Talented, multi-faceted, gifted: Meet Neeraj Raj, a Hyderabad doctor who doubles up as painter, cartoonist

Hyderabad: Dr Neeraj Raj, an MBBS doctor, artist, and entrepreneur from Hyderabad, recently presented an open-air art exhibition of watercolours, oils, portrait sketches, and virtual reality art at Rajniketan grounds in Saifabad.

Talented, multifaceted, and gifted are only a few of the words that come to mind when describing Dr Neeraj Raj.

Early Days

He was always passionate about painting. While he credits the beginning of his love for art to his roots at Vidyaranya School, as a 10-year-old, he had the opportunity to study in Scotland for a year and was exposed to Western Art while traveling through the great museums of London, Paris, Florence, Venice, and Amsterdam. He then joined the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet. Encouraged by his art teachers, he won many inter-school competition shields.

At Little Flower Junior College, he found his Guru in Ambadas Mahurkarji, under whose influence his creativity blossomed. Following the footsteps of his parents and grandparents, he joined Osmania Medical College in 1982.

Osmania Medical College

Neeraj found that the human body was highly artistic, both from the outside as well as from the inside. He was in awe of the colors, the textures, and the forms that it presented. He used to take sketch pens, watercolors, brushes, and paint his answers in his exams. He was awarded the Best All-Round Outgoing Student with University Gold Medals in Anatomy and Pathology and topped in General Medicine from Osmania Medical College.

Cartooning

While doodling and cartooning, Neeraj went on to do some serious cartooning and created a series of pocket cartoons about the misadventures of Dr PK Golmalkar, a character that he came up with, inspired by one of his teachers. His cartoons started appearing in publications such as The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Indian Express, Deccan Chronicle, and Siasat Daily. His set of medical cartoons was accepted for display alongside master cartoonists from all over India at the World Humor Conference in 1985.

First Art Exhibition

Aged just nineteen, Neeraj exhibited 40 of his paintings and cartoons for the first time in 1984 at the Koratkar Art Gallery.

Medical Illustration

Combining his love of Art and knowledge of Medicine, Dr Neeraj started doing medical illustration - initially as paintings and soon, mastering new emerging computer graphics technology as digitally designed 35mm slides and digital artwork. He started the Medical Education Research Centre (MEdRC) in 1993.

Multi media

He founded Dr Neeraj's Multimedia Studios (DNMS) in 1996. Dr Neeraj gained prominence when he set up Touchscreen Kiosks all over Hyderabad with a program that let visitors explore the city much before the Internet days! For this, he went all around the city exploring and documenting monuments and places in and around Hyderabad. He spent days on the streets to create watercolor paintings of the city as part of this exploration. He also designed a Heritage Map of Hyderabad for INTACH with digital paintings of several monuments.

Animation

The first Telugu animations were done at this studio (DNMS) in collaboration with Artist Mohan and his team of artists, all of whom made the studio an inspiring place to hang around discussing art, culture, humor, philosophy, and even politics. In 1999, Dr Neeraj co-founded Webtoons Media Inc. with an office in Burbank and Studios in Santa Monica in Hollywood as part of Sriven Multitech Ltd. With over 250 animators in India, Dr Neeraj's dream of making cartoon films came alive – the studio worked for Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Amberwood Productions, Z.com, etc. Unfortunately, the dotcom bust wiped out listed companies in the stock market meltdown.

Medical E-Learning

Combining Animation, Medicine, and Technology yet again, Dr Neeraj then took on the task of digitizing the entire MBBS curriculum into a huge online resource. Dr. Neeraj collaborated with over 750 medical teachers to digitize all the medical subjects and create the first and largest ever MOOC for Medicine, offering over 150 SmarTeach Online courses. Adapting quickly to bring mobility, he designed the SmarTeach Tabs that were launched by the then Chairperson of the Medical Council of India and are now used by several thousand medical students. In 2013, Dr. Neeraj set up the first ever Virtual Medical University, collaborating with the Indian Medical Association to offer post-graduate diplomas and CME courses to up-skill general practitioners. Dr Neeraj got this project approved by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, as an Innovation of National Interest, and his ambitious “Virtual Health University” concept was approved, endorsed, and recommended by the Medical Council of India and recommended by the General Body of the Dental Council of India.

Awards and Recognitions

Dr Neeraj’s mission has been cited as an example of innovation in specialized upgradation of education in a global report by UNESCO titled “Developments and Trends in the Application of ICT in Education” by Glen Farell and won the Manthan South Asia Award for Best e-Content for Development. He has been a faculty and speaker at several national and international forums onDigital Education including: Hosting e-Learning workshops for University faculty as onsultant for the Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver, Canada; Chairing the session on “e-Learning in Medical Education” at the International Conference of Association of Medical Educators of Europe at Norway; Addressing the Steering Council Meeting of the International Virtual Medical School (IVIMEDS) at Amsterdam; and conducting the workshop on “Future of Medical Education at Egypt.

He was awarded the Vaidyashree for outstanding contributions to medical education. In 2017, he won the prestigious TiE 20 award from among hundreds of nominees at the annual TiECon Detroit – one of the largest entrepreneurship-focused conferences in the USA for his work on Medical Virtual Reality for up-skilling nurses.

Urban Sketching

All the while, Dr Neeraj kept sketching and painting. In 2016, along with a couple of fellow artists, he co-founded the Urban Sketchers of Hyderabad, an art group consisting of over 200 enthusiastic weekend painters. The group meets to sketch and document areas and people of Hyderabad City every weekend. Recently, the group held an exhibition at T-Works displaying 300 sketches celebrating its 300th sketch walk.

Portrait Sketching

We are all living in an age where mobile phones dominate our lives – Dr Neeraj started sketching on his mobile using digital pens, brushes, and tools to make portraits of people around him. Starting with his friends and classmates, musicians, artists, and famous doctors and personalities of Hyderabad, his collection of sketches grew to more than 500 artworks in a short time.

Imperative Skills Development

In 2017, Dr Neeraj founded Immertive, a Virtual Reality (VR) organization that aims to digitize the entire Skills of Medicine using VR technology. Since then, he has developed Virtual Reality-based courses in areas such as Newborn Resuscitation, Management of Labor, Prevention of Post-Partum Hemorrhage, Cancer Screening, Family Planning, etc. Trainees wear a headset to enter virtual hospital rooms to examine patients, make a diagnosis, and learn life-saving skills. His vision is to make skills-based VR Courses to upskill Nurses and Doctors to serve as rural healthcare providers at Ayushman Arogya Mandirs and district hospitals across India.

VR Painting & Immersive Art

With VR technology being available around him, Dr Neeraj started something unique - he extended his media in art to also "paint" immersive paintings. One of his famous paintings is of the Old City of Hyderabad –while it seems like a regular oil painting on canvas, when you see it through a VR headset you are transported "inside" the painting and can see various views in all 6 directions – the Charminar in the front, the Mecca Masjid behind, the sky above and the road at your feet! He also created an interactive video art installation of the same theme with full surround sound.’

Art Exhibitions

After 1984, Dr Neeraj exhibited his art in solo shows in 1993 and last in 2003. He was part of several group shows thereafter. In 2021, he held a unique Virtual Reality walk-through art exhibition where avatars of attendees could see paintings and interact with the artist.

Art from the Heart

On the eve of his turning sixty, Dr Neeraj Raj put together an exhibition of more than 200 of his artworks – Watercolor paintings, Oil paintings, Portrait sketches, Urban Sketches, and his Virtual Reality Art – both the immersive version and the interactive video art. The Urban Sketchers of Hyderabad group also joined in for live sketching that evening.