Almost 10 years ago when Rabinder Malik celebrated his 60th birthday, his family and friends put on a surprise party for him. "Sixty persons came," he said. "That was awesome."
Malik was then still executive officer at the U.N. University, Tokyo, and chairman of the Urayasu Foreign Residents' Association. Many of his party guests came from these two bodies. "That occasion, with so many of my friends getting together, touched me," he said. "It was an important factor in my decision to stay on in Japan when I retired from the university a couple of years later."
Malik comes from a family that was "dispossessed and displaced from northwestern India at the time of independence and partition, and moved to Delhi," he said. "I finished my schooling in Delhi. I then went to work during the day, and to an evening college to earn my university degree."