In 2006, Raghu Mahajan was All India Rank 1 in IIT-JEE becoming the first student from Chandigarh ever to top the IIT entrance. He took the seat almost every topper takes, Computer Science at IIT Delhi. But two years later, he walked out. He left for MIT in 2008 to study physics and mathematics instead. Eleven years after that, he co-wrote one of the most important physics papers of the decade, alongside one of the most influential theoretical physicists alive. The problem had been open since 1976. That year, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes are not perfectly black. They slowly leak radiation and, given enough time, evaporate completely. But the radiation appeared to carry no trace of whatever had fallen in. If Hawking was right, information could be destroyed forever, something quantum mechanics insists can never happen. In 1993, physicist Don Page described what the answer would have to look like if information did survive: a curve that rises and then falls, now called the Page curve. For decades, nobody could derive that fall using the same tools Hawking himself had used. In 2019, working in Princeton, Mahajan co-wrote one of a small group of papers that finally did. His collaborators were Ahmed Almheiri, Ying Zhao and Juan Maldacena. The paper was titled "The Page curve of Hawking radiation from semiclassical geometry." The Institute for Advanced Study described that wave of work as coming "tantalizingly close" to resolving a paradox that had bedevilled physicists for nearly 50 years. In 2026, that paper earned him the Frontiers of Science Award, which honours high-impact research from the past decade, presented at the International Congress of Basic Sciences in Beijing. By then he had already made his choice. In August 2024 he chose not to take a faculty position in the United States and joined ICTS-TIFR in Bengaluru, where his colleagues include Ashoke Sen, with whom he has written papers on string theory. He has argued that Indian string theorists working in India, taken together, have contributed more to the field than anyone outside the United States. Sixteen years after leaving, he came home to keep working on the deepest questions in physics from Bengaluru. "I did not feel at all that I was missing out," he wrote.