As a child, Dr Natwar Sharma had a fierce spirit of enquiry. Raised in a Hindu Brahmin household, he questioned the idea of God one time too many, especially after his prayers to help alleviate the plight of the poor children in the neighbourhood had gone unanswered. Later—in what would have been considered a sacrilegious move by his family—he sought the help of his class teacher to secretly get himself baptised at the Catholic school, where he was studying. He even read the Bible from front to back in the hope that he would find answers to “why people suffer” “And yet, I wasn’t convinced,” Dr Sharma recalls now, in a telephonic interview from Kuwait, where he is currently enjoying a short sabbatical from his day job as associate professor in paediatrics and paediatric critical care at Saveetha Medical College Hospital, Chennai.

His initial days as resident doctor only made him probe deeper into the “whys and hows” of life. “I couldn’t bear to see the pain children were going through. I even considered quitting. But, then I realised that I could only help them if I was part of the system,” he says. Often, Dr Sharma would see “apparent anomalies” in his patients, which even science didn’t have an explanation for. He remembers this pair of identical twins, one of whom had been diagnosed with blood cancer. “Why did one catch the disease while the other was spared?” he asks, catching us off guard. “They had different souls,” he asserts, even before we can respond.