Understanding how stars form within the Universe is one of the fundamental questions in
modern astrophysics and is central to many other fields. In this talk, I will briefly
describe the current astrophysical understanding of the formation of low-mass (Sun-like)
stars out of the interstellar medium in the Milky Way, based on our long-term monitoring
observations of a few rare type of eruptive young low-mass young stellar objects (e.g.,
FUors, EXors, etc). The FU Orionis (FUor) or EX Orionis (EXor) phenomenon has attracted
increasing attention in recent years and is now accepted as a crucial element in the
early evolution of low-mass stars. The long-term observations of this class of eruptive
variables are important to design theoretical models of low-mass star formation. In the
second part of my talk, I will also give a brief description of the activities of the
Infrared Astronomy Group of TIFR with special emphasis on the ground- and balloon-borne
Instrumentation for star formation studies.