It was billed as one of those seminal moments of human progress - man landing on the moon, the first television broadcast and now, thanks to the marvels of internet technology, the first transatlantic "handshake." - The Telegraph, 30 Oct 2002 Using touch-relaying haptic technology, researchers in University College London shook hands with teammates in the Touch Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, roughly 3000 miles on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Around that time, a decade and a half ago, the author was just past his adolescence, having spent his life almost entirely without knowing of the internet. His life was, however, touched by Goliaths of Western thought - bards like Shelley and Robert Burns, scientists like Erwin Schrodinger and Richard Feynman, journalists like Malcolm Gladwell and Matt Ridley, philosophers like Sartre and Camus, among others. Like V S Ramachandran, the Marco Polo of neuroscience, and J Krishnamurti, perhaps the only human amongst god-men, the author extends his hand back across the Arabian. It starts with a li'l book of poems on love and living. More to come."