Dr Sanjay Kumar. We know him as the chief Consultant Neuro and Spine Surgeon at Apollo Hospital and arguably the city’s best neurosurgeon. While his exploits with the scalpel have taken him all over the world; at home in Ranchi he has brought the world to his doorstep through his secret romance with stamps.
The moment one asks about his ‘hobby’, the reaction is exuberant, as he travels down memory lane recalling his roller-coaster ride with stamps.As little a boy of class three, he was fascinated, as children are, by the colourful little square of paper on the envelopes addressed to his father. This led him to start collecting some of these envelopes. At many occasions his parents told him that collecting envelopes was a waste of time, but his fascination didn’t waver and he continued collecting.
“Fearing my parents’ wrath, I hid my collection in my books. But they surfaced thanks to a fete in class VIII when I was in St. Paul’s School. Students were asked to present their collections. Some displayed their coin collection or other exotic objects. I didn’t participate,” recalls Kumar. “Not participating left me disturbed. I asked among my friends what else could be collected and presented, besides coins. One of my friends Shareed Ghosh, now a teacher in Begusarai, suggested collecting leaves. I tried that for some time. But my love for stamps kept nagging me, and after the fete I resumed collecting stamps, albeit without my parents’ knowledge,” he says.
Initially, he collected only Indian stamps till the late ‘70s, when in class 9, a friend’s father gave him a Deutsche Mark stamp from Germany. “I realised that I could collect foreign stamps too. But I still didn’t know the name of my hobby—philately!” says Kumar smiling at his childhood naiveté. His parents soon found out that he was pursuing his hobby, and admonished him to concentrate on studies, as a “hobby can be pursued only by well-educated people and not students like me. And again stamps were left behind in the academic race,” he remembers, leafing through his trove.
His Chemistry professor at Science College, Patna, R.S. Gandhi, rekindled the spark for stamps in him. “I heard he was a nationally- famed philatelist, that he collected stamps, just as I had been doing. And my hobby restarted,” he says. His prize-winning streak in philately started in his first year at Patna Medical College Hospital in 1985. Till then he had collected around 3,000 envelopes. But stamps were not retrieved from them and the envelopes were in disarray.
Just days before his first college annual function, he decided to display his collection and went home to gather his treasure from its hiding places in old books and boxes of his childhood. “I wanted to make my presentation different. So I decided, rather than putting stamps randomly, I would tell a story through thematic presentation of the stamps and make a presentation of stamps relevant to medical sciences. I stayed-up the entire night before the exhibition putting different medical stamps in varied permutations and combinations on graph papers till every sheet told a story. That night was, perhaps, the most productive night of my life,” stated Kumar with a hint of pride.
Each of the 12 pages he had made told a story. The first page talked about the history of medical science in India, headed by a stamp on Dhanwantari-- the Hindu God of medicine--on the first page. In the subsequent pages, he had depicted types of medicines, theories of the diseases like supernatural theory of diseases, systems of medicines such as ancient systems, Unani, Ayurveda, Homeopathy and then Modern System-- all these with stamps. “Not only was I adjudged first, but the judges said they had never seen such an ‘innovative presentation of medical stamps in any medical college across the country’. I won in all four years,” he says.
But what really has this “costly hobby”—as he himself calls it—given him. “Philately has given me my motto in life. The last stamp of my collection presented in PMCH carried the line ‘learning never ends’. And since 1985, this has been my guiding line. All my lectures and presentations end not with the usual ‘Thank You’ but with ‘learning Never Ends.’”