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Not long ago, I realized I have been holding onto a tiny time machine. I realized this when I once accidentally turned it on! I do not have the user manual for this time machine, but from several instances of such accidental time travel, I now have some idea of how it works. This time machine is quite primitive — in the way that it does not all...

Two years ago on this day, I reported at the campus of the Indian Institute of Science — to begin my undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computing. With this, I have completed somewhat half of my IISc time1. There’s a lot to say about these two years, including the things I have learnt and the people I have met. But I will save my time2 by s...

Deadlines have some sort of magic to them. A project can continue to drag on for months, but as soon as we decide to make a deadline1, usually one of two things happen. The entire universe conspires to make sure we meet the deadline with everything we want to do. We conspire to make sure we meet the deadline with everything we can (and sho...

I am always very excited about meeting students from other universities, especially undergrad students. And whenever I do meet students from other universities, I am most interested in listening about how things work at their school. The undergrad program at IISc is very new. If you talk about the B.Tech. program in particular, that is as new a...

I have lately been working with GraalVM to use Polyglot for embedding Python code in Java. In doing so I sometimes require a translation of Java objects to Python objects and vice versa, while passing them between the two languages. My research advisor recently pointed out that my translation will fall apart if he passed a self-referential objec...

Python is a very flexible language, and provides a lot of “magic” for developers to do nearly anything they want with the language and also the objects in the language. One interesting feature is the ability to override the so-called “dunder” methods (methods with double underscores on either side) on classes in order to provide custom behaviour...

I have been hearing from many experienced researchers that research is not like coursework and is by its very nature open-ended. There is no fixed path, and even your supervisor may not have concrete answers. In fact most likely, nobody in the entire world may have the answers to your questions. If you’re doing “cutting-edge” research, then this...

While preparing for my visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - my first time travelling to the United States - I remembered the first image of America that I had in my head when I was around four years old. The image was of a vast hilly landscape with lush greenery and neat concrete roads. These roads would be lined with severa...