A family holiday in 2000 to a hill station in the Himalayas mapped out my future career. While I enjoyed the serene environment of the place, I also observed with dismay the havoc inflicted on uncontaminated nature in the name of progress. I therefore decided to make the environment my choice of study. By then I had already been selected for admission to Engineering and opted for Civil Engineering, which was then the parent branch of Environmental Engineering. I volunteered to work as an intern during my senior year with a consulting firm on environmental projects. 3 months of full-time work I did became the basis for my university project work. It became a model project in the department and I received great appreciation from my professor. Subsequently, in my professional life, I began environmental consultancy, specializing in studies relating to air quality. As I worked with different air quality prediction models, I observed a wide variation in results under different conditions. This discrepancy between actual data and forecasts had long puzzled me. I believe many models (for example - ISCST3, AERMOD) we use f...