In Surat, Gujarat, on 3 March 1939, a boy named Ashwin Balachand Mehta was born. He studied medicine at King Edward Memorial Hospital and Seth G.S. Medical College in Mumbai, collecting nineteen gold medals along the way, and chose the young specialty of cardiology at a time when heart disease was still largely managed with medicine alone.

In 1973 he performed India’s first cardiac catheterisation and angiography in newborn babies and introduced bundle electrography to the country. He later helped establish modern cardiology departments at Jaslok Hospital and L.T.M. Medical College, where he taught for more than twenty-five years. When angioplasty arrived, he was among the first in India to adopt and refine it. Over the decades he performed or supervised more than thirty-five thousand angioplasties and seventy-five thousand angiographies. He pioneered primary angioplasty for acute heart attacks, was among the first to implant drug-eluting stents, and performed the first trans-catheter aortic valve replacement in western India.

One young cardiologist, watching him work late into the evening, once asked, “Sir, after so many years, what still drives you?”

Ashwin answered with a quiet smile, “Every blocked artery is a life waiting to be restored. The day I stop feeling that urgency is the day I should stop.”

He served as President of the Cardiological Society of India and the Cardiovascular Society of India, trained generations of interventional cardiologists, and treated patients from every walk of life—including prime ministers and Bharat Ratna recipients—with the same careful attention. The nation recognised his work with the Padma Shri in 2004 and the Padma Bhushan in 2024, along with many other honours.

Even in his eighties Dr. Ashwin Balachand Mehta continues to teach, guide and care. From the pioneering catheter laboratories of the 1970s to the advanced interventional suites of today, he has spent more than five decades expanding what is possible in Indian cardiology and proving that skill, courage and compassion can open pathways once thought closed forever.