Contrived arguments against the anti-CEC protests

Claiming political attention is scarce can't justify vouchsafing for economists alone the authority to decide which grievances citizens should prioritise

Dama dam, mast

Always feel a tremendous, enlivening rush when I listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. ❤️ Especially tonight, after the day's events in New Delhi, with the arrest of Abhijeet Dipke and Neha Bora. The soul needs something to keep going and tonight, it must be 'Dama Dam Mast

'Maya' and the monoculture

I recently reviewed a novel titled Maya: Seed Takes Root, by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon, for The Hindu. Excerpt: As with novels, the first symptom is the writing, which is conspicuously aphoristic. Lines like “If dreams inspire hope, nightmares inform vigilance” are peppered throughout the text. Of Maya’s

Mulling AI and maths

Some AI + mathematics things I read recently and am mulling below. I've been struggling to pull these and various threads on the topic into a cogent whole, even if only for myself, because the developments have been coming fast and thick, with no indications they will slow in

'You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about'

Recently had a chance to rewatch Good Will Hunting, and thought Robin Williams's heart-rending speech to Matt Damon on the bench in the park is something we could also recount to AI, and to ourselves so that we remember what AI really is, and have it be

AI and the risk of catastrophe

Isn't it wild that we've reached a situation where people who are most ❊pro❊ AI say “this technology we love and build has like a 10% chance of killing us all” and the people who are ❊anti❊ AI reply “there's no way this figure

An explosive study

My sister Swathi Murali has her first peer-reviewed paper out, expected in print in the December 2026 edition of Forensic Chemistry. Excerpt from the abstract: Electrical tapes may be submitted to forensic laboratories for analysis concerning their utilization in the construction of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). However, post-blast

Computation that computes

While I was recently browsing the web for interesting physics papers, I came across one in Nature titled ‘A thermodynamically favoured molecular computer’. The work itself seemed interesting but what caught my eye was a pair of lines in the abstract: “… computation can be embedded in a system relaxing to

Verifiability, access, and allocation in maths

When I was talking about this post with a friend, he asked a thought-provoking question. In the post, I’d argued that I believe it should be appropriate for mathematics to consider a solution to a problem to be illegitimate if mathematicians had arrived at it with help from

Privileged access is bad for science

Despite some problems of its own, the ongoing Microsoft Majorana saga has been striking a pleasant contrast with the rush by artificial intelligence (AI) companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to show their proprietary models can do research-level mathematics. Of course, experts verify an experiment in condensed matter physics and

Lesson learnt? None.

A particular line from the open statement mathematicians wrote against the design of the latest Caltech Mathathon, due to happen in late October, has stuck with me: Mathematicians do not only prove theorems: they also take measures to ensure that the future of a field remains healthy after the extraction

Semiconductor nationalism

There’s a passage in an interview of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, published by Frontline on September 1, that many people seem to have misunderstood, especially on Twitter, where — perhaps unsurprisingly — it has been reduced to “India shouldn’t make chips because it can smuggle them in instead”. Excerpt: