Scholars 2024: Ritesh Khowal, Hrishika Jain and Kumaresh Ramesh
In the last piece of our 4-part series introducing the 2024 Inlaks Scholars, meet Ritesh Khowal, Hrishika Jain and Kumaresh Ramesh.
Ritesh will be joining the Royal College of Art for an MFA in Arts and Humanities, Hrishika will be pursuing her L.L.M. in Law from Yale Law School, and Kumaresh will be studying for his Masters in Environmental Management at Yale University.
Ritesh Khowal
Ritesh Khowal completed his Masters with Gold medal in Creative painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 2020. He will be pursuing Masters of Fine Arts - Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London.
He chose to pursue an MFA in Arts and Humanities because it seeks to challenge orthodoxies and welcomes an interdisciplinary approach. This professionally engaged programme brings fellow artists together with other creative practitioners in a transdisciplinary, collaborative community that promotes a dynamic dialogue to actively examine how the arts and humanities can address current and future challenges. It will support him in extending his practice, and locate and expand its professional potential.
The philosophy of his art practice stands between scientific curiosity and the poetic temperament of asking questions about the nature of things in the larger scheme of existential reality. Being a painter and visual artist, he has been interested in natural philosophy (a classical term for the study of nature and physical universe), navigating alongside socio-political currents of its time. He works with images, objects and materials to create paintings, installations and immersive situations.There are questions which are triggered by time about the human condition, human behavior, survival instinct, the changing relationship of mankind with the natural world and the nature of consciousness.
He is interested in demystifying the languages and modes of thought inherent in particular discourses that determine what reality actually is, through the concepts that they provide us, and which, in turn, shape our perception of the world.
Through his work, he intends to create a neutral space where we can just be human rather than politicized beings. He intends to liberate his viewer where one can, for a moment, take a pause from forced living conditions and think beyond in order to arrive at a broader scientific and philosophical understanding of things.
Hrishika Jain
Hrishika Jain is presently a counsel at the Supreme Court of India, in the chambers of Mr. Shadan Farasat and Ms. Warisha Farasat. She graduated from the B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) programme at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore as a double gold medallist in 2020. While in law school, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the university’s flagship law review, was part of the inaugural Core Team of Parichay, a legal aid network for ameliorating citizenship-deprivation, and headed the Karnataka Chapter of Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access, an NGO encouraging legal education in vulnerable communities.
For the past two years, Hrishika’s practice in the Supreme Court has concentrated on strategic litigation concerning democratic structures and civil liberties in India; she has worked on challenges to the abrogation of Article 370, to the electoral bonds scheme, and to the prohibition of same-sex marriages in India, to name a few. Prior to this, Hrishika worked as a Law Clerk to Late Justice M.M. Shantanagoudar, and subsequently, as a Research Consultant at Project 39A, where she authored a comprehensive empirical assessment of trial court capital sentencing in India.
Hrishika’s long-term goal is to meaningfully contribute to the reform of the Indian democratic process through a combination of constitutional litigation, consensus-building, and policy advocacy. To that end, she will be attending the LL.M. program at Yale Law School, where she will focus on constitutional and democratic theory.
When her face is not buried deep inside a book, Hrishika spends her time solving cryptic crosswords and obsessing over perfecting her recipe for masala chai.
Kumaresh Ramesh
Kumaresh believes that rebuilding our energy systems to enable just, equitable, and sustainable development is this generation’s moonshot challenge. The desire to lead efforts on this challenge led him to complete his undergraduate degree in energy systems engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, along with minors in Social Sciences and Applied Statistics. After graduation, he worked with Black & Veatch Global Advisory on repurposing coal-fired power plants, technical due diligence of power plants for financial institutions, and regulatory landscape analysis supporting the development of low-carbon data centers. Most recently, Kumaresh worked as a Research Analyst with the Energy Transitions team at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water. At CEEW, his research focused on the techno-economic analysis of solar-plus-storage systems at the distributed scale, the regulatory ecosystem for rooftop solar, and the integration of renewable energy in industries.
Having worked in corporate and policy spaces, Kumaresh now wants to influence the interactions between people, public policy, private actors, and the power market; hastening the transition to net zero. To gain skills and competencies complementing his technical background, he shall attend the Master of Environmental Management program at the Yale School of Environment.
Beyond academics, Kumaresh loves traveling, reading, and learning more about diverse fields ranging from languages to history. He has traveled to 12 countries and hopes to keep adding to the number in the years to come.
To know more about the Inlaks scholarship, visit our website here.
