Dear Friends,

This year we are going to have the annual conference at Vellore. Professor Rajshekhar, Prof Ari Chako and their team are already busy in organizing a highly awaited conference.

Over the years the skull base techniques which otherwise looked ghastly and difficult have been refined, and have been made easier with the advent of minimally invasive tools, endoscopes and with the availability of Radio surgery.

It is no longer one man doing everything and we have many masters of many fields, and to continuously update ourselves, we need a multidisciplinary approach.

The aim of this year's conference at Vellore would be on these lines; and so we will have a microsurgery and endoscopic surgery workshop on 20th October and it will be followed by Lectures by International and National Masters on various aspects with free paper sessions in next two days.

The Skull Base surgery once considered highly specialized is now an established subspecialty of mainstream neurosurgery and a full session is devoted to this section in the annual conference of Neurological Society of India also every year. Therefore I feel that some kind of concordance should be achieved between these two societies; without breaching their independence. This might augur well to form standard national policies and guidelines regarding post graduate training, patient treatment and conducting multicentric studies. To achieve this coalition, one of the Executive committee members of SBSSI may be nominated to the EC of NSI for the purpose of coordination. I invite your valuable inputs regarding this integration and union.

On behalf of the EC I invite you all to attend this meeting and to send suggestions regarding improving the objectives of the Society.

Dr. V K Jain
Consultant Neurosurgeon Sir Ganga Ram Hospital,
New Delhi