Ballambetu Yogish Pai was a consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon for the South and North Tees Health Authority and a former professor of surgery at Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore. He was born on 20 October 1931 in Kumbla in the Kasaragod district of Kerala, India. He studied medicine at the Christian Medical College, Vellore, where he won a gold medal and qualified in 1954 He gained a masters’ degree in surgery in Madras in 1958 and then went to the UK to train in surgery. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and of Edinburgh in 1960. He returned to India in the same year and joined the Kasturba Medical College and Wenlock Hospital. Here he set up the first ever postgraduate surgery course. In the early 1970s he went once again to the UK, where he was an orthopaedic consultant. He died on 27 December 2018 in Middlesborough. He was 87.