His childhood in Darjeeling, a mystically beautiful Himalayan town in northern India, uniquely prepared him for a career that has taken him from the cricket field to outer space and back several times. The town is a crossroads for people from Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and other exotic locales as well as a favorite vacation spot for aristocratic Europeans and, in the 1960s and 1970s, a required stop for youthful Americans and Australians on the so-called "hippie trail".