Biography
Bio of Professor Upendra Mohan Chowdhary
A Village Boy’s Journey
The idea of writing a book which would tell the stories from my life beginning from a village in India to becoming a Professor of Neurosurgery with having achieved the MBBS degree and a Master’s degree in surgery in India and then having higher neurosurgical training at elite neurosurgical departments in England, attaining Fellowships of two Royal Colleges of Surgeons going on to become accredited in the UK as a fully trained neurosurgeon. The journey till here needed considerable sacrifice and overcoming several obstacles such as leaving my home in India as well as my parents, grandfather, brothers and sisters and close friends. It also required ingenuity, adapting to different culture, climate and working environment after leaving the cosy life as a child among my extended well-to-do Zamindar family.
I was born on 1st August 1941 in Patna, Bihar, India as a British subject. The period between 1941 and independence of India in August 1947 and, then, new era of Indian self-governance led to tumulus changes in all aspects of Indian society. As I and the extended family were part of these major changes and as there are not that many people alive now who have undergone and observed these changes and evolution in all parts of life in India between 1941 and 1960s, I decided to describe this in my memoir as part of the stories from my journey through life.
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I left India, in 1967, with the determination to become a fully trained and accredited neurosurgeon. I achieved this with training at two premier institutions of neurosurgery in England. Due to strong racial and ethnic prejudice in UK I could not get a long-term permanent consultant’s position. Hence with the agreement of my fiancé we decided to go back to India and have a career there. We did this but it did not work out and we came back to England and subsequently went to Ireland.
I continued to face problems due to racial and ethnic discrimination in England and Ireland over next 6 years to obtain a permanent consultant position in neurosurgery in the UK or in Ireland. Thus, I decided, in 1982, to go to Saudi Arabia (a fundamentalist Muslim country) to continue with my professional career and to see if I can still continue to advance neurosurgical techniques and technology there. I, as a Hindu, had realised the possibility of facing major problems this time based on religion, but I was assured that this should not be a problem being in a highly regarded profession and doing a vital job which proved to be true. Between my two stints in Saudi Arabia, I came back to the UK for 9 years. After retirement at the age of 66 years I came back from Saudi Arabia to England for good and had a very flourishing and useful career as a neurosurgical medicolegal expert in civil cases of personal injury and clinical negligence till 2022.
From early 2020 onwards, with the Covid pandemic spreading, I started to think what I would do when if the medicolegal practice slowly dwindles as well as that I would be soon getting to be 80 years old and this and the Covid related restrictions may be a major barrier for solicitors to continue to instruct me in such cases.
I have been recounting anecdotes of my life to my friends and family from the time of my childhood in India and subsequent stay at various countries that I have spent my life in. Almost all of them said why do you not put it in a book as it will be very interesting, not only just as a story of your life but also your struggle to overcome the racial and ethnic prejudice in the UK and Ireland and your flourishing career in Saudi Arabia where I had not belonged to their religion and where one would have expected much more discrimination but that did not happen there. I had a very good academic and professional career in Saudi Arabia where I had established very advanced neurosurgical practice at three major Saudi institutions over a total period of 15 years. I, also, established advanced postgraduate education and certification programme approved by the Royal Colleges of Surgeons. In addition, I changed various major clinical processes such as determination of criteria of brain death, getting Brachial Block type anaesthesia over the right upper limb before the judicial chopping of the right hand and many other things which were related to their religion and their way of life and way of thinking in Saudi Arabia. I had to be very careful in carrying out these clinical projects due to religious sensitivity with me being a non-Muslim.
Slowly this idea of writing a memoir became attractive to me. From early 2020, I started dictating what I thought would be parts of a memoir starting from my life since my infancy including ancestral details related to my grandfather and great grandfather etc. along with the major societal and economic changes that I had observed from the pre-independence to post-independence India. I realised within a few months that if I had to do justice to this story of my journey from my village to become a fully trained neurosurgeon trying to break the barrier of racial prejudice among senior physicians and surgeons in the United Kingdom and Ireland and a considerable degree of success in advancing neurosurgical, neurological and neuroscientific advances in Saudi Arabia this story should be written as a multi-volume memoir.
From 2007 onwards I became very involved in medicolegal work as an expert in neurosurgery. I have done my best to help the injured patients, who are known as clients by the solicitors and barristers, so that even though the justice may be delayed (and usually has been delayed!), these people would get adequate monetary compensation through the British legal system so that they can rebuild their lives as much as possible even after considerable interval between the incident and the final settlement. All this consolidated in my mind that a multi-volume memoir would be more appropriate as there are several themes that run through my life story and journey from my village to becoming professor of neurosurgery. Hence, around early 2020, after some thinking, I decided that a memoir would be the best way to put my life journey and life story. I had realised that it would not be possible to do it one or even two volumes and after quite a bit of thought I have decided that my memoir was going to be in three volumes.
My aim in writing my life story as memoir shows that with will power, persistence, knowledge, ingenuity and moral integrity how a village boy from India achieved a life-long ambition to become a professor of brain and spinal injury and helped thousands of patients and has continued, even in 2022, at the age of 81 years to work towards helping injured patients due to accident or due to clinical negligence to get adequate monetary compensation through English justice system which has many flaws and limitations still in 2022. I also believe that I put as a narrative as stories from my life which began in the era of Quit India movement of 1942 and continued through major socio-economic changes during the post-independence period in India and then further through my life journey in England, Ireland, Saudi Arabia. In these books. I have also depicted the spectrum of Indian economic, structural and societal changes, the role of neurosurgery in shaping lives of thousands of patients that I treated and the social, religious and cultural pictures that I had observed in previous 80 years.
There are numerous stories of innovations in saving lives and limbs by learning and use of evolving modern neurosurgical techniques and technology where I have not only described the life-changing events of several neurosurgical patients with use of modern technique and technology in various divergent countries, but have also depicted the social, economic and cultural aspect of life in these diverse countries and the courage and fortitude of numerous of my patients when faced with life-changing diseases.
