After almost 10 months of not posting anything on this blog, Hi! A lot has changed in the past few months, and I would ask you to scroll through the links in the Navigation Bar for more.

January is [obviously] the month of resolutions. I wrote down a few non-academic resolutions on Twitter at the start of the year.

But January was also an extremely busy month, owing to the Cosmology - The Next Decade Workshop at ICTS.

The program was really world class. The first part of it had a school on cutting-edge topics in cosmology, which I tried to attend whenever I could. I found the Inflation (Paolo Creminelli) and the Structure Formation (Aseem Paranjape, John Peacock) lectures very useful. I also got to meet Rashid Sunyaev, who has one of the most interesting physical effects in the Cosmic Microwave Background named after him! He came across as a wonderful human being, and his lectures were filled with anecdotes of his life in physics. It was enlightening and inspiring at the same time.

I am also crediting courses in Electromagnetism, Advanced Statistical Physics and Dynamical Systems this semester. The Dynamical Systems course is taught from a very mathematical point of view - I am taking some time to come to terms with the way mathematicians think about dynamical systems and ordinary differential equations, but the few weeks I have spent working on the assignment problems have been pretty rewarding. Also planning to audit the Elasticity course just for fun. Looks like it’s gonna be a heavy semester courses-wise (but hey, it’s the last semester ever of courses!)

I have started working on one other project in gravitational waves, and am currently reading up the literature needed to get up to speed with everything.

I have a new favourite place in Bengaluru - the National Gallery of Modern Art in Vasanth Nagar! I went there with Ballu and Wachas, and we spent a good 2 hours there. It is a must-see for anybody who visits Bengaluru. I also have a new favourite restaurant - Tom’s on Residency Road. Lip-smacking delicious food, and not too heavy on the pocket! The creme brulee there is also very good.

Coming back to the earlier tweet, I was not able to fully complete any of my goals :(. I am telling myself “it’s okay”, but it obviously is not. What’s done is done, and I am fully geared up for February.

I hope to post at least fortnightly updates as also updates about papers I am reading - hope it goes through well. I also have some creative writing ideas in my head which I want to explore. Let’s see how everything pans out.

Be well, all :)