Deepak PrasherDeepak Prasher is Founding Editor-in-Chief of Noise & Health (Wolters Kluwer) and Emeritus Professor at University College London. He spent his professional life as a research scientist at the British Medical Research Council, where he accumulated ovr 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals and edited six books on the health impacts of noise - including Noise and its Effects (Wiley, 2007) and the two-volume Advances in Noise Research (Whurr/Wiley, 2006). The habits of a working scientist - close observation, pattern recognition, the search for mechanism beneath surface complexity - turn out to transfer directly to reading landscapes, and they are everywhere present in this book.He was born into a family that moved constantly across India - Jodhpur, Nagpur, Dehradun, Jullundur - before leaving for England at eleven. India remained the country of his childhood, but it took a return journey in 1989 - three months travelling by train from Jammu to Kanyakumari, from Mumbai to Kolkata, with his wife Sumon and their three young children - to reveal it as a place of intelligible pattern rather than overwhelming complexity.He and his wife later lived for twelve years in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, returning annually for extended travel through other states. The contrast between Punjab, his heritage, and Kerala, his chosen home, posed the central question this book sets out to answer: why do landscapes so close within one country feel so utterly different?How to Read India's Cultural Landscapes is his first work of travel writing. Read More Read Less