I was born in 1935, in Zanzibar, the famed magical island of cloves, where my father once welcomed Mahatma Gandhi on his way back to India from South Africa, and though very young, have strong memories of the island’s beaches washed by the Indian Ocean. I left for India in 1940, and spent my early school years in Udaipur in the state of Rajasthan, a place of considerable beauty, with great contrasts between desert landscapes and blue lakes. A place, which inevitably imprinted images of vivid colour, and profound light, on an impressionable mind. Moving, in 1948, to the Cathedral School in the teeming metropolis of Bombay, I was again surrounded by the island wonders of sea and sky.

After a couple of years at Elphinston College, I left the shores of Bombay to read medicine at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, followed by Postgraduate Studies in Diagnostic Radiology at Addenbrookes in Cambridge.  I found myself enchanted by the distinct change of English seasons, the summer greens, and the yellow fields of mustard seed. It is the romance of the English countryside, with winter crocus, and mauve valleys of bluebells in the month of May, that prompted me many years later to return to the Emerald Isle. 

1967 found me back in Bombay, soon to be Consultant Radiologist and Head of Department at The Breach Candy Hospital, with an office right beside the Arabian Sea. It was at this juncture that my parallel life as an artist suddenly took off. I had discovered a little art shop on Warden Road, which stored bottles of thick watercolour, which allowed me to freely experiment with colour on much larger sizes of paper than I had been used to. It dawned on me that watercolours were the perfect medium to express all the images stored in my mind over the years. I’d also recently met the girl I hoped to spend the rest of my life with - a charming girl, herself a professional artist. Looking back, it seems apparent that a major incentive to explore my artistic side clearly came from the drive to impress her! It was the combination of these two factors that led to her organizing my first exhibition in 1975 at the Art Gallery at the Taj Hotel, soon after which we were happily married, and have been so ever since!