Dr Krishna Kishore

Thirty-year-old Dr Krishna Kishore has recently arrived from Hyderabad having just finished his basic medical degree. 

He comes from a middle class family – his father works for the railways and his mother, who worked for the forest service for 20 years, has recently retired.

Becoming a doctor has been a big thing for Kishore – he is the first in his family to go into medicine and his family have high hopes for him.

Kishore is one of only six students who have started work at Narayana Hrudayalaya as part of a novel approach to training cardiac surgeons being promoted by Dr Devi Shetty, the founder of the hospital.

Instead of spending five years doing general surgery, he and his co-students are being fast-tracked to become cardiac surgeons.

It is a trial that not all of the medical staff are happy about, including one of his primary teachers Dr Sri Krishna, a vastly experienced cardio-thoracic surgeon. He is from the old school where students learnt their craft gradually and slowly worked their way up from general surgery to specialisation only after five or six years.

Krishna considers this fast-track teaching as an example of ‘learning to run before you can walk’ and is sceptical about whether Shetty’s ambitious plans will work.

It is daunting for the students as well and Kishore is assigned to Krishna to assist him in upcoming operations.

He is about to find out that there is more to surgery than medical books and even a supposedly straight forward operation can change in an instant.