Interview of Prof. Govind Agrawal, a pioneer in nonlinear optics

Professor Govind Agrawal is the James C. Wyant professor of Optics at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, USA. He is famous for his book Nonlinear Fiber Optics, which is widely accepted as the standard reference in the field, and is cited over 30,000 times. Here is an interview with him, conducted by Debanuj Chatterjee. (to be published in Inscight on August 2026)

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Short summer courses : Breaking barriers in science education in India

The IISER Kolkata Alumni Association’s Short Summer Courses (SSC) programme fills gaps in traditional science education by bringing together Indian university students and early-career researchers from around the world. Starting this July 2025, SSC hopes to promote academic innovation and democratise scientific knowledge throughout India by offering engaging, state-of-the-art courses. (Published in India Bioscience on June 2025)

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Secret of the Wings : Nanostructures on a Dragonfly

Dragonflies are one of the marvels of natural creation. The secrets of their flight dynamics, mate selection, predation, and visual information processing are all awe inspiring. During a trip to Puri in India, I had an interesting encounter with a group of dragonflies. A few of their pictures revealed some hidden mysteries about the nanostructures present on their wings. (Published in Inscight in May 2025)

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A Contextual Story of Fiber Optic Amplifiers for Modern Communication Technologies

The field of fiber optics traces its transformation from a 19th century parlor trick to the foundation of our global communication network. However this revolutionary technology is far from attaining its maximum potential. Exploration of aspects of nonlinear fiber optical systems and harnessing their capabilities for superior communication systems is an ongoing pursuit unleashing a lot of excitement in the scientific community today. (Link to the LinkedIn post)

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Ultrashort Optical Pulses : A Tool to Probe the Electron

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for contributions in advancement of attosecond science. The prize recognizes the use of ultrashort optical pulses to probe the dynamics of electrons in atoms and chemical molecules. These scientific achievements in physics are truly remarkable and pave the way for future discoveries. Congratulations to the winners! (Link to the LinkedIn post)

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Fractals : A New Way of Understanding Visual Arts

What is beautiful and what is not? How to define or identify beauty? Man has asked and tried to answer these questions through the ages. Nevertheless, despite being captivating and transcendental, the nature of beauty turned out to be highly elusive.

(Published in Cogito in August 2021)

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Universalism in Tagore's Utopia

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath who instrumentally reshaped Indian literature, music and art in the first half of the twentieth century. Here we rediscover the tenets of the Tagorean philosophy of Universalism and establish an avant-garde paradigm of value-system for our societies.

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Love Oscillations (I)

About two-thirds of young dating adults have experience with on-and-off relationships that often seats them in an emotional rollercoaster wreaking havoc on their mental well-being. This analysis tries to investigate the dynamics of these relationships with an over-simplified physical model. (Published in Cogito in August 2021)

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Artificial Photosynthesis

All of us encountered the term photosynthesis in our high school science textbooks. In a nutshell, photosynthesis convert atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) into carbohydrates in the presence of water and sunlight. Through this process, the energy in sunlight is converted into chemical energy stored in the bonds of the carbohydrates that can be used by the plant at a later time. what if we can mimic the ingenious idea of plants, of trapping light energy as chemical energy, in our labs? It would be a path to a completely sustainable energy technology.

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A Girl in the Tunnel

Mathematics is full of mysteries. The Collatz conjecture, is a long standing conjecture in mathematics that is elusively simple to state. Here we dig into this conjecture and try to visualize its properties in a non-traditional manner. Read on to find out about a harmonious marriage between mathematics and art. (Published in Cogito in April 2020)

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Dark Spots of Modern Technologies : A Futuristic Perspective

When a historian of a future time (say 2200) starts writing the history of today, s/he will definitely have a lot of content and excitement in describing today’s world. The amazing things that are being developed today are paving the way for a new epoch of science and technology. But if we do not take care of the existing loopholes in our systems today, there is a possibility that that historian will never exist; as our civilization might cease to be. (Published in Confluence in May, 2020)

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Classification of Truth for Dummies

What is truth? In general, anything that is in accordance with fact or reality can be designated as truth. But don't you think this characterization of truth is deeply naive? For example, I can further ask, what is meant by a fact? The faculty of the language system developed by human beings, disallows the existence of a precise answer to these questions by construction. Albeit the general premise of the meaning of truth is quite vague, I envisage that having a better conception of truth, requires its efficient classification.

Classification of Truth

লুই ও আশ্চর্য্য বেড়াল (in Bengali)

20th century painter Louis Wain is known for his amazing cat-paintings. The evolution of the role and significance of cats in his paintings follow a poignant trajectory of events in his life. Through the course of his life, he kept losing his near and dear ones and his mental health deteriorated. Eventually he was sent to a mental hospital where his cat paintings gained the artistic flavour of abstract expressionism; creating the “Monalisa of asylum art”. Eminent writer H. G. Wells once remarked about Wain’s paintings, “He made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. British cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.”. This article takes a cruise through the life of Louis Wain, tracing the social dynamics surrounding him and articulates his struggles, reimagined through the lens of his obsession with cats. (Link to publication in Cogito, on Feb 2021)

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Paradigm Shift in the Philosophy of Science

This blog explored one of the most important theories in the realm of philosophy of science by Thomas Kuhn, the ‘theory of paradigm shift’. We discuss a few instances of non-linear scientific developments in recent times, covering topics like Darwinian evolution, electromagnetism, nonlinear dynamics and quantum physics.

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