Vivek is a damn cool guy. He's this dude that I met here on the very first weekend I arrived in Austin, and we both ended up going to see the Austin Symphony Orchestra with some mutual friends. I got to have a nice convo with him a couple weekends back, and he's truly a fascinating character.
He's from India, and (like I had guessed when I first met him), an IIT reject. But I use the word 'reject' so lightly it's almost sarcastic: he was in the 92nd percentile in the IIT entrance exams. Like many who don't go to IIT, he looked to American universities and chose Texas since it was the cheapest school with such a strong engineering program. I remember the first day I met him, he couldn't have been in the country more than a week. He had a heavy Indian accent and spoke with very slight hesitation, as though he were extremely well-taught in English but not immersed. He was dressed like he had just gotten out of church. Over the year, it's been so incredibly cool to see him adapt to American life. He gradually dressed down more and more, exchanging button-down shirts for khaki shorts and burnt orange t-shirts. I saw him chatting up some girl once in Kinsolving and thought it was just the coolest thing ever that he was fitting in so well.
His family's extremely proud of him. They're all really excited to see America through his eyes, it's almost like they live through him vicariously.
As we walked across campus together, I invited him out to the after-party that was supposed to follow the Texas Revue. I caught him near the cafeteria the next day, after it turned out that the party fizzled out. I told him I hoped he hadn't tried to go down to 6th and wind up disappointed on account of me. "Don't worry," he said, "I found a party on this side of campus anyway." I was happy to hear, since I wasn't able to find anything to do that night. "Next time, give me a shout," he said as he started to leave. He promised me, with his trademark Indian accent, "I'll let you know where the party's at."