A Tribute to A.Pai
In honor of the fact that Ajeet has recently been unveiled as the member of the c/o 2007 with the highest GPA at the end of our second year of law school, I have decided to post about him. I am even using capitalization! I also figure that celebrating Ajeet's intellectual greatness gives some sort of explanation of my GPA, seeing as how I have managed to take an average of 3 classes with him per semester. Anyways, the real impetus for this is that the Law Weekly is writing an article, but the fear is that that's just going to make Ajeet look like a tool, and I realized that I had no end of good things to say about him (after all, maybe one day he'll be the person in the position to give me that secretarial position of which I have always dreamed.)
The thing about Ajeet is that he's obviously really really f''in' smart, but there's so much more to him than that. It's kind of infuriating really. While we were waiting for him to meet us at the polo match last Sunday, we were all sitting around joking about the fact that he would probably show up with a portable pop-up polo tent. Because he probably wouldn't have had anything else to do the previous night, after finishing a bottle of wine, than construct a portable pop-up polo tent. Well, obviously this would have been after he taught himself Arabic, cleaned the gutters, and cooked up some sort of elaborate meal with freshly-grown ingredients.
But I think the thing that may take longer to notice (unless you sit next to him in class, in which case it is immediately obvious) is that Ajeet is the most efficient user of time you will ever meet. In the time it takes me to read a case, Ajeet has read that same case, understood the legal underpinnings to the opinion better than I ever will, organized a section outing, e-mailed amusing anecdotes to a dozen different friends, accrued another 1,000 Lexis points, and composed a Wikipedia article, all while a soufflé bakes in the oven behind him. I suspect he is also curing cancer, but he hasn’t ‘fessed up to that yet.
And while those traits might be what make him worthy of high praise, none of that is what makes me love him like I do. Somehow, I am fortunate enough to count him among my best friends. I can't figure out why he would include me as one of his close friends at the law school, but he does. (I suppose you need to keep a couple of people around who aren't competing with you for clerkships.) My IQ is probably about 1/3 of his, (hyperbole, people) and my IQ comically overestimates the level of intellectual conversation of which I am capable. And while I may be intimidated by him, Ajeet does not make me feel like a moron. He asks my opinions on things, he forwards me articles he thinks I'll find funny, he replies appreciatively when I do the same. But what's the most impressive is just that he makes a really good friend. That's not something you can say about many people in your life, and I really noticed it this summer when we were all spread to our various corners of the US, busy with our own firms and summer activities and totally separate lives. Somehow, Ajeet always managed to stay in touch; it wasn't necessarily a huge thing, but always some well-timed email or gesture that pulled out some sort of fond memory or positive emotion and made you remember how glad you were to have friends like these.
Ajeet is the sort of person who makes me realize how lucky I am to go to UVA Law. There is no denying that he is a brilliant mind who has the ability to do just about anything, but he's also the sort of person with whom you just want to spend time and enjoy a beer.
So, in conclusion--three cheers for A.Pai! Hip hip hooray and all that.
The thing about Ajeet is that he's obviously really really f''in' smart, but there's so much more to him than that. It's kind of infuriating really. While we were waiting for him to meet us at the polo match last Sunday, we were all sitting around joking about the fact that he would probably show up with a portable pop-up polo tent. Because he probably wouldn't have had anything else to do the previous night, after finishing a bottle of wine, than construct a portable pop-up polo tent. Well, obviously this would have been after he taught himself Arabic, cleaned the gutters, and cooked up some sort of elaborate meal with freshly-grown ingredients.
But I think the thing that may take longer to notice (unless you sit next to him in class, in which case it is immediately obvious) is that Ajeet is the most efficient user of time you will ever meet. In the time it takes me to read a case, Ajeet has read that same case, understood the legal underpinnings to the opinion better than I ever will, organized a section outing, e-mailed amusing anecdotes to a dozen different friends, accrued another 1,000 Lexis points, and composed a Wikipedia article, all while a soufflé bakes in the oven behind him. I suspect he is also curing cancer, but he hasn’t ‘fessed up to that yet.
And while those traits might be what make him worthy of high praise, none of that is what makes me love him like I do. Somehow, I am fortunate enough to count him among my best friends. I can't figure out why he would include me as one of his close friends at the law school, but he does. (I suppose you need to keep a couple of people around who aren't competing with you for clerkships.) My IQ is probably about 1/3 of his, (hyperbole, people) and my IQ comically overestimates the level of intellectual conversation of which I am capable. And while I may be intimidated by him, Ajeet does not make me feel like a moron. He asks my opinions on things, he forwards me articles he thinks I'll find funny, he replies appreciatively when I do the same. But what's the most impressive is just that he makes a really good friend. That's not something you can say about many people in your life, and I really noticed it this summer when we were all spread to our various corners of the US, busy with our own firms and summer activities and totally separate lives. Somehow, Ajeet always managed to stay in touch; it wasn't necessarily a huge thing, but always some well-timed email or gesture that pulled out some sort of fond memory or positive emotion and made you remember how glad you were to have friends like these.
Ajeet is the sort of person who makes me realize how lucky I am to go to UVA Law. There is no denying that he is a brilliant mind who has the ability to do just about anything, but he's also the sort of person with whom you just want to spend time and enjoy a beer.
So, in conclusion--three cheers for A.Pai! Hip hip hooray and all that.
posted by laura at 12:49 AM
1 Comments:
he's a good man.
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