My Shooting Star: From a Village Boy in India to Chief Medical Officer in a Global Company in England

In rural West Bengal, Durga Sankar Chatterjee was born into a close-knit community, where time hardly moved and World War II seemed a dim and distant threat. His lessons began at home with his grandfather as the birds sang in the neem tree and the sun inched over the horizon. It was the dawn of a life in the pursuit of knowledge. The history and politics of India as an emerging independent nation and Great Britain as a declining colonial power converge to form the backdrop to this moving memoir. Chatterjee's journey takes him to medical college in Calcutta, and then far from his family on a voyage across the sea to England, arriving amidst the wave of immigrants to flood into the country in the 1960s. There he follows his dream of a career in medicine, though his path takes many unexpected twists and turns. Along the way he is faced with cultural differences, love and loss, success and failure, and family times both happy and tragic, yet all the while he never loses sight of his shooting star.