HE'S quite the sports­man, loves nightclub­bing and Hindi and Tamil film music-and insists on having fun wherever he goes.Sounds like your average teen, but Dr S Natarajan hap­pens to be one of the best oph­thalmologists in the city, with, more than 10,000 retinal surg­eries to his credit. The glass case in his office is filled with al­most 50 awards, medical and non-medical.

  Hindi films are his other ­passion. "But only comedies," he clarifies. Once captain of the athletics and football teams in college, he's busy preparing for next month's Mumbai Marathon.

  Natarajan (48) is a third-gen­eration ophthalmologist-his grandfather practiced in Madu­rai , while his father, Dr N S Sun­daram, now 80, was director/of the Eye Regional Institute of Ophthalmology in Chennai. And both his children want to become eye doctors.

The family possibly had something to do with it, but Natarajan wanted to be an eye doctor since Std I.

"Even during medicine, I was free to take the subject of my choice but I chose to the eye. All I knew was I 'wanted to be the best," he says.

Born in Madu­rai , he trained in Chennai to become a vitreo-retinal surgeon, the youngest at the time, when nobody did exclusive vitreo­retinal surgery. Soon enough, he got a call from Bombay Hospital to join them.

  'I didn't take the offer seri­ously then because I only knew Tamil and English," he said. But they persisted and he ac­cepted on condition that he is made head of their vitreo-reti­nal surgery department. They agreed and in a year-and-a­ half, he performed 750 retinal surgeries.

  In 1990, however, he decided to set up his own hospital-the Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital . He swears by positive think­ing, and the hospital is always filled with the strains of bha­jans playing in the background. And he can't understand pa­tients coming to him with negative thoughts.

  "They're al­ways worried about what'll happen and I simply don't un­derstand that attitude, espe­cially when I'm doing my best to help them," he says.

"I would get extremely an­gry earlier and fight and argue with them," he says.

   He's calmer now- as soon as a patient walks in, he's given a leaflet containing excerpts from various religious texts and quotes of philosophers' urging people to have faith, stop worrying, pray, and believe in action and leave the fruit of ac­tion to God.

 "I believe if you believe in yourself, you are correct; once doubt creeps in, you're a fraud," he says. He was awarded the Gusi Peace Prize a month ago for his work in medicine. "The award was for the different kinds of charitab1e'workwe do," he says.

  This charitable work in­cludes free eye check ups at clinics in Dharavi, Mahalaxmi and Matunga.

  "The clinic in Dharavi not only has free check-ups but also performs free cataract surgery and focuses on total eye care, whereas here at Aditya Jyot, we have a full charitable hospital with a con­sultation fee of Rs 50," he says. The last one to leave the hos­pital, he's on his way to a dis­cotheque right now. "There's always time for what you want to do," he signs off.