Professor M. Azizur Rahman, Ph.D. Vanderbilt University, is the founder and vice-chancellor of Uttara University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He was motivated to write his first book of poetry The Essence of Life by his perceptions of the time he spent in the United States. He is a renowned academician in Bangladesh and an eminent economist of international repute. He graduated in 1972 from Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) in agricultural economics, standing first in his class, and then obtained a masters’ in the same field from BAU in 1973. He earned his doctorate in economics with a World Bank Scholarship at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1987. The author has twenty-five years of university teaching experience at home and abroad, and worked as an economic adviser of USAID at the U.S. Embassy in Bangladesh from 1989 to 1997.