Prashant Bhatt's notes

“All actual life is encounter.” — Martin Buber

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A Meditation on Memory, Mentorship & the Maps We Keep

There are weeks when silence speaks louder than words. This was one of them.

During my walking and sitting meditations this week, two faces surfaced — not as memories to be filed away, but as living presences, as Buber might say, genuine encounters. Not the I-It of archived recollection, but the I-Thou of a relationship that continues to breathe and shape, long after the physical meeting has passed.

Before I speak of these two remarkable men, I want to sit briefly with a concept that has been running beneath the surface of my reflections like an underground river — the daimonic.

Food for Thought: The Daimonic

Rollo May (1969, as cited in Hoffman et al., 2019) described the daimonic as:

“any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person” (p. 65).

May was careful to clarify that the daimonic is not inherently evil or destructive. It is raw, primal, creative energy — neither moral nor immoral in itself. What matters is how we meet it:

While the daimōnic cannot be said to be evil in itself, it confronts us with the troublesome dilemma of whether it is to be used with awareness, a sense of responsibility, and the significance of life, or blindly and rashly… When the daimōnic is repressed, it tends to erupt in some form. (p. 129)

This is the paradox of vitality. Repress the creative fire and it does not disappear — it finds another exit, often destructive. Engage it consciously, with responsibility and awe, and it becomes a source of extraordinary generativity.

My two mentors, each in their own way, were men who had learned to engage the daimonic — in their fields, in their lived histories, and in the volatile landscapes they inhabited. And they, in turn, helped me learn to do the same.

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The First Encounter: Dr.Sandeep Kawlra, MD (Dr. SK 1) — Delhi, 1997

I first met Dr.Sandeep Kawlra, MD (Dr. SK 1) in the mid-1990s, in a diagnostic centre in Delhi, quite unremarkably. What followed, over the decades, was anything but unremarkable. Born on July 2,the son of immigrants from the part of British India that became Pakistan, he embodies many layers of experience and history.

By the time I encountered him in 1997, I had already spent over a decade in medicine. I carried two degrees from the medical universities of Delhi and Bombay (now Mumbai). My father — PNB — a specialist in Cardiac Anaesthesia, had been my earliest and most intimate mentor, inspiring and instilling in me both the discipline and the devotion that medicine demands. Being a regular meditator, he imbibed in me the spirit of stepping back, seeing the bigger picture and invoking the healing energies of the universe.

My mentors in Microbiology at Maulana Azad, Delhi (1992–93) had given me something I would carry for a lifetime: the follow-up register. A practical, living document used to map bacterial strains across a hospital, track resistant patterns, and maintain a dynamic clinical picture — not a static snapshot, but an evolving cartography of what is happening and why. One such mentor also had an in-depth knowledge of not only bacterial strains and different media to see their sensitivity (and resistance) but also of Indian Ragas, Botany, and life. He was a misunderstood genius, who would sometimes come in conflict due to his idiosyncracies.

My mentors in Radiology at KEM–Seth GS Medical College, Parel, Mumbai deepened this practice further. A registrar would be specifically assigned to follow up on critical findings, attend clinical rounds, gather real-world feedback on patient care, and bring that learning back to the department — to sharpen protocols, to close the loop, to ensure that knowledge did not die in isolation.

Dr. SK 1 helped me refine what these teachers had seeded. One of the first questions he asked me still echoes:

“Do you have a system-based interest or a modality-based interest?”

Given the realities of Delhi imaging in the 1990s, I leaned into modality-based interest — that was where the world was, and where the work was. But the question itself planted something. Over the decades, the slow, patient work of integrating those modalities into a bigger systemic picture became one of the most meaningful intellectual and clinical journeys of my life.

The follow-up register was the thread that held that integration together.

When I face doubt, when a challenge looms large and the noise of the immediate threatens to drown out the wisdom of the whole, I step back. I try to see the bigger picture. And I add a specific layer of nuance by asking myself:

“What would Dr. SK 1 say?”

I invite his energy — his precision, his creativity, his capacity for awe.

Dr. Kirk Schneider, in his luminous book Rediscovery of Awe, reminds us that awe is not reserved for stargazing. It is, at its most fundamental, the brute, trembling awareness that we exist at all. Dr. SK 1 has always carried that quality — an alertness to the extraordinary embedded in the ordinary.

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The Second Encounter: HB 1 — Tripoli, December 2003

On a cold December morning in 2003, I met the second mentor I remember this week — I will call him HB 1-Tripoli. Born on July 7, in former Yugoslavia, he embodied many histories and legacies. The concept of Yugoslavia, as a common state of all South Slavic peoples, emerged in the late 17th century, with the name derived from the Slavic word -jog (south) and Slaveni (Slavs). The formal creation of Yugoslavia accelerated after the 1917 Corfu Declaration. It emerged as the Socialist federation under Josip Broz Tito from 1944 to 1980, and dissolved after his death, becoming five different countries, leading to the Yugoslav wars.

We met in Libya, a country then still living under the long shadow of 42 years of Muammar Gaddafi’s rule (1969-2011). Over the next 15 years, HB 1 became a fellow traveller, a mentor, and a witness. Together, we watched — on the ground — the shifting and often violent recomposition of a nation.

HB 1 came from a military background. He was not a man of sentiment about systems; he was a man of functional precision. He understood maintenance, supply lines, checklists, and follow-ups not as administrative tasks but as acts of survival and foresight. In his lifetime, he had witnessed the dissolution of not one, but two armies — the Yugoslav Army of Josip Broz Tito, and the Libyan Army of Muammar Gaddafi. He had seen what happens when systems collapse, when follow-up stops, when the register goes unreviewed.

Making lists, keeping checklists, and tracking outcomes was, for HB 1, a deeply nuanced practice — never mechanical, always alive to context. He understood that what you track reflects what you value. And that what you fail to track has a way of ambushing you.

In his quiet, measured way, he reinforced something I had first learned in hospital wards and radiology departments: the follow-up register is not bureaucracy — it is a form of integrity.

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The Follow-Up Register: A Living Practice

What these two men shared — across utterly different disciplines, geographies, and life histories — was a commitment to tracking the living encounter over time. Not just the first impression, but the arc. Not just the diagnosis, but the outcome. Not just the policy, but what actually happened on the ground.

In my current work as a psychotherapist, this practice continues — now applied to the most intimate of all territories: the human psyche, the therapeutic relationship, and the integrative, creative, and spiritual-daimonic forces at play in each person’s life.

The clinical and social experiences of living and working across four continents form the soil from which I work. And the follow-up register remains a cornerstone.

Each week, I review it — not as a performance metric, but as a contemplative act. I ask:

• Which interactions brought life into a positive frame of growth and gratitude?
• Which sent someone — or me — into a frame of regression and resentment?
• Where did the daimonic erupt because it was repressed? Where was it engaged with awareness and responsibility?
• Where did genuine encounter, in the Buberian sense, take place?

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Closing Reflection: Encounter as the Ground of All Learning

Buber’s words open this blog, and they deserve the last word too:

“All actual life is encounter.”

The follow-up register, in its truest form, is a record of encounters — clinical, human, historical, interior. It is how we honour the relationships that shaped us, by continuing to learn from them. It is how we honour our mentors, not by idolising them, but by staying in conversation with what they gave us.

Dr. SK 1 in a Delhi diagnostic centre in 1997. HB 1 on a cold Tripoli morning in 2003. My father PNB, leaning over a complex cardiac case. A microbiology mentor mapping resistant bacteria on a ward. A radiology registrar walking the clinical rounds.

All of them alive in the register. All of them still teaching.

The daimonic, when engaged with consciousness and care, does not erupt in destruction. It becomes generativity — the kind that can be passed forward, one encounter at a time.

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Written in reflection, during a week of walking and sitting meditation. With gratitude to the mentors who helped me shape maps.

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References:

Buber, M. (1958). I and thou. Scribner.

Hoffman, L., et al. (2019). Existential psychology East-West. University Professors Press.

Jezernik, Božidar (2023). Yugoslavia without Yugoslavs: The History of a National Idea. Berghahn Books. pp. 221–222. ISBN 9781805390442. 

May, R. (1969). Love and will. W. W. Norton & Company.

Schneider, K. (2004). Rediscovery of awe. Paragon House.

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