Diversity is one of the common threads that connects people from different walks of life from ecologists to economists to engineers. I am not talking about the diversity in the practice of their professions, but of the biological diversity on Earth. Ecologists are driven by their quest to understand the drivers behind this diversity, and economists might assess its value to us, while engineers have for centuries used the diversity of life forms as an inspiration for their innovations. As a student of biogeography, diversity is the main reason I am in this field. Assume a world consisting of a single species, people like me would cease to exist, Carl Linnaeus would have inherited his fathers ministerial position and Charles Darwin might have become a medical practitioner, while Alfred Wallace would have emerged as a star cartographer! But, thanks to the sheer diversity of life, Linneaeus went on to propose a new way to catalogue plants and animals, Darwin opened up a whole new world of evolutionary biology, while Wallace laid the foundation for biogeography. This age old quest of mankind to understand the diversity of life still burns bright in the minds of researchers who have decided to take a plunge in this field of exploration, adventure and enlightenment. With the dawn of the new century, paradigms are shifting and traditional boundaries of disciplines getting fuzzier and advancement in analytical tools are providing new perspectives about the past. We have entered a new era of exploration of the origins of diversity of life. Mine is one such exploration to decipher the processes behind diversification and dispersal, the evolutionary and biogeographic drivers of diversity and endemism.