Scholars 2021: Arshu John, Lakshmi Reddy, Mudabir Hassan Wani and Rashmi Gottumukkala
This week we present, scholars, Arshu John, Lakshmi Reddy, Mudabir Hassan Wani and Rashmi Gottumukkala.
Arshu will be pursuing a Master’s in Journalism, Media and Globalisation, with a specialisation in Totalitarianism & Transition at Erasmus Mundus, Lakshmi will be joining the Master’s in City Planning programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mudabir will be pursuing a master’s in Religion in Global Politics at School of Oriental and African Studies, London and Rashmi will be pursuing a Master’s in Astrophysics at the University of Geneva.
Arshu John
Arshu John had been an assistant editor at The Caravan for over four years when he was awarded the Inlaks Scholarship. He will be pursuing the Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Journalism, Media and Globalisation, with a specialisation in Totalitarianism & Transition. He sought to better understand India’s political reality, while also seeking a break from living in it, and to his delight he found a programme that allowed him to do both.
Arshu joined The Caravan with no prior journalism experience, after studying law and practicing criminal litigation in Delhi courts for a year. He now tells anyone who will listen that he is a fake lawyer and a fake journalist. His imposter syndrome notwithstanding, Arshu enjoys working on stories on law, crime and politics. He wrote the cover story of the February 2020 issue, a profile on the former CJI Ranjan Gogoi, and how he laid the groundwork for the BJP government to introduce a pan-India NRC. In September that year, Arshu co-authored the cover story on the police and political complicity behind the anti-Muslim violence in Delhi. Their report was the most comprehensive and scathing indictment of the BJP leaders and police officials who participated and led the violence, and Prabhjit Singh and Arshu were awarded the prestigious ACJ Award for Investigative Journalism for it.
Arshu will not want to admit it because he does not like that it is true, but the worst of times was the best of times for his journalism. He lost hope in the process, and he is unsure if the trade was worth it. His pursuit of higher education is part of his attempt to make better sense of India’s road ahead, and the role for himself and journalism within it. Along the way, he also hopes to write political satire.
Lakshmi Reddy
Lakshmi completed her undergraduate studies in architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi in 2017. It was here that she developed her scholarly interests in issues surrounding informality in cities. She later pursued the Anant Fellowship, a year-long interdisciplinary postgraduate diploma program, in order to explore how urban practitioners can address the challenges faced by marginalized groups.. She is currently working with mHS CITY LAB to develop a digital tool that bridges the knowledge gap between low-income communities and construction professionals in order to increase the resilience of self-built, incremental housing. Prior to this, she led a research project that focussed on the settlement, dwellings, vernacular practices, and everyday design processes of the Gujjars, a traditionally nomadic pastoral community in Jammu.
Besides inspiring her enthusiasm for city planning and design, Lakshmi’s academic, professional, and volunteering experiences furthered her appreciation of the challenges and promise of inclusive approaches to development, and highlighted the potential of planning decisions and public policy in shaping social and spatial relationships.
In September, Lakshmi will be joining the Master in City Planning programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Through the International Development specialization, she intends to focus on the predicaments of development that are peculiar to the emerging contexts of urbanization in the global South. Alongside the Inlaks Shivdasani Scholarship, she has been awarded a tuition fellowship and assistantship by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Lakshmi enjoys walking/biking around cities, travelling, hiking, swimming, and watching and discussing films from around the world. During the lockdown, she took up knitting, yoga, and board-gaming.
Mudabir Hassan Wani
Mudabir was born in a small village in the western part of Kashmir where his maternal family named him ‘Mudabir’. He belongs to the first generation on his father’s side of the family to have received any sort of formal education. Mudabir’s father worked at a fuel filling station for the most part of his life and when the smoke and the dust became too much to bear, he started operating a small tea stall. Despite all odds, he made sure that Mudabir and his brother got everything that he couldn’t, best possible schooling being only one of them.
Mudabir studied in a rural branch of the valley’s oldest and first school for modern education. After his 10th grade, he entered the rat race of studying science and mathematics with the aspiration of being a medical doctor or an engineer. However, soon after he realized that his studies were a complete misfit with the events occurring only three blocks away from his classroom. The decision to study Social Sciences at the bachelor’s level at its very basis, was driven by the urge to make sense of the world that he was living in, a world created by Humans and not ‘natural’. He graduated from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, in 2020 with an honour’s degree in Political Science. He will start his master’s at SOAS, London, this fall, where he will be studying Religion in Global Politics there. Religion and Politics have always been the area of his primary interest and this degree at SOAS seems tailored precisely for him.
Apart from things related to everything that is academic, he loves playing and watching cricket (not the drama called T20s, by the way), driving on roads that are surrounded by woods on both sides (there are many in Kashmir), along with trekking and camping.
Rashmi Gottumukkala
Rashmi received her B.Sc. (Hons.) Physics in 2020 and her Postgraduate Diploma in Physics in 2021 from Ashoka University. Growing up, she took keen interest in physics and amateur astronomy (who wouldn’t be utterly floored by the image of Saturn’s rings through a telescope?), but found university physics to be initially daunting, with its mathematical and computational complexities. Therefore, she began her undergraduate education as a hesitant physics major. Her undergraduate experience, however, was deeply enriching, giving her the freedom to explore physics and astronomy, through insightful discussions in the classroom, student activities in the Astro Club and Physics Journal Club, and Teaching Assistantships for astronomy courses. The physics programme at Ashoka allowed her to stumble, fall, but ultimately overcome her fears and embrace physics!
After having done a few research projects during her undergraduate studies, Rashmi soon realised that astronomy would be the ideal field for her, because it allowed her to combine what she loved best in physics with the joys of astronomy – using real world data to understand physical processes, on the grandest of scales. This realisation was only strengthened after an internship at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR), Pune, where she worked on fast transients in radio astronomy.
With the support of the Inlaks Scholarship, Rashmi will be pursuing a Master’s in Astrophysics at the University of Geneva, beginning in September 2021. She is keen to participate in the exciting ongoing research at Geneva in high energy and extragalactic astronomy and looks forward to a diverse introduction to the subject, from observational astrophysics to theoretical cosmology.
Beyond the classroom, Rashmi enjoys reading English classics, loves to crochet, cook, travel, and is passionate about her morning coffee. She hopes to find time for these little pleasures alongside her academic pursuits.
