We present here a somewhat personalized account of the emergence of econophysics as an attractive research topic in physical, as well as social, sciences. After a rather detailed storytelling about our endeavors from Kolkata, we give a brief description of the main research achievements in a simple and non-technical language. We also briefly present, in technical language, a piece of our recent research result. We conclude our paper with a brief perspective.
Keywords: Gini index; Kolkata Paise Restaurant problem; Kolkata index; kinetic exchange model; minority game; simulated annealing technique; traveling salesman problem.