned the one about a young Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam arriving at Swami Sivananda’s ashram in 1958, rejected by the Air Force Selection Board at Dehradun. In Wings of Fire, Dr. Kalam recounts how Swamiji dissolved his despair with words that redirected destiny itself:

“What you are destined to become is not revealed now, but it is predetermined. Forget this failure, as it was essential to lead you to your destined path. Search, instead, for the true purpose of your existence. Become one with yourself, my son! Surrender yourself to the wish of God.” (p.19)

History, of course, followed Dr. Kalam—not towards the cockpit but towards missiles, the presidency and an icon of integrity and moral authority. One cannot help wondering how many destinies, misread as failures, are quietly redirected in institutions like this.

Standing there, I felt the presence of both Swami Sivananda and Dr. Kalam, not as memory but as atmosphere. Goosebumps appeared. Beside me sat Jaya, a 22-year-old intern from the United States, spending four months working with cancer patients under Dr. Sunkavalli, here on the other side of the planet. I looked at her and said—half in jest, half in awe—who knew she might become a Madame Curie of the future?

Today, when one speaks of eradicating leprosy, the language of science is no longer tentative or speculative. It is calm, measured and quietly confident. Multidrug therapy has rendered the disease curable; early detection interrupts disability before it can inscribe itself upon the body; genomic insights reveal a bacterium already biologically exhausted—slow to adapt, surviving more by legacy than by strength. Around this knowledge has grown a lattice of intelligence—digital surveillance, AI-assisted forecasting, integrated public-health systems—that narrows the pathways of transmission until they become rare, almost incidental.

I presented Dr Sunkara a copy of Dr Sanjay Kumar’s book Village Republic 2.0 that I co-authored. The book issues a clarion call to apply NextGen Biology and AI to bioresources. A renowned plant physiologist, Dr Sanjay Kumar, says, “In the high-altitude deserts of the Lahaul-Spiti Valley in Ladakh, the Sowa-Rigpa tradition uses plants such as Sea Buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides), Himalayan Monkshood (Aconitum heterophyllum), and Rose Root (Rhodiola rosea) to gently soothe skin ulcers and nerve pain. Along with Indian Wormwood (Artemisia brevifolia) and Blue Poppy (Meconopsis aculeata), these botanicals offer vital immune support and comfort. They serve as supportive companions to Multi-Drug Therapy (MDT), which remains the essential medical cure for leprosy.” Who knows, a deeper examination may even reveal a leprosy-curing molecule?

It is here that the quiet wisdom of Swami Sivananda returns, reminding us that life does not unfold according to our anxieties, but according to a deeper purpose, discernible only through surrender and service. It is here, too, that the journey of Dr. Kalam stands as a testament that what appears as rejection or suffering may, in fact, be redirection towards a higher calling. What seems like an interruption is often guidance—the shepherd’s poke that saves the sheep from wandering into  danger. The final work is not merely to cure a disease but to heal a society. This is the accurate crossing—Science, Service, and the Long Goodbye to Leprosy. May God bless the kind-hearted, socially-conscious people who understand and work for the larger purpose of human life.