‘Mid-term Reflections of the President’—Charting Progress and Future Directions for the Association of Surgeons of India

Dear Friends,Greetings from the Association of Surgeons of India!As I reach the halfway point of Presidential term, I not only heartily thank members of the Association for the tremendous support and love that I have received.ASI has emerged out of the tumultuous times, arising out of discordance and conflict amongst its members.The year was 2015, my first term as a Governing Council member of ASI.The mayhem at the Gurgaon conference where we were supposed to start our innings was marred by unruly scenes at the conference venue, police forces called in to protect the then President, ECs not allowed to take charge and national office bearers shying away from hired hoodlums of a group of so-called respectable members of our Association.What followed was a spate of court cases all over the country, from Haryana to Bihar to Odisha to Chennai.It was extremely disheartening for me to see the affairs of this body and I wondered if my decision to be a leader of such a tainted organisation was correct.When the situation reaches its lowest ebb, strong leaders emerge and something similar happened in ASI.The grounded ship of ASI was now ably steered out of the quagmire of scandals and muckraking by leaders like Dr. Shiva