Dr. Kamal Bharti: Inspired By Life – Quite Literally

For most students, MAHE’s motto is aspirational. For Dr. Kamal Bharti, an MBA learner of MAHE Online, it is autobiographical.

Before every surgery, pilots and doctors share something fundamental in common: a checklist. It is not a sign of forgetfulness, but a ritual of intentionality. It ensures that nothing critical is left to chance. Every item ticked is an act of care.

Dr. Kamal Bharti, an anesthesiologist and current MBA student at Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), knows both worlds intimately. He has spent decades putting patients safely to sleep before surgery. And then, one day, the roles reversed. He became the patient — not by choice, but by the brutal randomness of a plane crash.

What follows is not just a student profile. It is a pre-flight checklist for a life rebuilt with greater wisdom, deeper empathy, and the rare clarity that only a second chance can bring.

CHECK 01: Confirm You Are Still Here

Most people are surprised when they first meet him. A “walking, talking war memorial,” he jokes, with the kind of self-deprecating humor that only the truly battle-tested can carry off convincingly. He survived an air crash and emerged not broken, but recalibrated.

But underneath the laughter lives a man who understands, more viscerally than most, what it means to count your breaths. Surviving a life-altering event does not hand you peace — it hands you a question: Now what?

For Dr. Kamal, the answer was not retreat. It was reinvention.

CHECK 02: Recalibrate Your Instruments

After the crash, everything looked different through the same eyes. The career he had built with precision and dedication — the carefully administered drugs, the monitored vitals, the patients who trusted him with their unconscious selves — took on new weight.

Resilience, he says, stopped being a word he used in professional contexts and became something he practised, the way you might practise a clinical skill — deliberately, repeatedly, under pressure. He learned to find clarity in chaos. He learned that fear and forward motion are not mutually exclusive.

And somewhere in that process, a new kind of ambition was born: not the ambition to accumulate credentials, but the ambition to become more capable, more useful, wiser.

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CHECK 03: Trust Is the Most Powerful Drug

Lying on an operating table, Dr. Kamal Bharti encountered the thing that no pharmacology textbook had ever adequately described: the sensation of surrendering your consciousness to a stranger.

The experience humbled him completely. He now speaks of those few moments before induction — when a patient’s eyes flicker with vulnerability — with the reverence of someone who has lived them from the other side. His communication with patients changed. His patience deepened. His empathy, once professional and measured, became something more personal.

He practices today with what he calls “the quiet strength of continuing” — a phrase that doubles as a philosophy.

CHECK 04: Add the MBA to Your Plate

When colleagues learned he was pursuing an MBA alongside his clinical career, reactions ranged from admiration to gentle bewilderment. Why would a senior anesthesiologist need a management degree?

For him, clinical excellence and organisational impact are not competing priorities — they are partners. He believes that a doctor who understands strategy, finance, and leadership can do far more for patients than one who stays confined to the four walls of an operation theatre. Healthcare systems need physician-leaders who speak both languages.

The MBA, in that sense, is not an addition to his identity. It is a logical extension of it.

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CHECK 05: Maintain Your Non-Pharmacological Therapies

Ask Dr. Kamal Bharti what keeps him grounded and the answer arrives with characteristic good humour: music, parties, soccer, cricket, and table tennis. He calls them his “non-pharmacological therapies” and he means it more literally than you might expect.

In a profession that demands relentless precision and carries the weight of lives, knowing how to step away is not a luxury. It is maintenance. The doctor who plays soccer on a Sunday is often a better doctor on Monday – not despite the detour, but because of it.

CHECK 06: Return Home with Fresh Eyes

Dr. Kamal Bharti’s relationship with MAHE began in 1996 as a dependent student anxious about exam fees and the cost of failure. Three decades later, he has returned as a professional whose fear of failing exams has been replaced entirely by something more valuable.

There is something quietly profound about an institution that can hold a student across the arc of an entire life. The MAHE of his student days gave him a foundation. The MAHE of today gives him a context, a place to situate everything he has learned and lived, and to translate it into leadership.

CHECK 07: Honour Your Second Chance

MAHE’s motto is “Inspired By Life.” For most students, it is an aspirational phrase. For Dr. Kamal Bharti, it is autobiographical.

“Inspired By Life isn’t just a motto for me — it’s a reminder.”

Everything he does now, the learning, the practicing, and the leading, is guided by what he describes as a renewed sense of purpose. The second chance that survival handed him is not something he wears lightly. He considers it a responsibility: to learn more sincerely, to serve more completely, to lead more humbly.

Lucky few get a second chance, he reflects. He intends to use his.

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CHECK 08: Know Your Alternate Flight Path

Every pilot files an alternate flight plan – a destination to divert to if conditions change. We asked Dr. Kamal Bharti about his:

It is the answer of a man who has always been drawn not to comfort, but to consequence. Both medicine and military service demand precision under pressure, decision-making when stakes are highest, and the willingness to place others’ welfare before your own. That he chose one over the other is perhaps less important than the fact that both paths were built on the same foundation: service.

CHECK 09: Redefine What ‘New Beginning’ Means

He was asked about “new beginnings”, the theme of a recent reflection exercise, and his answer quietly dismantled the cliché.

After experiencing what he calls “the true reset button” of life, new beginnings hold no drama for him. They are simply the next logical step. He embraces them with the calm of a man who has already survived the worst turbulence imaginable and landed, somehow, right-side up.

CHECK 10: Dedicate the Journey

When asked who he dedicates his MBA to, Dr. Kamal Bharti does not hesitate.

Behind every story of fortitude is usually a quieter one – a partner who held the world together while someone else put themselves back together. His wife, Dr. Meenakshi Dua, a gynaecologist and IVF specialist, and herself a KMC Manipal alumna, is woven through every chapter of this journey. Fittingly, two doctors who missed each other in 1996 as MBBS students and again in 2004 as postgraduates finally found each other as neighbours in staff quarters at KMC Manipal, proving that some stories take their time before they begin. The degree, when it comes, will belong to both of them.

CHECK 11: Transmit a Final Message

Every flight ends with a final transmission – a confirmation that the journey is complete and the lessons are logged. We asked Dr. Kamal Bharti for his message to anyone reading his story.

He signs off with a proverb he has lived: Fall down seven times. Stand up the eighth.

Pre-flight checklist complete. Cleared for takeoff.

MAHE Online continues to open its doors to extraordinary minds who carry extraordinary stories, a proof that the best MBA classrooms are filled not just with ambition, but with lived experience. Dr. Kamal Bharti didn’t just enrol in a programme; he brought an entire life’s curriculum with him.