Often we are unsure whether the lives of ordinary persons need to be chronicled and presented. For what purpose? Yet, over the weekends and on holidays or while travelling during the last seven years, this book has been written to piece together, as the title shows, the lives of a father and a son. Such a narrative of two lives, brought of up in Odisha, is from a less talked about region of India in the global literary world. No person, place or event written about in this book have been altered or fabricated. It attempts to combine a biography and an autobiography, criss-crossing the lives of two Indians which stretched from the British colonial period to the post-independent years. It spans a period from 1930s till 2020s. The writer is the son, a doctor and an oncologist. The father was a Police man whose life of earning started in British colonial India spanning till the end of Emergency in India. Odd[ly] enough, two septuagenarian British ladies came on a visit to India to retrace the steps of their fathers, under whom the Police man had worked in pre-Second World War and in pre-independence years. Those meetings and conversations sparked an idea to do the necessary social research and write this book to conjoin the past with the present. These eighty odd years link the tumultuous British colonial years before independence in the life of an ordinary police man in Orissa province, his empathy for the freedom struggle and his perseverance to rise above his limitations. Caught in this loop, the son, a little privileged, has lived to witness his youth in the independent India of nineteen sixties. There is a piteousness to abandon his aimlessness, and then coming to grips with the duties of an oncologist to care for the cancer patients in India for the last 40 years. This narrative covers the little nuggets of training as a health worker in nineteen seventies and eightees, and then how it expanded to the choice of combining an academic life with clinical services at AIIMS, Delhi. Both lives intersect to be populated by people, events and places from Orissa, largely unknown to the rest of India and the world at large. This book, joining the biography of father with the autobiography of son, is liable to carry replicate narrations about people, events, and places. Yet, the two lives between them with their contrasts and ordinariness, encapsulate what a reader can conjure up as the essence of India at a time when we celebrate the 75 years of Independence.