Biography I was born and grew up in New Delhi, and did my schooling at St. Columba's School (1971-1983). Soon after finishing high school, I went into kidney failure; I received a kidney transplant from my father on 5th February 1985. The transplant failed in 2011, and I was on hemodialysis November 2011 to January 2026. My (hopefully) last-ever dialysis was on 21st January 2026. On 22nd January 2026, I was transplanted for a second time, at Charité Virchow.
Before moving to the US and then Germany, we lived in Japan for a total of five years, in Minoo, Osaka prefecture, and Nishinomiya, Hyogo prefecture. At the bottom of the page are some of the visual traces from my life over the years, mostly but not all from our time in Japan.
I used to be an amateur musician (violin). Currently, I play guitar plus a couple of other instruments. Some guitar recording: Milonga "Floreos et Preludio Criollo", by Juan Buscaglia, Largo, by J.S. Bach.
In my younger days I used to do Iaido. My BA (Honours) was in Japanese (JNU, India), and I have Masters degrees in Linguistics (JNU, India), Computer and Information Science (Ohio State, USA), and Statistics (Sheffield, UK). I have a PhD in Linguistics (2002) from Ohio State.
Cool fact: My academic geneology (as far as I could reconstruct it) goes all the way back to a German scientist from Berlin: Richard Lewis (my PhD advisor) ← Allen Newell ← Herb Simon ← Henry Schultz← Henry Moore ← Simon Newcomb, John Bates Clark ← Benjamin Pierce, Karl Knies ← Nathaniel Bowditch, Bruno Hildebrandt ← Maximilian Duncker.