Meet Dr. Ved Vyas

Meet Dr. Ved Vyas, who describes himself in six words: a healer by profession, a poet by passion.

The first half of that is emergency medicine. Fifteen years of it, across two countries and nine cities, in the room where the worst hour of somebody's life arrives without an appointment.

The second half is two published books of poetry — A Healer's Hymns and A Healer's Hymns 2 — drawn out of around three hundred poems written over years, mostly at the edges of those fifteen years rather than instead of them.

He is fluent in six languages. He paints, photographs, sings, cooks and has an eye for interior design. He keeps a dog, a cow and an aquarium of fish.

And he is clear about what he wants a reader to take from any of it:

Some stories must be told, some silences must be shattered. My words are my offering to the world.

A profession chosen for him

He is honest about the beginning in a way most people are not. He did not choose it.

His father and his grandfather were keen that he enter a stable profession — medicine or engineering, the two doors that a certain kind of Indian family considers worth opening. What followed was the machinery that follows that decision: a myriad of entrance exams, AIEEE among them, then the undergraduate entrances.

He puts it plainly. Sometimes responsibilities are thrust on you whether you like it or not.

It is worth sitting with that sentence, because the rest of his life is what a person does after it. He did not refuse the profession and he did not resent his way through it. He went and became genuinely good at it.

What he did not do was let it be the whole of him.

Saint Petersburg

The decision was made that he would do his medical schooling in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which at the time held some of the most prominent medical universities anywhere.

That is one line in his account and a very large thing in a life. A teenager who had just finished a run of Indian entrance exams was moved to a city in another country, in another language, to learn a profession he had not picked, in a system entirely unlike the one he grew up in.

He does not dwell on it. His summary of the whole stretch is four words — the rest is medical history.

But the habit the rest of this book runs on begins here: arriving somewhere unfamiliar, doing the work properly, and moving on when the work moved.

What he secretly wanted to be

All through it he wanted something else, and he says so.

He very secretly wished to be an artist. Not in a narrow sense — he means cinematography, set design, acting on a stage, writing. Any of the doors into making something.

That wish was heavily looked down upon, which is the ordinary fate of such a wish in a household already decided on medicine.

But it had a quiet ally in the house. His mother holds an MA in English Literature, and she put Somerset Maugham and Oscar Wilde in his hands as early as she possibly could. Maugham, who qualified as a doctor before he became a writer. Wilde, who spent a career refusing to be only one thing.

So while one half of the family was building a physician, the other half was quietly handing him the reading list of a man who would never be only that.

How emergency medicine found him

Years later he was unsure what to do for his post-graduation, and it was his mother again who made the suggestion that set the next fifteen years: emergency medicine.

He corrects one thing about it immediately. People call emergency medicine a niche course, and it is not. It was established in the United States in 1970 and recognised by the Royal College in the United Kingdom decades ago. It is not niche; it is simply new to India.

New enough that when he came to qualify in it, the Indian route did not exist yet — neither the DNB nor the MD in emergency medicine had arrived.

So he took the Royal College route instead and passed two of their examinations.

That is a quiet sentence covering a long effort, and it says something about how he works. The qualification he wanted was not available in his own country, so he went and got it from a country where it was.

This is the second time in his life his mother redirected it. The first was with a book.

What the word actually means

Here is the thing he has spent years trying to correct, and the reason he says nobody knew what he did for a living.

People hear emergency and think it describes the doctor — somebody who works fast. That is completely wrong, and he has been passionate about saying so for a long time, including from the TEDx stage.

The word describes the case, not the pace. Emergency means the most serious patient takes precedence over everyone else in the room.

What an emergency physician manages is the acute: the immediately life- or limb-threatening. A road traffic accident. A heart attack. A stroke. A seizure. The work is to diagnose it in minutes, stabilise the patient accordingly, and then hand them to the specialist whose branch it belongs to — once a stroke is identified, the neurologist takes over.

He is clear about whose job the fixing of this misunderstanding is. Indian academia has to educate people, at scale, about what the branch is and what the people in it actually do.

A day you cannot plan

The other difficulty he names is structural, and no amount of skill removes it.

A day in emergency medicine cannot be planned. There can be no patients at all, and then three or four emergencies walk through the door together.

Every one of them has to be managed immediately. Not queued, not scheduled, not deferred to a slot later in the week. The nature of the branch is that the work arrives all at once or not at all, and the physician is expected to be equally ready for both.

It is a particular kind of strain, and it is not the dramatic kind people imagine. It is the strain of being permanently available to a day that will not tell you what it contains.

Fifteen years of those days is the figure to hold on to while reading the chapters that follow.

Delhi to Kerala

What those fifteen years looked like, in his own description, was a nomadic life spent travelling with his resume.

Seven corporate hospitals. One charitable hospital, which he worked in during Covid. One deemed university. Spread from Delhi to Kerala, and across two countries and nine cities once Saint Petersburg is counted in.

Read quickly, that is a strong curriculum vitae. Read slowly, it is nine times packing, nine times arriving, nine times learning a new hospital's systems and people and politics from the beginning.

The charitable hospital during Covid deserves its own line. That was the period when emergency departments were the front of everything, and he chose to spend part of it where the work was not paid best.

A career like this is usually told as ambition. He tells it as cost, and the next chapter is why.

What it cost

He does not dress this part up, and the book will not either.

Living that way, he lost touch with a great many friends and with family. That is the plainest consequence of nine cities: the people stay where they were, and the distances quietly become permanent.

And it took a toll on his mental health. He says so directly, in a single sentence, with no attempt to soften it or turn it into a lesson.

That is unusual. Doctors are not, as a rule, encouraged to describe themselves as having been worn down by the work, and emergency physicians least of all — the branch carries an expectation of being unshakeable, which is part of what makes it so heavy to carry.

What he did with it is the subject of the next chapter, and it is the most important thing in this book.

Three hundred poems

He wrote it down. For years, he wrote his pathos as poetry.

It accumulated — roughly three hundred rough poems, written alongside a job that was already taking everything he had. Not for publication. That is the part worth noticing: this was not a writing career being built in the evenings, it was a man putting somewhere the things the day had left him with.

Those three hundred eventually became two published volumes, A Healer's Hymns and A Healer's Hymns 2, now also available as ebooks and audiobooks.

He has said poetry is how he heals his soul, and a refuge for his emotions — that he turns personal struggle into verse, and offers the result to people looking for meaning in words.

The second book takes its idea from Sanskrit, where shloka is held to have come from shoka: sorrow. A verse made out of grief. It is a book unafraid of rigid dogma and social convention.

And the first one carries a dedication: to his mother, the Great Goddess. The same person who handed him Maugham and Wilde, and then handed him his specialty.

The man outside the hospital

The artist he secretly wanted to be never actually went anywhere, and the evidence is in how he spends time that is his own.

He paints. He photographs. He sings. He cooks. He has an eye for interior design, which is the same instinct as set design wearing different clothes. He works out. He is fluent in six languages.

He cares for a dog, a cow and an aquarium of fish — a household that takes real, daily, unglamorous attention from somebody whose profession already demands it.

None of this is a hobby list to pad out a page. It is the direct answer to the question the whole book is circling: what happens to the person who wanted to be an artist and was sent to medical school instead.

What happened is that he became a very good doctor and remained an artist the entire time, and simply did not ask anybody's permission for the second part.

The sabbatical

After nearly fifteen years, he has stepped away from emergency medicine.

He calls it a sabbatical, and he is unapologetic about the reason: he is giving his mind a legitimate break after more than a decade of that work.

The word legitimate is doing a lot in that sentence. It is the word of somebody who has had to justify rest, to others or to himself, and has decided to stop justifying it.

For a physician in a branch built on permanent availability, stopping is not a small act. The identity and the schedule are the same object; removing one tends to take the other with it.

He has done it anyway, which is consistent with everything else here. The man who refused to be defined by one profession was eventually going to test whether he could stand outside it.

What he is looking for

What he is exploring now is beyond the conventional, and he is specific about it.

He is looking at the involvement of artificial intelligence in healthcare — in the overall development of healthcare systems, in making diagnosis timelier, and in reducing the margin of error in treatment and management.

Coming from an emergency physician, those are not abstractions. A timelier diagnosis is the difference the whole branch is built on, and margin of error is a phrase that means something very concrete to somebody who has had three emergencies arrive at once.

He attaches a condition to it, and the condition is the interesting part: provided he finds the right people with the right vision to bring it forth. He is not looking for a job in it. He is looking for people who see it the way he does.

He is also turning over ideas for a third book. For now, though, the break is the plan.

More than one story

Ask him what he is proudest of and he does not name a hospital or a qualification.

His books, always, because they are his legacy. There may be the Internet, the reels, the digital cloud — but the written word, as he puts it, stays forever. And he is glad he gave justice to the child who wanted to be a published author someday.

Alongside them he counts his TEDx debut, and hopes for more chances to speak.

What he wants people to take from the whole of it is one idea, and he states it without decoration. Never let yourself be defined by one idea, one background, one story. Build more than one skill to fall back on, and keep your mind open to a myriad of ideas.

He will not pretend it is easy. Life is anything but easy, he says, so he will not sugarcoat anybody's challenges. Have faith in your own work. Be your own critic and your own mentor — which he admits is a great deal to ask of one person.

And in an age built on comparison, do not measure your milestones against anybody else's.

Every path is different, and every journey has its own conclusion.