Scholars 2023: Shloka Sah, Shourya Dasgupta and Viral Ketan Mehta
For the final post we will be presenting Shloka Sah, Shourya Dasgupta and Viral Ketan Mehta.
Shloka and Shourya will be attending Columbia Law School, Columbia University for an LLM in Law. Viral will be joining ETH Zurich, Switzerland for an MSc in Landscape Architecture.
Shloka Sah
Shloka is presently engaged as a law clerk-cum-research assistant to the Honourable Mr Justice S. Ravindra Bhat, Judge, Supreme Court of India. Previously, she was a part of the competition team at the Mumbai-based law firm Trilegal. She is a graduate of National Law University Jodhpur and will be pursuing her Master of Laws degree at Columbia University.
As a law clerk, she has rendered assistance on cases concerning significant questions of constitutional law, including capital punishment, personal liberty and affirmative action. Her interest in commercial law has enabled her to additionally assist on matters involving taxation and insurance law. Upon the completion of her degree at Columbia, she wishes to return to India and practice as a litigator, with a focus on serving in the judiciary in the long-term.
In her downtime, Shloka is an avid practitioner of the classical Indian dance form, Odissi, and can be found either taking a class, or attending a performance.
Shourya Dasgupta
Shourya has been an advocate practising in Delhi since 2020. He is currently associated with the chambers of Mr. Shadan Farasat, prior to which he did a short stint as a corporate lawyer at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas. He graduated from the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata, in 2019.
Shourya’s work primarily revolves around criminal defence and protecting the constitutional rights of undertrial prisoners. He has worked on cases that have elicited several landmark judgments, including reimagining the definition of ‘custody’ to include house arrest, and the need for constitutional courts to balance the right to a speedy trial against the gravity of an offence while considering bail for persons accused under anti-terror laws. He is also interested in issues of federalism and has been part of several landmark cases delineating the powers of the Delhi government and the Delhi Legislative Assembly.
When he’s not working, Shourya can be found giving expression to his inner Anton Ego, sampling the food at the newest restaurants. If he knows you very well, you can maybe also persuade him to sing some verses of Rabindrasangeet- after all, even though Shourya no longer lives in Bengal, you can never take the Bengali out of him.
Viral Mehta
Viral was born and brought up in a coastal town of Gujarat. She lived close to nature during her childhood, landscapes of the ocean, saltpans, orchards, and sacred groves were part of everyday life. When she travelled to the city for higher education, she felt disconnected from nature in developing urban areas. Degradation of landscapes is not only an ecological threat, but also a concern for the physiological wellbeing of humans. This disconnection triggered a concern and curiosity, about landscape urbanism, in her. After her graduation from the School of Architecture, CEPT University in 2018 she has worked with several organisations towards understanding urban and natural landscapes.
With ThumbImpressions Collaborative in Surat, she worked on the revival of 29 water bodies affected by the rapid urbanization in Delhi state by using ecologically sensitive and sustainable methods. This was a pivotal experience for her in understanding that landscape architecture is where her deep interests and design thinking overlapped.
At Integrated Design, Bangalore with landscape architect Mohan Rao she learned about traditional knowledge systems of water harvesting, agriculture, pastoral practices, and native ecologies of many Indian regions through working on projects of varying scales and impacts. Her ongoing research and photo-documentation with Leaf Foundation, Ahmedabad, on Bangalore’s landscape history explores landscape typologies in the garden city, their emergence and evolution through time and socio-political factors.
Viral has a keen interest in design education too. She has been working at school of architecture, CMR University, Bangalore, where she has taken hands-on workshops on model making and basic design and has been part of architecture studies trips.
Viral will join MSc Landscape Architecture at ETH Zurich in September, 2023. She hopes to expand her knowledge of ecological systems, widen her skills in designing landscapes and get a global perspective to better respond to the current day challenges of climate change and biodiversity degradation.
