Welcome to California: Winner of the Best Young Adult Book Award in the Multicultural Category

A beautiful university campus in Davis, a small university town in California.

A young student away from her home in Southern California who needs help writing computer programs for her class.

A foreign born computer scientist who has traveled thousand of miles at the young age of 21 to design computers which can imagine and is working as a teaching assistant at the university.

An old world romantic confused by the new definition of love in the brave new world.

A true story which is better than any fiction.

It begins as a story of an ambitious young man traveling to a land far away from his home to fulfill his ambitions. It unfolds in the fast moving technology world of Silicon Valley.

From there we hop to San Francisco and land in Southern California, where we hold our breath as our narrator survives the infamous wildfires.

Technology. Art. Wit. Ambition. Humor. Imagination. They all come together in this wonderful tale of a man's journey though space, time, life and love.

Winner of the 2009 Young Reader Views Award in Young Adults (Multicultural books) Category.

Kalpanik S. is the pen name for a technologist in software industry. He came to USA on a fellowship by University of California Regents to do graduate level studies and research in Computer Science and Engineering.

After obtaining his Master’s degree, Kalpanik spent more than a decade in Silicon Valley, working for both large Corporations and small startups companies.

The technology industry’s infamous bust early 21st century took him to Seattle, where he worked for Amazon.com. He could not get used to the gray skies of Seattle, so his journey took to Tennessee and eventually back to California, but Southern California this time.

Having traveled through and lived in so many interesting places, it was only natural for Kalpanik to document his journey as books.

He has a strong sense of humor, and uses his power of observation to highlight uniqueness of the places he visits and people he meets in a jovial way. He also likes playing with his readers and surprising them by mixing concepts from science, philosophy and literature in an unexpected manner, making them both crack up with laughter page after page as well as force them to think a little bit. Many of his stories, characters or incidents have a second deeper symbolic meaning adding a layer of barely visible complexity, thus cater to needs of both types of readers, those who are looking for something light to read and those who want to read something a bit more sophisticated.