Ritaman Sarkar

Hi! I'm Ritaman, a 3rd year undergrad student at Ashoka University (close to New Delhi, India) and I'm majoring in Philosophy and Computer Science. I’m interested in working in AI Governance and tackling key philosophical and ethical issues in this field in the near future. Currently I'm working to create an outline for my undergraduate thesis which tries to reconcile philophers of futurity like Deleuze, Guattari, Focault etc. with AI that seeks to benefit rather than destroy. Other things I'm interested in are literature, critical theory, psychoanalysis etc. I'm also deeply excited by issues in Indian Philsophy and my most favourite schools include Kaśmir Śaivism and the sub-schools of Tantra.

The most recent project I was working on was called "Poetry in Parliament" and I was working under Professor Aalok Thakkar. This is a personal project which seeks to answer quantitative questions, by the help of an integrated LLM, regarding the usage and significance of poetry in the rhetoric-building of the largest democracy of the world. Learned a lot about OCR techniques due to this project!

I like writing about Philosophy, AI and a bit of literary criticism too from time to time :)

• To Love is to See

  An essay dealing with the Philosophy of Love: Love as an intstrument of political resistance.

• Chinnamuṇḍā: A tradition of non-Motherly Women

  Here I recount the myths of origin of the most famous practitioners of the deity Chinnamuṇḍā and elaborates on Her iconography uncovering subtle social commentaries.

• Can AI be a Poet?

  An essay which tries to grapple with the question of what is originality, nature of experience (sensory or otherwise) and asks: can AI be a poet?

• RaktabījaVināśinī: The vanquisher of Raktabīja

  Published on the official page of Ashoka University's Philosophy Society, this essay analyses a myth found in an ancient Hindu text, the Devī Māhātmya or the Durgā-Saptaśatī. From this myth I try to derive a theoy which concerns epistemology, knowledge-production to be specific.

• Lover, why do you play games?

  This short essay explores a recurrent literary trope in a class of literature in Indian Philosophy called Tantras, or Śakta Āgamas: what does this trope reveal about the nature of the relationship between the Self and the Other? .

• "Miltonian" Metaphysics: A poetic theory on the Nature of God and origin of the universe

  An essay in Comparative Philosophy, a metaphysical account of the creation of the universe and the nature of God, as found in Milton's text: Paradise Lost. .

• Gender, Trouble and Love: From Anarkali to Leela

  This essay examines portions of two massively popular Indian films and explores feminist politics rooted in India's history as depicted in postmodern cinema.

• What do we stand for: from Chandrabati’s plight to Rama’s valour

  Talks about a certain proto-feminist retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa.

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