Towards constructing viable bouncing scenarios

The inflationary and bouncing scenarios constitute alternative paradigms for the generation of perturbations in the early universe. The remarkable efficiency of the inflationary paradigm has resulted in a profusion of models that fit the cosmological data quite well, even leading to the concern whether inflation can be falsified at all. In complete contrast, it often proves to be difficult to construct bouncing models that are free of pathologies and are also consistent with the data at the level of the power spectra as well as non-Gaussianities. In this talk, I shall first rapidly review the status of the inflationary scenario, highlighting its successes. Thereafter, I shall introduce the essential ideas related to the bouncing scenario and present results from our recent efforts towards constructing viable bounces.