The 50-year report of the Maharogi Sewa Samiti, founded by Baba Amte to serve the leprosy affected humanity, is titled “A rainbow in tears”. You have to hold back yours as you turn its pages. Though physically challenged, undaunted Baba Amte surfaced where India needed him most: “I want to be a man who goes around with a little oil can and when he sees a breakdown offers his help”. Some vignettes here.

One rainy night Baba Amte came across a foul-smelling, maggot-ridden leper lying in the rain. He grabbed some nearby matting, covered the wretch and hurried away. It was not the first leprosy sufferer he had seen — India has four million — but the encounter disturbed him strangely. When confronted with a prone leper, Baba Amte, whom Gandhi once called the “Fearless Seeker”, turned away in panic, a coward. Would I, he later thought in horror, have run away like this if it had been my wife or child? For months the shame of cowardice dogged him.

He struggled with his conscience.

He recalled that G K Chesterton had suggested it was strange “man sought sublime inspiration in the ruins of old temples and churches, but saw none in the ruins of man”. “I took up leprosy work not to help anyone”, Baba Amte later claimed, “but to overcome that fear in my life. That it worked good for others was a by-product.”

On the advice of Vinoba Bhave, Baba Amte underwent formal training at the leprosy colony established by Manohar Diwan at Dattapur, near Wardha. He studied how to diagnose, give injections, clean ulcers, remove decomposing bones, dress wounds and administer drugs. Then with medicine supplied by the Dattapur centre, he began to treat Warora’s leprosy patients at his “clinic under a tree”.

However, Baba Amte felt the need for more scientific knowledge and training, such as that offered by the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine. To be admitted to the above, one had to be a doctor which he was not. With Prime Minister Nehru’s intervention he was admitted to the School of Tropical Medicine in 1949.

During his training there, a professor casually mentioned that a barrier to curing the disease was the inability to grow mycobacterium leprae germs in animals. Baba Amte forthwith offered himself as a guinea pig. He later said, “The halo of Brother Damien (a Belgian religious leader, who contracted leprosy treating patients at a colony he had established in Hawaii) was before me. And I knew my wife Sadhana would nurse me”. He was injected with the live bacillus, but the bacillus failed to take hold and the experiment was abandoned. At the end of the course, Baba Amte stood at the head of the class.

On his return, Baba Amte began to plan a radically different leprosy colony — where patients would be given purpose and dignity as well as drugs. He envisioned an innovative settlement as much like a normal community as possible, where sufferers could be taught to be self-supporting by creative work. He saw work as the therapeutic cure to mental depression common among leprosy patients and other outcasts. His slogan became: Charity destroys, work builds.

He once organised a scavengers’ (night soil collectors) union, but when they struck for higher wages while he was still vice chairman of the municipality, he refused their demands because the town committee lacked funds. The strikers charged he was unsympathetic because he had never carried a pan of night soil on his head. “Imagine our plight during the monsoon,” they pleaded.

They challenged him to do the job and then reconsider. Baba Amte accepted the challenge and was assigned 40 latrines. Daily he collected the steel pans of excrement from the backs of houses and carried them on his head to the disposal sites. It was revolting and sickening labour and affected him profoundly, deepening his regard for, and commitment to, these outcasts. The scavengers received their raise.

Little is known that the same Baba Amte as a student drove to school in a sports car wearing clothes from the best tailor. He sometimes bought three seats in a theatre to be able to prop up his feet. He was so knowledgeable about films that he wrote reviews for Picturegoer magazine. Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo, reigning Hollywood beauties at the time, especially, appealed to him. He wrote them fan letters to which they replied.

When militancy in the Punjab and Kashmir were at the fiercest in the 80s. Baba Amte launched a yatra on bicycles, from Kanyakumari to Punjab and Kashmir. Hundreds of youth joined the yatra ignoring the advice of security officials that their life could be in danger. “So what,” they said, smiled, cycled a thousand km singing: “diya jala diya hai toofan ke saamne, isliye ke roshni badnaam na ho jaye”. We have lit the lamp in the face of the storm, so that light may not be put to shame.