I know I am very late in saying this - but happy new year everyone! Hope it is a good one for all of us.

I have been away from blogging for almost 45 days now, and I apologize, primarily to myself, for not keeping at this. It really isn’t a big deal writing a blog every week, and it hardly takes half an hour to write a weekly report. Galat baat. Not done.

Let me talk about what all I did in the past month.

Exactly a month ago, I took a vacation of about three weeks, and went off to Pune! What all did I do there?

  • On 17th, I packed my bags and took a bus to Mumbai to celebrate Chuski getting placed at JP Morgan Services. We had a wonderful night of partying, with Abhisumat showing off his skills as a mixer :P. Had so much food that I can’t even recollect how much I had. The next day I solo-toured some important spots in Mumbai including Haji Ali Dargah, Siddhivinayak. Met up with Tanmay, Devanshi and Dhairik, before spending the night at Vishal’s place. The spirit of the people of Mumbai impressed me a great deal, and I am seriously in awe of the way the city conducts itself.

  • The Christmas weekend, I went for a family trip to Dive Agar, a charming little coastal village about 5 hours from Pune. Gorged on some absolutely delicious seafood. Unfortunately, fell a bit ill when I was there :(.

  • New year weekend, like always, was spent with cousins. The new year barbecue has sort of become a ritual in the family now, and everyone eagerly looks forward to it!

  • Oh, and on the academic side, I started reading up about the Uncomplexity and Black Hole Geometry paper by Ying Zhao. It builds on an earlier paper I had been reading last semester for my thesis. Uncomplexity is an interesting concept which Susskind and Adam Brown have postulated, majorly because it gives a measure of the total amount of useful computational work that can be done by a system, akin to how the a system away from maximal entropy can be used for useful work. The holographic dual of uncomplexity is the just the area available on the Penrose diagram for trajectories to fall into. Interesting af!

  • I also started working on gravitational wave physics at ICTS - mostly on an idea that tries to use binary black hole detections by LIGO in the next 10/20/30 years to measure cosmological parameters. We are currently doing some preliminary checks to see whether the idea is actually something worth working on. Worked on this at home.

After coming back to Bangalore, life has been a bit hectic. ICTS was celebrating its tenth anniversary, and the people in attendance were real bigshots. I will let my tweets speak for themselves.

Last Sunday, Shubhankar, Wachaspati, Saini and I did a little tour of Bangalore. And Shubhankar being Shubhankar decided to make a vlog out of it! Do give it a watch.

We also attended the lecture on Usefulness of Useless Knowledge organized by ICTS at the Christ University Auditorium, and it was so good! I highly recommend giving it a watch when it is uploaded on the ICTS YouTube Channel.

This week, Kip Thorne came down to ICTS to deliver a public lecture, and it was a celebration. The excitement in the crowd was visible, with cheers and whistles even at regular intervals. I had presumed the lecture be the usual rut about general relativity, but it turned out to be an inspiring version of the rut with LIGO playing the lead role.

I also attended some technical lectures at the Kavli Asian Winter School on Particles, Strings and Cosmology. The best Profs in the world lecturing!

Anyway, that’s it for now. I will try not to miss any weekly update. I have a few ideas for the general blogs too, and hope it goes through.

Be well everyone. :)