Umashankar Sivakumar

Ganapathi Bappa Morya!

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I spent an evening at the 64th Bengaluru Ganesh Utsava in Basavanagudi, from the drums at 5pm and the aarti to Sivasri Tejasvi Surya's bhajans, where the entire crowd sang along with her.

Bhajan

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:53:36 GMT

This is Sivasri Tejasvi Surya at the Bengaluru Ganesh Utsava, singing with her head tilted back, a pair of wooden clappers raised in one hand and the other hand open. It was the evening the entire crowd sang the bhajans along with her.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

What a week of khayal and dhrupad, both, actually does

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Khayal on the sitar and dhrupad on the surbahar, in the same week, put me in two different kinds of stillness, one that comes from moving fast and one that comes from hardly moving at all. A week with only one of them leaves a gap the other can't fill.

A hero who goes by the book

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Amish Tripathi's Ram Chandra series tells the same years three times over, from three sides, and what kept me reading was Ram, a hero who reads the rules and then actually follows them, even when it costs him everything.

The machine under my desk

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One box under my desk runs eight things through Portainer: a git server, a music library, a photo library, a file-sync setup, game streaming, an ebook pipeline, and the plumbing that ties them together by name. This is why I run it, what it costs, and how each piece works.

Importance of a muse for artists

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Practice can get you to correct, and that's usually where it stops. A muse is the thing your work is reaching for beyond correct, and it's what tells you what to do next once you can already do it right.

The art of black and white photography

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Underneath its colour, a photograph is a map of light and dark, and that map is what the eye uses to see shape. Black and white shows me the map on its own, which is how I find out whether a frame holds.

What playing and training for all 7 days does

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I'm on court or in the gym seven days a week (two days of intense coaching, three of academy play, and two of fitness closed out with relaxed hitting), and I have the reflexes, footwork, and rally endurance to show for it.

Still Water

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A lone duck is the one still thing on a surface that never stops moving, where morning light cuts a diagonal across Puttanahalli Lake and the water breaks it into thousands of small ripples. The duck sits at the edge of the bright band, with its wake still spreading.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

The Perch

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A cormorant sits on a bare fork of driftwood, with its head turned towards something out of frame. Everything in front of it is a blur, hence the bird and its branch are the only things that hold the eye.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

Follow Through

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:14:13 GMT

This is the end of a forehand, held at the moment the whole body is committed to a shot that's already gone, with the eyes tracking the ball down the court. The racquet is already behind the shoulder and the back foot still off the ground, in early light, with the chain-link and the long shadow of the wall behind.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

The Weight

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:17:33 GMT

The figure sits head down just outside a hard-edged pool of stage light, carrying whatever the scene has just handed him. The frame is white on black, with the light spilling across the boards towards the audience.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

Mid-Turn

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:14:44 GMT

A dancer turns faster than the eye can follow, hence the only way to see the shape is to stop it. The head has already arrived while the arms are still travelling, with the fabric caught mid-flare and the hands soft at the ends of straight arms.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

Held Note

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 18:54:10 GMT

The singer is holding the note past the point where it would be comfortable to stop, with the microphone close enough to be part of the face, and everything outside the single spotlight is gone.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

The Still Point

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:32:22 GMT

One man stands still while a temple queue moves past at a fifteenth of a second, with everyone in the frame smeared except him. Fairy lights hang down the barrier and a trishula is picked out in bulbs above.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR II

What hardware counters can and cannot tell us

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I spent a year testing whether CPU performance counters can predict how fast an HPC application will run. They can't. They explain runtime rather than project it, and the useful part of the project was measuring exactly where that boundary sits and what crossing it costs.

The Answer

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The smile that made the rest of it a formality is the whole point of this frame, even out of focus behind two rings held up to the lens, with hands clasped around them.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

The Ring

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A ring slides onto a mehndi-covered hand, and all the ceremony around it falls into shadow, which leaves just the small, deliberate work of two pairs of hands and the promise passing between them.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

Gat in Chowtal — Raag Bhimpalasi

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is from the annual event my guruji, my teacher, conducts with all his students. I played Bhimpalasi on the surbahar, the bass sitar, in dhrupad, the older and the slower of the two styles I learn. My performance began with fifteen minutes of aalap, the slow opening before any beat comes in. The recording picks up at the gat that followed, a fixed composition set to chowtal, the twelve-beat cycle dhrupad uses.

Aalap and Jor — Raag Bhimpalasi

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fifteen minutes of aalap, the raag opened one note at a time with no pulse to lean on. Then jor, where the chikari strings start keeping time and the phrases tighten around them. Bhimpalasi's komal Ga and Ni carry most of its feeling, and the aalap is mostly about letting them settle. It's practice, recorded as it was.

Raag Bhimpalasi

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bhimpalasi is a raag for the early afternoon, and what it carries is a quiet ache, closer to longing than to grief. Two of its seven notes are flattened, the third and the seventh, and nearly all of its feeling lives in those two. It climbs on five notes and comes back down through all seven.

Rudra Veena

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A rudra veena (the been) in performance, with its two gourds and fretted neck. It's the deepest voice of the dhrupad tradition, with a slow, heavy note allowed to fully dwell.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

Order and chaos

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Leave anything alone and it drifts. Order is something you choose, build and keep paying for, so the question was never how to get rid of chaos. It's which parts of it are worth a frame, and what happens inside the frame once it holds.

Ten models, four domains

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I built a local AI coaching system for Hindustani music, tennis, photography and career coaching, then spent two weeks benchmarking ten models to find the right one, on speed, on quality, on whether letting a model think first helps, and through a lot of out-of-memory crashes.

Riyaz with a machine

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I wanted an AI practice companion for surbahar and sitar, and the model kept making things up about raags it barely knew. Fixing that meant giving it a library of 1,385 Wikipedia articles to look things up in before it answers, and nobody had built one for this music before.

Raag and taal

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Friends who sit through a recording with me always ask, about ten minutes in, what makes this music different. The answer is two ideas everything else rests on, the raag, a set of notes with a character, and the taal, the cycle of beats the music lives inside.

Seven months in, my first tournament

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Seven months after picking tennis back up after a decade away, I signed up for a two-day open tournament with no idea what I was walking into. By the end of day one I had a runner-up trophy, and by the end of day two I could barely stand.

Last Customers

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A street stall lit against a quiet road is a small, bright place of work, with the city slowing down around it. The vendors are finishing up for the night while the traffic on the left leaves trails in the long exposure.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR II

Darshan

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A roadside shrine glows behind the everyday traffic of people and bikes, with the deity steady at the centre. Everything else is in motion around it - the priest's gaze, the stranger on her phone, and the man crossing the frame.

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Tabla, in Motion

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A long exposure of a tabla solo, where the tihai resolves somewhere between the drums holding still and the hands smearing into the rhythm they are making.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

The Pianist

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A long exposure of a piano recital, where the player blurs into the music itself while the score holds still on the stand.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF50-140mm F2.8 R LM OIS WR

Mudra

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A dancer's hands are raised in a mudra that condenses years of practice into a gesture, with the face held in the half-second between effort and ease.

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Pause

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A Bharatanatyam dancer holds still between two movements, on the beat with no sound, which is the hardest one in any composition.

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Hearth

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The day's first heat comes from someone else's labour - a woman at the rolling stone with dough in one hand. Steam rises from the tava, with a basket of finished roti waiting in the morning light.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR II

Shade

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A vendor steals a quiet hour from the day's selling, pausing in the afternoon under a borrowed umbrella while the cart waits and the sun moves on.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR II

Common Mormon

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A common mormon rests on a flower head, still and balanced on the smallest set of legs, with everything behind it dissolved into a soft blur.

FUJIFILM X-T5, XF16-55mm F2.8 R LM WR II

Twelve days in England and Scotland

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I went to see the university I had only studied at online, Viren came along to tour the UK, and we kept asking one question - why can't India be more like this?

Access Control for Streaming Data Across Heterogeneous Communication Models

Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A unified mechanism to insert access-control policies into data streams and enforce them across heterogeneous communication models.

Heterogeneous Parallel Critical Nodes Detection

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A heterogeneous algorithm for the Critical Node Detection Problem using OpenCL, outperforming the earlier parallel implementation by 2× on real-world Twitter data.