Bhavneet Bharti

Eldest among three sisters, born and brought up in the beautiful city of Chandigarh, I had a headmistress for a mother and a blood-bank technician for a father, who inculcated life-values and a sense of responsibility in me from early childhood. I was married to my colleague and heart-throb during post-graduate studies while training to be a pediatrician at the premier postgraduate institute in India for medical education and research (PGIMER, Chandigarh), and soon proceeded to Rohru a small village in Himachal Pradesh to work among the simple rural town folk. This rural grassroots experience in a small town was not only life-transforming but also future-defining for me. Blessed with a beautiful daughter in Rohru, I came back to my institution in Chandigarh, with renewed vigor and a new vision. I joined the department of Pediatrics as a young Assistant Professor and was soon given charge of the newly envisaged Social Pediatrics and Health Education division. I involved myself with outreach activities involving marginalized, oppressed and weaker sections of the society over the next decade. Recently, I have been entrusted with the responsibility of a new medical institution, struggling in its infancy, which has become a new home to me over the last one year. Simultaneously, with the new appointment, I have become a mother again, to my seven-year old son, whom we have brought into our life and our family, also becoming the first foster parent in the city Chandigarh in the process. I love to learn from challenges using a truly and cruelly honest, instinctively transparent, all-inclusive, participatory, walk-the-talk approach while leading intuitively with an undying love for humanity and its people.