A Gandhi kin with tips on better, healthy living

A renowned diabetologist based in Mumbai, not purely because of his illustrious lineage but also because of the unorthodox approach he has adopted.

Diabetologist Anand Gokani

There is a sports analogy that Anand Gokani, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, uses to help explain his shift from being a doctor who spends long clinic hours dispensing medicines to one that prioritises preventive measures through stress management sessions and week-long workshops.

He is a renowned diabetologist based in Mumbai, not purely because of his illustrious lineage but also because of the unorthodox approach he has adopted.

“During the first few years of my practice, I felt as though I was standing as a wicket-keeper, just waiting for the batsman to get bowled out.”

He felt the need to be more proactive to stem the exponential rise in the number of patients getting diagnosed with diabetes — a disease strongly associated with increase in stress and poor lifestyle. And the root cause of stress was often a lack of focus and there being too many distractions.

Dr. Gokani was here in the city this week, after attending a book release function at Kochi.

He began taking stress-management classes for groups of corporate employees when he realised that the disease was being diagnosed at a much younger age.

So he decided that intervention at the school level was necessary. It was in 1999 that he ‘experimentally’ took children from the Cathedral and John Connon School to an ashram in the outskirts of the city for a five-day camp.

“The children became ‘Socially Useful Productive Workers’,” he says, describing the kind of work the high-school students are made to do in addition to the team-building, leadership, and goal-setting exercises. The workshop turned out to be a proven formula that he continues to carry out in schools and colleges in Mumbai. Dr. Gokani’s talks do often explore values upheld by his great-grandfather, namely hard-work, honesty and time management.

“From when I was born, I was indoctrinated with the principles that governed his life because that was dinner conversation at home,” he says. His grandfather was the only son of Gandhi who lived with the Mahatma.

The root cause of stress is often a lack of focus, says Dr. Gokani