The Bulletin Years

In 1990, MGIMS had a problem we didn’t even know how to name. Students graduated, walked out of the gate, and—quite literally—vanished.

There was no Facebook, no WhatsApp, no email. If you wanted to stay in touch, you wrote a letter, posted it, and waited. Sometimes it arrived. Sometimes it didn’t. Professional networks ran on luck: a chance meeting at a conference, or a familiar face spotted across an OPD corridor. Otherwise, silence did the rest.

Today it is hard to explain that kind of quiet. A photograph clicked in Sevagram now reaches New York before the tea cools. Back then, even a change of address could erase a friendship.

Mrs Desikan’s idea

Mrs Kamla Desikan, Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society, understood this loss more sharply than most of us. She had the rare ability to see an institution not as buildings and departments, but as people—especially the ones who had left.

One afternoon she said to me, almost casually, “We need a newsletter.”

Not a circular. Not an annual report. A newsletter—something that would tell our alumni, We remember you. And we still belong to each other.

And before I could ask what that would involve, she added, “You will edit it.”

That is how I became, overnight, the editor of the MGIMS News Bulletin.

A one-man newsroom

The plan sounded harmless: a four-page quarterly bulletin.

In reality, it became a small second job that ran alongside ward rounds, teaching, and the daily chaos of hospital life. In a proper newsroom you have reporters, sub-editors, proofreaders, and designers. At MGIMS in 1990, I had only myself—and a stubborn desire to make it work.

I went from department to department collecting news the way some people collect stamps. A new faculty joining. A seminar. A guest lecture. A promotion. A retirement. Anything that could make an alumnus pause and say, Ah, so the old place is still alive.

But I quickly realised something: buildings and equipment don’t create belonging. People do.

So the most-read part of the bulletin became what we called the “personal columns”—births, deaths, marriages. It was the campus grapevine, made respectable in print.

Cut, paste, and patience

Designing the bulletin was a physical exercise. “Cut and paste” wasn’t a computer command. It meant scissors, glue, and strips of typeset paper.

I sat for hours arranging columns, counting words, trimming edges, and shifting paragraphs by millimetres so the four pages looked balanced. There were days I felt like a junior doctor doing a delicate procedure with no instruments—only patience.

And yet, I enjoyed it. The work had a quiet satisfaction. It felt like stitching together a community that had started to fray.

Our social media, on paper

Looking back, the MGIMS News Bulletin was our social network—just slower and far more polite.

It did what WhatsApp groups do today. It reminded people they still mattered. It gave them a sense of place. When an alumnus posted in a remote district hospital opened the envelope and saw a familiar name, the distance shrank for a moment.

I remember the excitement of the early issues. One line announced the birth of a baby: Shridhar Reddy.

At the time it was just a happy entry in a column. Today, Shridhar is a grown man—a 33-year-old orthopaedic surgeon. That single line, printed on cheap paper, quietly contains three decades of life. No “timeline” can do that so cleanly.

The printing ritual

Every quarter, the bulletin took me back to a familiar place—the printing press of Mr Rajabhau Chawade.

The press had its own smell: ink, paper, and a faint metallic heat. The proofs came out warm, the letters sharp and slightly raised. Photographs were grainy black-and-white headshots, the kind that made everyone look either too serious or slightly guilty.

We checked the layout, fixed the mistakes, argued about fonts, and worried about deadlines. When the final copies arrived in bundles, it felt like a small victory. Not the kind that wins applause, but the kind that makes you breathe easier.

Thousands of bulletins would then go out—little paper ambassadors carrying Sevagram to wherever our alumni had landed.

The dead letter problem

Printing was only half the job. Posting it was the real battle.

Doctors move the way monsoon clouds move—often and without warning. Internship. Rural bond. Residency. Fellowship. Another city. Another hostel. Another address.

In the 1990s, when people moved, they didn’t update a profile. They simply disappeared.

We typed labels, stuck stamps, carried sacks to the post office—and then waited for the heartbreak to return. Weeks later, envelopes came back with red postal stamps:

Addressee left.
Insufficient address.
Door locked.

Each returned copy felt like a small failure. Somewhere, someone who still cared about MGIMS didn’t get the bulletin because life had shifted a few kilometres and we didn’t know.

We tried to keep a database, updating addresses with pencil and hope. It was never complete. It could never be.

What the internet changed—and what it didn’t

I edited the bulletin for six years and then passed it on. The bulletin continued, but the world changed.

With the internet, news stopped waiting for the postman. Retirements, deaths, achievements, celebrations—everything now travels instantly. WhatsApp groups do in minutes what our bulletin did in three months.

In that sense, the bulletin lost its urgency. It became less “news” and more “record.”

But I still feel something for print.

An email is skimmed and forgotten. A notification is swiped away. A printed bulletin is different. You hold it. You turn pages. You sit with it. It asks for your attention without shouting for it. It feels strangely human.

And paper has another strength—it stays.

Hard drives crash. Phones get replaced. Passwords are forgotten. But a booklet can sit quietly in a drawer for thirty years and still open like a memory.

The regret that stayed

This brings me to a regret that still pinches.

Somewhere between office shifts, renovations, changing administrations, and our casual neglect of archives, MGIMS lost most of the News Bulletins from 1990 to 2007.

The irony is painful. We created the record of those years—and failed to keep it.

Sixteen years of campus history: births, obituaries, milestones, faces, names, small announcements that now feel precious. They may still exist in someone’s trunk or attic, saved by an alumnus who couldn’t throw them away. But our own shelves are empty.

That loss taught me something simple: institutions love ceremonies, but they rarely love storage.

And yet, I don’t regret those years.

For a while, we built a paper bridge between Sevagram and the world. It carried more than news. It carried belonging.

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