Curd rice and MINDS Newsletter

Down the Memory Lane

Volume 12 Issues 12 December, 2022

That was the summer of July 2011; I rushed to get some quick bits for lunch; I opened my lunch box and saw cold Upma, which I got packed from the hostel mess. Getting a packed breakfast from the hostel mess and having it in the lunch was an economical deal both for saving time and money. Though cold Upma immediately killed my appetite, I managed to push a few bits into my throat.

A warm, fresh lunch is a luxury for a first-year medical postgraduate student. Satiety, a biological urge to replenish your body sugar, have a profound impact on your behaviour too; on the dining table, teachers, students, and senior junior’s boundaries emerged, and varieties of south and north Indian dishes mixed and found their way into the human gut, perhaps we also do get some satisfaction from other’s quenching their hunger. 

Repelled by my Upma, even curd rice seemed to be more tempting that day, as one of my teachers offered it to me; I often wondered, as first-year psychiatry postgraduate, what if it is possible to read your mind by your psychiatry teachers, at the peak of paranoia I quickly reached out to the curd rice (a south Indian dices prepared with rice and curd), suddenly my attention caught by an attractive colourful paper lying between me and bowl of curd rice. I picked both and flipped their pages while savouring the curd rice. Later, I learned that one of our aluminous, Dr Kishor, initiated the MINDS Newsletter.  

In those days, the MINDS Newsletter was in a hard copy of two to three pages, a crispy handy thing to read by a first-year postgraduate like me. I ended up reading the intriguing articles of that newsletter. By the way, the curd rice taste soured in summer and was as tranquilising as 1mg of lorazepam.

Later, I had a few more fortuitous encounters with the MINDS newsletter; each time, I found it getting more enriched with experiences with the experienced ones. 

Well, the time slipped with its pace; I finished my MD and joined PGIMER, Chandigarh as a senior resident, later became faculty in the Institute of Mental Health and Hospital, Agra, for some time, joined as faculty at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, at Raipur, and finally land up to be part of the editorial team of MINDS Newsletter in 2019.​ ​

I still found of curd rice and even learned to cook it; believe me, if you tempering it with mustard seed and curry leaves, top it with some pomegranate prepared with fresh curd, you will fall for it.

We entered a much more sophisticated digital era now; the MINDS Newsletter also adapted to the changes and became fully digitalised and perhaps the country’s only fully digital psychiatry newsletter. If you asked me about the current position of the MINDS Newsletter, it attracted all sorts of medical professionals during its journey to justify its objective of bridging gaps and understanding psychiatry among different streams of medicine. We see the growing popularity of MINDS among psychiatry faculty (Figure 1) and young medical students, as reflected by subscription rates.

The e-IPS Google group, a Google group of psychiatrists, is the largest readers group of MINDS (Picture 2). Readers’ special sections are the invited article and the Down the memory lane sections (picture 3). The most crucial factor of flourishing MINDS is its utility and usefulness to medical professionals; hence, it bridges the difference between various mental health professionals and medical specialities. 

Picture 1. Showing types of readers of MINDS Newsletter.

Picture 2. Showing the source from which MINDS Newsletter from which the readers usually introduced to MINDS.

Picture 3. The popularity of sections/ columns of MINDS Newsletter.

Picture 4. Usefulness of MINDS