João A. de Menezes was born in Pune, India, on January 24, 1933 and lived in the British Colony of Aden till the outbreak of World War II. The author joined the Bombay Port Trust in 1963 and retired from service on February 1, 1991. During service he took three years leave of absence for higher studies and joined the University of Tennessee, USA, in 1979 and graduated in 1982 with a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering.
After retiring from an Indian port authority as Chief Mechanical Engineer, he travelled widely to Europe (Britain, Portugal and Switzerland), the Middle East (Israel, Jordan and Syria) and the Far East (Macau, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia) and within India as well.
Always dedicated to telling and upholding the truth, Menezes in his first book has felt it necessary to give his own background of his experiences in youth and in his stays in Portuguese Goa which he saw as a veritable paradise and to bring out some little known facts to which he has had access through the de-classified documents of the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Portuguese India issue which he hopes his readers will appreciate with an open mind.