I would love to interact with anyone who is interested about space and keep on talking about it till they get bored!!!!!  I have spoke to students at the J.B.Petit High School For Girls ,Bombay International School, the Students For the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) at Thanjavur and Vellore, at a Mumbai-based astronomy group and the Indian Science Congress in Mumbai. The focus of my presentation has mainly been on India's ground-breaking Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM).

 

I have covered a number of launches at Sriharikota near Chennai and visited Nasa's Kennedy Space Centre, the Johnson Space Centre and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I have also toured the European spaceport of Kourou in French Guyana. In October 2015 I attended the International Astronautical Congress in Jerusalem at the invitation of the Israeli government where I briefly interacted among with the second man who stood on the moon, Buzz Aldrin.

 

As a space journalist, I have met Neil Armstrong, the first man who stood on the moon and Gene Cernan, the last man to stand on the lunar surface, Rakesh Sharma, Kalpana Chawla (over the telephone) and Sunita Williams.

 

I am a grad of Mumbai's Elphinstone College and was a correspondent with the Times of India till I retired in 2009. However, my links with TOI have not been completely broken because I still file stories for the newspaper

 

.I have to thank my wife Usha's colleage, who is also my daughter, Rimanika's psycho tutor Tanya D'Mello, who spent a lot of time on conseptulizing and editing this website.