Though he passed away in September, I only learned about it tonight: Thanu Padmanabhan, renowned Indian theoretical physicist, is no longer with us. He was only 64 when he passed away, a result of a heart attack according to Wikipedia.
I never met Padmanabhan but I have several of his books on my bookshelf, including Structure Formation in the Universe and his more recent textbook Gravitation. I am also familiar with many of his papers.
I learned about his death just moments ago as I came across a paper by him on arXiv, carrying this comment: “Prof. T. Padmanabhan has passed away on 17th September, 2021, while this paper was under review in a journal.”
What an incredible loss. The brilliant flame of his intellect, extinguished. I am deeply saddened.
A tribute article about his life was published on arXiv back in October, but unfortunately was not cross-listed to gr-qc, and thus it escaped my attention until now.