Abhijit Basu was born and brought up in Calcutta, India in a tradition of liberal idealism and a faith in renaissance-type education. He received his B.Sc. in Geology from Presidency College, Calcutta (1959) and his M.Sc. from Calcutta University (1961). He served as a Geologist in the Geological Survey of India for about ten years much of which was spent camping in remote areas and hunting for culinary diversity. Thanks to a Fulbright grant he received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1975, followed by post-doctoral appointments at Harvard and NASA. He has been teaching at Indiana University since 1979. Basu's research is focused primarily on the petrologic evolution of the regolith of rocky planetary bodies (Earth, Moon, Mars, Asteroids). He has been a Visiting Scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (Houston) and a Visiting Professor at the Universitá di Parma and the Universitá d'Annunzio (Italy). His teaching interest, nay passion, is in science education for undergraduates majoring in non-science disciplines. He is currently the Science Editor for books published by the Geological Society of America and has been an Associate Editor for different scholarly publications since 1976. He has received Distinguished Service Awards from Indiana University and the North American Bengali Conference. Tagore is his favorite author.