https://kartrick.com/ Recent content on Karthik Thrikkadeeri Hugo -- gohugo.io en Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/decade-of-devotion/ Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/decade-of-devotion/ A decade ago, I started my undergrad which would go on to be one of the biggest inflection points of my life. There are innumerable things that have changed during this decade, and my noggin is two of them. I’ve long wished to collate all my avatars from those undergrad years defined in part by a crazy growth spurt. This wish is now fulfilled with this retrospective covering my post-undergrad chapters as well. https://kartrick.com/blog/summer-26/ Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/summer-26/ Dear Friend, In this letter I try to press sense out of a specific set of jumbled thoughts and emotions, with many others being left out. Healthy corporate prioritization! Right now I am in a weird in-between period of a few weeks with not much keeping me urgently busy, and I just wanted to write. I usually do not rest easy until and unless my thoughts, and by extension my writing, follow a clear discernible logic, so this is a personal challenge as well as an amusing creative experiment. https://kartrick.com/sandbox/ebird/ Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/sandbox/ebird/ Birding to me is a lot of things; at times, I see it as a sport. Given my love for numbers and my obsession with cricket stats as a kid (more on this coming soon!), I wanted to try and implement a similar sort of analysis and visualisation of sport statistics. Disclaimer: All this is based off my data uploaded to eBird. That covers most, but not all, of the birding I have done. https://kartrick.com/sandbox/vehicle-register/ Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/sandbox/vehicle-register/ I have loved cars from the time I can remember, whether it was our family cars in which we would spend hours and hours road-tripping across southern Africa, or my little plastic scooter or battery-operated car that I’d rally across our house, much to the annoyance (but occasional amusement) of my parents. Heck, I would even “air drive” both indoors and outdoors, imagining that I was driving the intriguing boxy Toyota Hiace vans that would pick me up and drop me off from school. https://kartrick.com/blog/hip-hop-love/ Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/hip-hop-love/ He said, “I write what I see Write to make it right, don’t like where I be I’d like to make it like the sights on TV Quite the great life, so nice and easy.” — Lupe Fiasco, Hip-Hop Saved My Life Snowstorm in Baton Rouge, 21 January 2025. Although I can recall many days chanting apple bottom jeans and crank that on loop as an eight-year-old, it wasn’t until I was 13–14 that I started listening to rap music more broadly, in earnest. https://kartrick.com/blog/locustella-love-update/ Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/locustella-love-update/ Having started birding in India, it was Europe that made me fall in love with warblers. Among them, those of the genus Locustella particularly took my heart, due to their mesmerising songs that so perfectly emulated orthopterans. There were three species I ran into during my time in Europe, all with surprisingly distinct songs. Given that I was captivated enough by this genus to boldly declare, in June 2020, that “my favourite warbler will be Locustella for a long time”, I was naturally elated when I found myself entwined in a web of mystery around a different Locustella in an altogether different part of the world! https://kartrick.com/slides/2024_ga-soib/ Sat, 16 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/slides/2024_ga-soib/ In this session of alumni talks for the current batch of Green Army members, I outline my journey from clueless and naive BSc student whose world opened up via the peer group of Green Army, to falling in love with ecological science, and finally to my current research work. I give an overview of the State of India’s Birds 2023 effort, as an example of what can be done with a large amount of fun data. https://kartrick.com/blog/adidab/ Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/adidab/ Today, I had a dream that straddles the line between nerdiness and providence, both of the birdy kind. Dreams about birds or birding are an everyday occurrence for a birder, but I found this one interesting enough to actually write about it. All Day I Dream About Birds. Source: Bing Image Creator "replace three stripes in adidas logo with something that looks like a bird". In a weird amalgamation of multiple recent events, I started out birding in some large campus in Odisha, with Ashwin, Ian Davies and a couple other foggy silhouettes. https://kartrick.com/blog/kenbunshoku-haki/ Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/kenbunshoku-haki/ SPOILER WARNING! This blog post contains spoilers for One Piece (Whole Cake Island onwards). Continue reading at your own risk! I have previously alluded to the interesting perspective of life as a series of chapters or arcs in a shounen anime, and of my own timeskip (see here). In One Piece, after Luffy’s timeskip, he has great adventures with Trafalgar Law, as the two pick a fight with Donquixote Doflamingo whilst on their way to the top brass. https://kartrick.com/blog/hello-again-2023/ Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/hello-again-2023/ Hello again! It’s been close to two years now since I last posted on my blog. Naturally, a lot has changed. First of all, more than 11 years after I first registered with WordPress, I have decided to move on. This decision had been made quite some time ago, as I became increasingly fascinated with Markdown, and parallelly with R. My first leap into the world of RMarkdown was creating my CV, whereas more recently I use it to make most of my slide decks as well. https://kartrick.com/contact/ Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/contact/ ** Contact page don’t contain a body, just the front matter above. See form.html in the layouts folder. Formspree requires a (free) account and new form to be set up. The link is made on the final published url in the field: Restrict to Domain. It is possible to register up to 2 emails free and you can select which one you want the forms to go to within Formspree in the Settings tab. https://kartrick.com/slides/2022_ncf-am_covid-ebirding/ Mon, 10 Oct 2022 10:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/slides/2022_ncf-am_covid-ebirding/ There is no phenomenon in the recent past that has had a more devastating impact on human life than the COVID-19 pandemic. A speed talk summarising how this phenomenon has affected citizen science efforts in bird monitoring in India. https://kartrick.com/slides/2022_ioc-covid-ebirding/ Sun, 14 Aug 2022 08:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/slides/2022_ioc-covid-ebirding/ There is no phenomenon in the recent past that has had a more devastating impact on human life than the COVID-19 pandemic. How has this phenomenon affected citizen science efforts in bird monitoring in India? https://kartrick.com/colophon/ Thu, 04 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/colophon/ Made with Hugo Apéro and blogdown Made with Hugo Apéro, which is based on Blogophonic by Formspree. Powered by blogdown and built by Hugo. The source code for this blog can be found online here on GitHub GitHub. License My blog posts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Unless otherwise specified, code presented in blog posts are released under the MIT license. https://kartrick.com/blog/czech-birding/global-big-day-2021/ Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/czech-birding/global-big-day-2021/ My last Big Day in the Czech Republic was on 8 May 2021. Inspired by friends like Honza, I planned to spend as much time as possible outside in the field. Now this would naturally have meant being outside from midnight to midnight, but due to being caught up with some work throughout the day on 7th and then twitching for a Red-breasted Goose in the evening, this wouldn’t have been a good idea. https://kartrick.com/blog/czech-birding/pseudo-spring-birding-bohemia/ Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/czech-birding/pseudo-spring-birding-bohemia/ A spring birding trip to Šumava had been set in stone long back, but the question was when exactly. In early March, I dove head first into my thesis work, for its submission in mid-April. Despite having a crude calendar on which I crossed off each day as I passed it, that whole month and a half honestly flew past, and all I can remember is my laptop. As I got deeper into my work, I only realised that it would take even longer, and I was worried and frustrated that I would miss much of the springtime bird wonder. https://kartrick.com/blog/czech-birding/winter-birding-bohemia/ Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/czech-birding/winter-birding-bohemia/ As I near the end of my stay in the Czech Republic, I have been feeling quite guilty about not having travelled enough and I’ve had enough of diligently waiting for the pandemic to pass. Luckily for me, this has been an unusually cold winter, so I won’t be missing out on that experience. And I still have a lot of birding to do here. I asked Jan (Honza) Grünwald, who was technically my first Czech friend and whom I had found through eBird and contacted even before getting admitted to the university, if he’d be interested in birding together sometime, because I sure was! https://kartrick.com/blog/darkness/ Fri, 08 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/darkness/ Posting now this draft which I had left slightly incomplete in 2019. I have retained most of the original essence of the note, only making a few edits and filling in a couple of lines. About a year ago, on one of the rare occasions I travelled back to Bangalore from home by bus, I as usual decided to put on my earphones and look out the window instead of going to sleep. https://kartrick.com/blog/turn-of-year/ Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/turn-of-year/ So. 2020 was a curious year. For me personally, it was a trial in many ways. An opportunity for deep learning and growth. Well, I suppose any year is, but 2020 was particularly so. And no, it is not due only to the pandemic. Even the content and style of this blog is going to change, so I thought it worthwhile to write up this post. It was a long (but short! https://kartrick.com/blog/a-lidl-signboard/ Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/a-lidl-signboard/ The other day, I was sitting at my desk as usual and occasionally looking out from my seventh-storey window onto the midday cityscape, when something suddenly caught my eye. It was something located around two-thirds of the way between me and the horizon. I immediately recognised it to be some sort of a signboard, seemingly hoisted proudly above its neighbours and towered over only by a handful of nearby communist apartment buildings. https://kartrick.com/blog/of-life-and-death/ Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/of-life-and-death/ Of late, when I haven’t been wasting my time on worthless pursuits like YouTube binges, I have been getting in a decent amount of thinking. One of the trains of thought I find myself arriving at repeatedly is perhaps the one thing I fear more than death— Yes, I am afraid of death. And frankly, I believe most people are. It doesn’t mean I go through every day paranoid and suspicious. https://kartrick.com/blog/under-the-auspices-of-birds/ Fri, 27 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/under-the-auspices-of-birds/ There is no bigger backing for the claim that birds are Mighty and Majestic (yes, capital M&Ms), than the fact that us humans, to this day, call upon them prior to any major undertaking. “Eh?” you ask? Allow me to elaborate. Classical Roman society had certain priests who had pretty important roles. So important, in fact, that no major project, public or private, would commence without the involvement of these priests—even war and religion! https://kartrick.com/blog/on-the-road/ Sun, 08 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/on-the-road/ I am at home on the road, helmet-clad. I am tripping, yet in tune with the world. I am one with myself and my machine. Detached from my normal life, from the rat race, from the mundane tasks. A simple switch of lenses; wide-angle to macro—a narrow but crisp and focussed field of vision. Attached to the present—to the self and the machine, and to the world. Attached to being alive, to feeling, and to exploring. https://kartrick.com/blog/335-to-budejce/ Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/335-to-budejce/ Ending an exhausting yet fulfilling adventure, I board the 3.35 back to České Budějovice. On this return leg of my journey, all the cabins in 2nd class seem to be occupied by at least one weary privacy-seeker. The travellers turn away my optimism all the way to the end of the carriage, and I take a seat in the last cabin containing, unsurprisingly, an occupant in one of the window seats. https://kartrick.com/blog/hello/ Sun, 22 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/hello/ My name is Karthik Thrikkadeeri. I am 20 years old, and India is what I call “home”. However, I am currently studying Master of Science in Ecology, in the Czech Republic. Some of my interests include wildlife/ecology, reading, travelling, minimalism, a bit of philosophy, personal growth, aaand… writing. Eight years ago, I had started a blog. Or rather, multiple blogs (I don’t even remember the details). I ended up settling on one of them, and it ran for around 4-5 years. https://kartrick.com/blog/rain-tree-reflections/ Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/blog/rain-tree-reflections/ An old journal entry reflecting on rain trees, numbers and other things. Posted to the blog on 14 July 2025, with only minor proofing done to the original text. 18:15, Christ University Main Campus Today I have been pushed to think, rather ponder, on numbers. What exactly was the trigger? Not the astonishing number of students trudging along everyday in the campus. Not the number of books resting in the underexploited library. https://kartrick.com/pubs/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://kartrick.com/pubs/ This page contains the list of my academic publications, which can be grouped and sorted using different parameters. It uses BibBase to link directly to my Zotero publications profile, ensuring live updates here as and when I update the corresponding Zotero library. Hat-tip Shankar Raman et al. (2024) for detailing this method.