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I immigrated to Canada some 30 years ago from India. After I finished my master's degree in biochemistry at York University, Toronto, I started working as a research associate in the medical research field, first in Toronto, and then in Calgary.
During all this time, I was writing stories about my new, adopted country in my mother tongue, Marathi, a language spoken by about 100 million people in India. My very first collection of stories, titled Mavaltichi Zaday (The personalities of the West), won the Datar Award, a coveted prize in India given annually for the best piece of literature in Marathi. The stories in this book, on topics in science, received an especially warm welcome and this encouraged me to focus on writing more science stories, each story covering some specific area of medical research. I published two more books after that, both being a collection of short science stories. One of them, Manavache Varadaan (A boon to mankind), again received an award, this time for writing in the field of science. One story, "Manachakshunchi Kimaya," containing material about the visualization technique that is employed in cancer treatment, was on the topic of breast cancer, and it made quite a few waves among women readers in India. Women who had been affected by breast cancer were totally averse to talking about it openly with anyone, including their family members. The topic obviously carried a taboo among all women in India. A few women's organizations invited me to give a talk on breast cancer.
This opportunity offered me direct contact with people. It gave me an excellent insight into the severity of the underlying problem of ignorance about breast cancer. After a stay of about 3 months in India, which entailed many lecture tours and meetings with different social organizations, I came back to Canada with a decision to publish a book totally dedicated to the subject of breast cancer, and one especially written for an audience in India.
After returning to Calgary, I contacted the Reach to Recovery organization, where I met wonderful women such as Barbara Cameron, Carol Dyke, and many others like them-all of them having faced this disease sometime in the past. Reach to Recovery is a special branch of the...