I graduated as a Mechanical Engineer in 1988 from IIT Madras, successfully optimizing the number of core credits to the lower-bound. Thereafter I did a Ph. D. in the State University of New York at Stony Brook in theoretical physics till 1993, working with the late Professor Nandor L Balazs. I joined as a post-doc and later became Scientist-D and Reader at the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad, enjoying Gujarathi food till 2003. During this time I also started studying the connections between chaos and quantum entanglement, a fringe activity at that time. The Indian National Science Academy, in an obvious and momentary lapse of judgement, gave me the Young Scientist award in 1998. Since 2003 I have been a faculty at IITM. I have foisted myself as a long-term visiting scientist or faculty on Washington State University at Pullman, IIT Kanpur, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany and the Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University at Krakow, Poland. Most of these places I still periodically haunt due to enduring collaborations.

I am married to Lata Sundaram and as the photo shows she is a part time Elephant trainer.