Memoir of an Indian academic, recounting his life from graduate school till his retirement, in locations in the Middle East and Europe, while maintaining his Indian roots. People interested in anthropology, life of an Indian immigrant in Europe, the politics of oil and the Middle East.

It has been more or less a year since ‘Transience of Life’ volume 1 was published. It is cause for much reassurance that serious-minded Urdu readers, some venerable magazines, and a few dedicated friends and associates have praised the memoir in appropriate words and raised my confidence. Otherwise, in the last half a century, all my books and articles on topics in anthropology that were published are in English, the language that became the tool of my teaching and academic employment. Reading and writing in Urdu had been left behind in Lucknow half a century ago.