This man. This man, when I was starving actor status and was a lead in a Sundance Film Festival movie, but couldn’t afford to fly from London where I was studying to attend the festival. This man paid for a hotel for the two of us, and even helped with other expenses, and we had the grandest most amazing time together. But I still took it for granted. Only in retrospect do I realize how unique he was, that I had a BROTHER who was more excited than ME about something I had done. More excited about my accomplishments than myself. And he enabled me to go, and we partied and watched films and got into mischief, and he was by my side through all the firsts for a young actor. My biggest fan, a partner in crime.

Don’t get me wrong though. He had ulterior motives. A huge Indiana Jones and Star Wars fan, he was obsessed with Harrison Ford. Well, Harrison Ford’s daughter Georgia was in my film. And he was dying to meet her. And she did not disappoint! After an amazing, weekend, on our last night, we all partied together and took an Uber back to the hotel. And I’ve never seen someone so happy, because lovely Georgia gave Shekhar a kiss on the cheek goodnight, and the man was on Cloud 9.

He was a budding writer and we hoped his films would take us back to Sundance someday. Hopefully this scholarship will pass that, and other dreams, down to someone else.

It’s hard to choose a single story. Plus, his parents could see this, and there’re things I wouldn’t want mine to know if the tables were turned – edit this as you’d feel appropriate. In the aggregate, let’s just say awesome, sometimes serendipitous things happened when you were around him.

There was Chicago, where I was a younger-than-usual intern with a bad fake ID (statue of limitations has to be up by now) that ended up working nowhere except the grocery store liquor aisle. And yet, my first week in the city, when I ditched the rest of my intern class to hang out because he was in town for Accenture training, it worked in line at Rockit Bar on West Hubbard.

There was Kabin bar, where we went for a comedy show. He was between apartments and crashing with a friend in Brookyln, so he had to leave early, but when Hannibal Burress showed up on stage for a surprise set, he blew off the curfew. He crashed on my couch, and in exchange, we both enjoyed a bit about Bill Cosby that’d blow up the Internet two weeks later.

But most importantly to me, there was my first real house party, which he invited me to (who does that? Invite a gawky, awkward, wide-eyed freshman to a house party?). There, he introduced me to lifelong friends, and gave me front row (lawn?) seats to two of those friends drunk boxing each other on Washtenaw. He handed me a pair of boxing gloves a minute later, with which I sparred his much-taller, much-stronger roommate, and the next morning, the liquor he’d soaked me in handed me my first five-alarm hangover. What he really handed me was a taste of what college could be, and a sample of the joie de vivre with which he approached life.