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On May 15, Saket Dandawate, an engineer and avid biker, was headed from Pune to Bengaluru, where he worked for a digital app company. When he reached Chitradurga on his motorbike, he was hit by an unknown vehicle. He was wearing a helmet. He was rushed to a nearby hospital by a passerby who also managed to contact Saket’s parents Dr Vinit and Dr Sumedha. The good Samaritan took Saket to the hospital in his car and even paid the hospital expenses till the family arrived, said a friend of the Dandawates’.
Saket who had sustained serious injuries to the brain was moved to the Narayana Hospital in Bengaluru, where he was on a ventilator. On Friday morning, he was declared dead. Soon after, both Dr Vinit, a physician and President of the Indian Medical Association, Virar and Dr Sumedha, an ophthalmologist decided to donate Saket’s organs like liver, kidneys, eyes, heart valves and skin. Saket’s wife, Apoorva, who works in the IT sector in Bengaluru, also agreed to the organ donations. The couple had married around five months ago. Saket’s body was cremated in Bengaluru on Friday.
Friends of the doctor couple said the Dandawate family has a history of organ donations. “The Dandawates’ come from a progressive family and have been donating organs and bodies,” said a doctor friend. He said Saket’s grandparents’ organs were also donated. Saket too had early on expressed his desire to donate his organs.
Saket, the elder of two siblings-his sister Aditi is a doctor–, returned to India after completing his masters in the United States in 2017 only so that he could ride motorbikes. He did his engineering from Vellore in Tamil Nadu. Family friends said Saket was part of a group of professional bikers and went on long rides over the weekends.
