The Man Who Stayed After the Meeting Ended

On a winter evening in Dehradun, when mist hangs over Rajpur Road and the last patients have left the clinic in Raipur, Dr. Dipak Dhar Choudhury still sits with a file open. Colleagues call him Dr. D.D. Choudhury. Some write it Chawdhary. In IMA circles he is simply “D.D. sir” — the doctor who was President of IMA Dehradun in 2001–2002, and who, long after that year, never quite left the association’s workbench.

The story does not begin in Dehradun.

It begins on 29 October 1951, in Shillong. A boy grows up in the Northeast, finishes school in Silchar in 1969, and takes his B.Sc. and MBBS from Gauhati University. There is no public legend of a famous teacher or a sudden calling. There is only the ordinary fact that he became a doctor and then went where doctors were scarce.

Nagaland first. State health services, 1980 to 1983, then again from 1984 to 1987. In between, a year with the ITBP. The hills taught him what a city OPD never could: that medicine is often a matter of reaching people before the road gives out. In 1983 the ITBP’s Director General gave him an appreciation award. In Mokokchung the Rotary Club named him Best Community Worker. He trained later as a family-welfare lead trainer, an STI master trainer, a breastfeeding coordinator. He liked work that did not look glamorous on a visiting card.

In 1987 he opened a clinic in Raipur, Dehradun. Patients came with fever, pregnancy, childhood coughs, the quiet worries of a valley turning into a city. At home in Arya Nagar he was a husband and the father of one son. At IMA House he began the long climb that would define him more than any single prescription.

Joint Secretary in 1994. Treasurer the next year. Honorary Secretary for three years running. Junior Vice President. President Elect. Then, in 2001–2002, President of IMA Dehradun. During his secretary years the branch collected Best Branch awards from the state and from Headquarters. Someone once told him the trophies looked well on a shelf.

“They look better,” he is remembered as saying, “if the village camp still happens when no one is watching.”

Then the map itself changed.

On 9 November 2000 Uttarakhand became a state. Doctors who had belonged to IMA Uttar Pradesh woke up inside a new geography. On 28 January 2001, in Dehradun, they formed the IMA Uttaranchal State Branch. Dr. Mahabir Singh became the first President. Dr. D.D. Choudhury became the first Honorary State Secretary.41

There must have been a meeting that week when someone asked whether a small hill state could carry an association of its own.

“We already do,” he would have answered, in the manner of a man who has filed more minutes than speeches. “We only have to write it down and keep doing it.”

He kept doing it for nearly twenty years, until December 2020. In December 2024 he took the secretary’s chair again — State Coordinator, CWC member, past National Vice President, back at the table as if the work had merely paused. A newspaper put it simply: he pioneered the state branch in 2001.4

The blood bank became the other half of his story. He was a founder life member of the IMA Blood Bank Society of Uttarakhand, Joint Secretary, then Honorary Secretary from 2013. The bank’s mission is blunt: no patient in and around Dehradun should die for want of safe, voluntary blood. He spoke once of linking IMA blood banks across states so a donor card from one place could help a stranger in another. Accidents on the highways had taught him the price of the golden hour.

National IMA noticed the same stubborn consistency. Central Council. Dean of the College of General Practitioners. National Chairman of Blood Bank. Director of the Hospital Board of India. Ethics. Anti-quackery. In 2019–20 he served as National Vice President. In July 2023, in Patna, Justice Rajeev Ranjan handed him the Dr A.K.N. Sinha IMA Rashtriya Samman. The award was not for a famous surgery. It was for a lifetime of holding an organisation together.He is now national President IMA INDIA

He is still a general physician. That is the part of the story people outside IMA sometimes miss. The man who sat on national committees still sees patients in Raipur. The man who built a state branch still answers to the title that fits him best: doctor.

If you met him after a long IMA meeting, the conversation would not sound like a citation.

“President is one year,” he might say, closing the file. “The branch is every year. Blood is every night. The rest is only names on a letterhead.”

That is the story of Dr. D.D. Chawdhary of Dehradun: not a man who passed through the president’s chair, but a man who stayed after the meeting ended.