How has your engagement with Asia enhanced your life personally?

If you like people, you'll like India. Where else can you meet so many people, travel so many landscapes, or witness such rampant biodiversity? No other nation encapsulates so many superlatives, and my time there has taught me much about engaging with other people at all levels.

How has your engagement with Asia enhanced your life professionally?

Before moving to India, I imagined my future as a research scientist. But following those years of fieldwork as a educator, documentarian and pilgrim, I realised I'd need to find wider horizons than the academic. I was, as well, able to conduct some baseline ecological surveys in a handful of forest locations throughout India, which will always give me a reason to go back to re-survey.

Do you have a story about your engagement with Asia that you would like to share?

I would never say that I went to India to engage with people - I went as a natural historian. But after meeting so many people in and around such amazing trees: The Bodhi Tree, where Buddha attained enlightenment, the Giant banyan of Calcutta, the wishing-tree of Lodurva....I found that I was a better and more avid communicator.