y.In the misty hills of Kangra in Himachal Pradesh, where pine trees whispered secrets to the wind and the Dhauladhar ranges stood like silent guardians, a boy named Randeep Guleria was born on 5 April 1959. His earliest memories were of village life in Majra—crossing a ditch that flooded in the rains, studying under oil lamps when the electricity failed, and sleeping on the rooftop under a sky full of fireflies.

“Look at the stars, beta,” his father would say. “They remind us that even in darkness, light is always there.”

That father was Dr. Jagdev Singh Guleria, a brilliant cardiologist who would later become Dean of AIIMS and receive the Padma Shri. Medicine ran in the family’s blood. Randeep’s younger brother Sandeep would also become a Padma Shri surgeon, and their sister a doctor too. Growing up first in the hills and then on the AIIMS campus in Delhi, where his father had joined the very first batches, young Randeep watched patients come and go at all hours. He saw his father diagnose with an almost sixth sense and teach with quiet passion.

“I could have joined the Army like my uncles,” Randeep would later admit with a smile. “But Appa’s life showed me another way to serve.”

He studied at St. Columba’s School in Delhi, a place that valued ethics as much as excellence. Then he returned to the mountains for his MBBS at Indira Gandhi Medical College in Shimla. From there he moved to the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, earning his MD in General Medicine and becoming the first Indian to complete a DM in Pulmonary Medicine, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine.

In 1992 he joined AIIMS as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. Over the next three decades he rose steadily—Associate Professor, Additional Professor, Professor—and in 2011 he achieved something no one had done before: he established India’s first dedicated Department of Pulmonary Medicine and Sleep Disorders at AIIMS. Under his leadership it was repeatedly ranked the best in the country.

“Breathing is life,” he would tell young doctors in the wards. “When the lungs fail, everything fails. We must listen to every breath.”

His expertise in asthma, COPD, lung cancer, respiratory muscle function and sleep disorders drew patients from across India. From 1998 to 2004 he served as personal physician to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a responsibility he carried with quiet dignity. He advised the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He published more than four hundred papers and wrote chapters that guided generations of pulmonologists.

In 2015 the nation recognised his work with the Padma Shri. The previous year he had already received the Dr. B.C. Roy Award for Eminent Medical Person. When colleagues congratulated him, he simply said, “This belongs to my teachers, my patients, and the team that never leaves the bedside.”

In March 2017 he took charge as Director of AIIMS New Delhi. For five and a half years he steered the institution through ordinary days and extraordinary crises. When COVID-19 swept the country, he became a calm, steady voice on the National Task Force—explaining science without panic, guiding policy without drama. Together with colleagues he co-authored the book Till We Win: India’s Fight Against The COVID-19 Pandemic, a chronicle of resilience and hard-won lessons.

After more than thirty years at AIIMS he took voluntary retirement and moved to Medanta, where he now serves as Chairman of the Institute of Internal Medicine & Respiratory and Sleep Medicine and Director of the Medanta Medical School. He continues as President of AIIMS Bilaspur, still linked to the mountains of his childhood.

At home he is supported by his wife, Dr. Kiran Guleria, a gynaecologist who understands the long hours and the quiet weight of responsibility. Friends still describe him as the same grounded man who once watched fireflies on a Himachal rooftop.

From a boy who crossed flooded ditches in Kangra to the doctor who helped a nation breathe through its darkest days, Randeep Guleria’s life has been a steady rhythm of service—measured not in awards, though those came, but in the countless patients who found air, hope and healing under his care.