And if his close friends at the PGI are to be believed, it was at this institute where the seeds of politics were sown in Yadav. Yadav did his MD in medicine from the PGI in 1982-85, long after his MBBS from the Calcutta Medical College.

Prof A Chakraborty of the Department of Microbiology, who has known Yadav from his Calcutta Medical College days, believes Yadav became serious about politics and social service while pursuing his MD.

Prof Chakraborty had played host to Yadav when the latter visited Chandigarh after his PGI days.

“He was in grief after he lost his wife to malignancy in the early 1980s. She was only around 35 years old. Yadav was then running a hospital in his hometown, Janakpur, in Nepal. I persuaded him to join me at the PGI for MD, so that he could overcome the bad phase of his life. It was during his stay here that he decided to do something for the people back home in Nepal and devote more time to social service.”

Prof Chakraborty had visited Yadav last year in Nepal.

Chatting with the new Nepal President in Bangla over phone, Prof N Khandelwal, head of the Department of Radiodiagnosis, congratulated him on Tuesday. All he had to tell Yadav’s personal staff was that he was calling from Chandigarh, and the busy President was quick to come on line.

“Since he was senior to us by around eight years, we would always listen to him. I recall him as a man of simple taste who wanted to work for his country,” says Prof Khandelwal, who had shared the same Old Hostel, Block B, with Yadav for three years.

“Our hostel hangouts included Ramesh’s canteen in the Old Hostel building, Tuck shop in the PGI campus and Neelam Cinema in Sector 17. I would address him as ‘Dada’ and ‘Bade Sahib’. In fact, it was him who had told me to choose radiodiagnosis as a specialisation. Later, he also asked his son, Chander Mohan, to do his MD in the same specialisation,” says Prof Khandelwal.

For most of his batchmates here, Yadav had created an unforgettable image as he was the only MD student whose son was doing MBBS at the same time, though not in the same institute — Chander Mohan was at the Calcutta Medical College.

One of his teachers, Prof Subhash Verma, who was then an assistant professor in the Internal Medicine department, recalls Yadav as “a sincere student”.

Yadav’s PGI connection did not end with him. His son, too, did his MD from this institute in 1991, while his daughter-in-law did her MD in gynaecology from the PGI.