After completing house jobs he worked at a hospital by the Zambezi in Zambia, before moving to the United States, where he held a Rockefeller Fellowship in public health at the University of Michigan.

[1][3] His family were Punjabi Sikhs and had origins in Ras Koh Hills, Balochistan (British India) (now in Pakistan), and during the interwar years his parents left to work in East Africa.

[2] After spending his early years in Dar es Salaam among a large Indian community, he gained admission to study medicine in 1960 at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, from where he graduated in 1965.

[2][7] On returning to Zambia, he was appointed regional medical officer and became involved in containing a cholera outbreak among refugees from Mozambique.

[2] Under the chairmanship of William Nicol, Medical Officer to the Birmingham area, the committee included Henry Bedson, Spence Galbraith, Geddes, and Bakhshi.

[4][12] Pallen explains that Bakhshi secured unrestricted funding, the use of three floors of Birmingham's Holiday Inn, the black cab service, food from local restaurants, and the recruitment of around 60 doctors, 40 nurses, 85 environmental health inspectors and associates, six officers for disinfection and near a hundred administrative staff.

Their action in dealing with the task of tracing isolating and vaccinating all close contacts of Mrs Parker, and in disinfecting all areas of possible contamination was impressive and contributed considerably to preventing a far wider spread of infection.During his tenure as medical officer in Birmingham, he was responsible for containing other outbreaks including hepatitis A,[4][16] meningitis,[17] and typhoid.

[1] In Williams' article in The Guardian (2020) during the COVID-19 pandemic on whether the 1978 smallpox outbreak could provide any lessons, Bakhshi's approach was considered personal and locally led, and he explained that "contact tracing and containment are in the genes of any public health doctor.