Preamble

As I finalize plans for the first phase of my return to India, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you some background information to put it all in context.

I was born in Canada and my parents went back home to India when I was a kid. I studied in India engineering and returned to Canada to pursue my graduate studies and completed a Ph.D. in metallurgical and materials engineering at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario. After a one-year Post-Doc at the University of Western Ontario in London, I moved west to Edmonton and worked there for a rather large company (by Canadian standards) for 6 years. Now, I must say, Edmonton was cold and with long winters. Surprisingly, Edmonton has, to the best of my knowledge, some very interesting statistics. It has the largest number of golf courses and bike trails per capita for any city in North America. For a region that gets about 4 months of summer, with only 2 seasons (the other being arrrrrrg winter), that is amazing. So, I learnt golf and remember explaining to one of my friends, when he told me that I had a natural golf swing that I used to play a lot of cricket. Although not exactly the same, the body mechanics as well as the hand-eye coordination are rather similar.

Winters in Alberta are very different from those in southern Ontario, primarily because of the lack of humidity. I recall the first week in Edmonton my nose bled and it was due to the dryness. I have experienced the only temperature, which is the same number on the Centigrade and Fahrenheit scale. That’s a trivia question for you; the answer will be posted in the next blog. The Canadian Rockies with resorts like Banff, Jasper and other areas are stunningly beautiful. There are many lakes; my favourite is Maline Lake with its crystal bluish-green water. We shall continue the experiences.