Abraham Verghese, M.D., is a noted Indian-American doctor and author. His family originates from Kerala, India. He was raised in Ethiopia where his parents along with hundreds of Keralites moved to decades ago to be teachers, as requested by the Emperor of Ethiopia. He went back to India to attend medical school and then immigrated to the United States. There he was given a post in rural Tennessee where he encountered the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote a bestselling book called My Own Country: A Doctor's Story about his experiences in displacement, diaspora, responses to foreignness and the human lives affected by the AIDS epidemic; it was later made into a movie by Mira Nair. His second book was called The Tennis Partner, dealing with physician drug abuse and the death of a friend.