Doctor Feel Good

Rajiv Kumar is a man on a mission: to help Rhode Islanders become the biggest losers (of weight, that is) and, in the process, get hooked on healthy living.

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Kumar is the anti-Richard Simmons. He doesn’t yell or race around to get people pumped about losing weight, and he’s admittedly more comfortable in a suit than sweatpants. “I’m not a fitness buff,” he admits with a self-deprecating chuckle, “and I’ve never been a star athlete.” And at five-foot-eleven and 155 pounds, there’s no spare tire to speak of either. Still, Kumar says, “I see myself in the same boat as everyone else. We all have trouble finding time in our day to be healthy, to exercise.” Although Kumar preaches the power of teamwork as a motivating force, days crammed with meetings, classes and hospital rotations often limit him to solo workouts at a gym near his Jewelry District apartment.

True to his medical roots, his approach as Shape Up’s spokesman is almost clinical (he lacks the in-your-face personality of a fitness instructor and certainly doesn’t subscribe to the hard-sell, quick-fix approach of a fly-by-night dietician). He speaks softly and calmly, letting the facts motivate people to join his movement. No matter his audience, he wins them over with his affable, nice-guy-next-door demeanor. “I see myself as very much like the average person,” he says. “Even I have to fight the temptation to take the elevator.”

Kumar has wanted to be a doctor since he was five. It’s in his blood. Just about everyone in his family is a doctor, nearly thirty in all. They cover seemingly every discipline: cardiology, radiology, nephrology, gastroenterology, oncology, ophthalmology, obstetrics, pediatrics, emergency medicine. Family gatherings invariably evolve into discussions on medicine, with relatives trading advice and comparing notes around the dinner table. “It’s kind of who we are. It’s our identity in the family,” Kumar says.

Kumar credits his mother, Manju Aggarwal, with his career choice. Manju is an internist who works at the state-run Cedarcrest Regional Hospital, about twenty minutes away from the family’s home in Glastonbury, Connecticut. She and two of her three siblings are doctors. They took after their father, who was a family physician in central India.

“He loved to help people, and he never expected anything in return,” Manju remembers. “They would come from villages, from all over. They would ring the doorbell in the middle of the night, and he would treat them in the living room. We would be woken up, and he’d say later, ‘Their suffering is greater than yours.’”

Manju and her husband, Pawan, left Delhi in 1974 when she was twenty-three. They ended up in Cincinnati where Manju completed her medical residency. The couple then moved to Connecticut when Pawan landed a job at United Technologies, a major aerospace and aviation technology firm.

At thirteen, Kumar began working at Hartford Hospital and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center—in the gift shop, the only place he was allowed at that age. The next summer, he wheeled patients around. The following summer, he was allowed “patient contact,” as he terms it, performing chores such as bringing meals to patients and supporting the nurses on duty. The jobs were all unpaid. “I saw it as valuable, and the purpose of summer is doing something good and worthwhile,” Kumar says.

 Kumar gravitated toward science courses in high school, taking particular interest in biology. He won an award from the governor for academic achievement, and he was the class valedictorian. He was serious about his studies but not obsessed, says Sachin Bansal, a friend since the fifth grade. Bansal remembers downtime filled with movies and Dave Matthews concerts, a band Kumar reverently followed. He says Kumar was popular, even though he didn’t play sports. He had a close network of friends, a group that kept to itself.