I was born in India, in a city which is adjacent to Calcutta called Howrah. I grew up there, mainly on the campus of the Engineering College. Dad was a professor there and it was a very happy childhood growing up within that community. My schooling and undergraduate medical education was in Calcutta and after that, I did my postgraduate degree in Bombay.
I was just under 30 when I went back to Calcutta with my wife, who was also a paediatrician. At that time, in the early 90s, many people would come to the UK for some training and most people would then go back after spending 3 or 4 years in the NHS. We were having a conversation with my father, and while we had no intentions of coming to the UK at the time, he was very keen for us to as he had done his PhD in the 1950s in Sheffield. To him, it was a great experience of training, education and generally broadening horizons. A few days after this conversation, he was in the middle of teaching and suddenly died of a massive heart attack. It was such a huge shock and what he had been telling us about moving to the UK really stuck with us: we decided to pursue it.