Dr. Mangalore
Vittal Kamath

He started because he was embarrassed

For thirty-eight years Dr. Kamath ran a multi-speciality hospital in Haveri, a small town in northern Karnataka. Patients came through his doors, farmers among them, with blood sugar and blood pressure readings that frightened him, and he found himself giving all of them the same advice: move more.

“I realised the main reason was lack of exercise. As doctors, we must practise what we preach. That thought made me start walking.”

On 1 January 2008 he walked five kilometres. Two months later, ten. Six months later, fifteen. It settled at twenty-four kilometres a day and it has not moved since — not for weather, not for travel, not for work.

The job that had to go

The routine costs five and a half hours a day. When it stopped fitting around senior posts as Principal and Medical Superintendent at private medical institutions, he resigned them. “I had to choose between my walks and a lucrative job, and I happily quit my job.”

He kept walking through his mother’s final illness, caring for her without missing a day. He has since moved to Bengaluru, where he teaches at a private dental college and covers his 24 km inside his apartment complex — a route he knows down to the metre.

Eighty countries, one routine

He has travelled to more than eighty countries and completed the day’s walk in every one of them. High-altitude mornings at Pangong Lake in Ladakh. Eastern European winters. Seattle in April, where the thermometer read between zero and five degrees when he set out.

“Remember, your mind is way stronger than your body.”

What he eats, and what he does not take

Millets, green vegetables, dal, fresh salads, protein. A shot of garlic, turmeric, ginger and curry leaves after the pre-dawn walk. Water through the day, and a rule he repeats to anyone who will listen: “One must eat only about eighty per cent of what the body demands.”

His vital signs sit within normal limits. By his own account he has not caught a cold in more than fifteen years and has not needed a tablet for any ailment in that time. “My vital signs are normal, and I don’t take any medicines.”

Before the walk, the Gita

He wakes at 2:45 am in Brahma Muhurta, the hour before dawn, and spends it chanting verses from the Bhagavad Gita — the whole scripture, from memory — and practising acupressure before he puts his shoes on. The walk is a mental exercise as much as a physical one.

In April 2026 he stood in front of 1,500 people in Seattle and told them, in plain language, how to start.